Trump reappears at Republican convention with his ear bandaged

It is known that Donald Trump always enters the scene with the song God Bless the USAfrom the singer of country Lee Greenwood. This Monday at the Republican Convention, which is being held in Milwaukee, he did not break with his tradition. Although it was not just any entrance. Greenwood sang his patriotic ballad live at around 9:00 p.m. local time, more or less 52 hours after the former president survived the attempted assassination he suffered last Saturday during a rally in Pennsylvania. The former president walked slowly and somberly, followed by a camera and amid the delirium of the thousands of people present at the basketball stadium where his acclamation as a presidential candidate is being held until Thursday. Trump had his left ear bandaged, the same one that was grazed by one of the bullets with which the shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks almost killed him.

He made his way through the shouts of an audience that hours earlier had officially designated him in a unanimous vote of the delegates present as the Republican Party’s choice for the White House, after months of his candidacy being taken for granted. At the end of his walk, JD Vance, the senator for Ohio, chosen this Monday by Trump as his candidate for vice president, was waiting for him. As he was positioned to his left, whenever the former president turned to speak to him, the cameras captured the profile of his bandaged ear. They were accompanied by, among others, the ultra-right television presenter Tucker Carlson, Byron Douglas, an African-American congressman from Florida, and Mike Johnson, president of the House of Representatives.

Trump, unusually for him, did not speak; his speech is scheduled for the grand closing of the convention on Thursday. He sat and listened to the final stretch of the speeches on the first day of the convention, which, under the title “Ordinary Americans,” was dedicated to what a return of the tycoon to the White House would supposedly bring to the American economy. The focus was also on wooing black and Latino voters, whom both parties are desperately courting.

The Hispanics’ “little coffee”

The former were addressed by rapper Amber Rose, Kanye West’s ex-partner, who said that she stopped worrying and started loving Trump when she listened to her father that day when he told her that the Republican “is not racist,” despite the “propaganda.” The latter were addressed by Linda Fornos, a Nicaraguan, single mother and resident of Las Vegas. “For my beloved Hispanic community, it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee,” she said. She said that she and her two children work six jobs to make ends meet and blamed Joe Biden’s economic policies for this. “I voted for him in 2020,” she added, amid boos from the audience. “I’m sorry. It was a mistake.”

Other speakers tried to contrast the Democratic president’s economy (bidenomics) and Trump’s (maganomics). Union leader Sean O’Brien was highly critical of the American business class (a bit surreal in a meeting like this) and the Washington elites, calling the former president a “tough SOB.” Governors like Kristi Noem (South Dakota) and Glenn Youngkin (Virginia) had previously reviewed the achievements of their respective states as if they were islands sheltered from the storm in the great swell of Biden’s America.

The messianic point was made by South Carolina Senator Tim Scott. Not long ago he was a favourite to be chosen as the vice presidential candidate, but in the end he was chosen as an agitator for Trumpism, a role he played on Monday with a touch of religious preacher. “On Saturday,” he said, referring to the attempted assassination of Trump, “the devil came to Pennsylvania wielding a rifle. “But an American lion stood up and roared! Oh yes! He roared!”

The lion was, of course, the former president, who, after surviving the attack, emerged from the bodies of the Secret Service members who had thrown themselves at him to protect him, raised his fist and shouted: “Let us fight! Let us fight.” The cry was adopted by Republican delegates on Monday to welcome their leader.

The defiant look Trump had displayed 52 hours earlier turned into an uncharacteristically sad expression on Monday night, and at one point he even seemed rueful. That was when Greenwood played the final bars of his song, which is enjoying a second life thanks to Trump rescuing it from oblivion. The song is also celebrating its birthday: it was composed four decades ago, in 1984, for another Republican candidate seeking reelection: Ronald Reagan. Greenwood premiered it at that year’s Republican National Convention, held in Dallas.

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