Less than 24 hours after being attacked during a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, former President Donald Trump said in separate interviews that the incident had made him reflect to the point of scrapping the speech he had prepared for the Republican national convention on Thursday, when he will be officially nominated as the presidential candidate in the November elections. The abandoned text will be replaced by a more “unifying” one, he stressed. “I want to try to unite our country, but I don’t know if that’s possible,” the populist declared. New York Post, Republican-leaning Trump, in an interview on his private jet while traveling to Milwaukee for the convention. “People are very divided. I had everything prepared for an extremely tough speech, really good, all about the corrupt and horrible administration.” [demócrata]“He said. But I threw it in the trash.”
The former president, with a light bandage on his right ear, expressed himself in similar terms in statements to The Washington Examiner“I think it would be very bad if I stood up and started saying how horrible everyone is, and how corrupt and twisted they are, even if it’s true,” he said. This unprecedented desire to compromise is not foreign to his campaign, which reviewed the speeches presented and saw no need to touch them up to tone down the alleged aggressiveness that the attack would have induced. Because this is the slogan: lower the tone, in words and in gestures. Among the latter is the last-minute addition to the list of speakers of former candidate Nikki Haley, who left the primary process in March and who did not end on very good terms with Trump. Haley will speak on Tuesday at the Milwaukee Bucks arena, completely armored by a legion of security forces.
Saturday’s assassination attempt foreshadowed that the Republican national convention, which runs through Thursday, would unleash the worst instincts of the speakers, such as calls for revenge, vindictiveness, or at least a flood of accusations against their Democratic rivals for the judicial persecution of their boss, which they attribute to the Joe Biden Administration. And for putting him in the crosshairs, as prominent representatives of the party such as Senator JD Vance and the far-right Marjorie Taylor Greene recalled after the attack. Trump himself has in fact presented himself as the victim of a political witch hunt in his appearances before the courts during the last year and a half. But, on the verge of not telling it on Saturday, a more thoughtful Trump than usual (“he should not be here, he should be dead,” he said in both interviews) has introduced fear as a new factor in the campaign.
However, the decision by the Florida judge to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago papers case, just twelve hours after his call for unity, has given the Republican wings once again. In a message on his Truth Social platform published on Monday morning, the re-election candidate again attacked the Biden Administration with his usual message. “As we move forward in the Unification of our Nation after the horrific events of Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be only the first step, quickly followed by the dismissal of the ENTIRE Witch Hunt,” he wrote, referring to the pending cases in Washington, New York and Georgia. “The Democrat Department of Justice coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Electoral Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME. Let’s unite to END all political instrumentalization.” [weaponization, en el original] of our Justice System,” he added with his usual emphatic capital letters.
Between extremes, a character as polarizing as the former president will move this week between the slogan of moderation – the first speeches of the delegates were clearly propositive, without allusions to Biden, when approving the 16 points of the electoral program – and the apotheosis that awaits him on the night of his nomination, in which, in addition to being the probable winner of the elections according to the polls and the all-powerful leader of the party, he will be greeted as a political martyr: the man who, after being wounded by a bullet, raised his fist and shouted the word fight three times. That hagiographic aura is already another new and indelible seal of his candidacy. “Many people say that it is the most iconic photo they have ever seen. They are right and yet I have not died. Normally you have to die to have an iconic photo,” he told the Post The Associated Press photo that has gone around the world, showing him bloodied but defiant, fist raised. It is the photo that the campaign is using on its fundraising website. The tycoon repeated the same gesture in the snapshot on Sunday when he descended the steps of his private plane at the Milwaukee airport.
How the Republican National Convention manages to reconcile moderation with the paroxysm of Trump’s coronation, the call for unity and the foreseeable attacks on his Democratic rivals, may determine the course of the remainder of the campaign, and not just on the Republican side. But the concern among campaign officials about over-the-top rhetoric reflects how profoundly the Saturday shooting has altered the political landscape. The new framework for the volatile race for the White House will not only be reflected in the schedule, speeches and, above all, the tone of the conference, it could even influence the choice of vice president. There is speculation in conservative circles about the significance of Haley’s last-minute addition. The former governor of South Carolina, the longest-serving challenger to Trump in the primaries—she dropped out after the former governor presidential candidate Ron DeSantis—was mentioned on Monday as a possible member of the future Trump administration, even as a presidential running mate, if the Republicans win in November.
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Republican sources say the call for unity is not just a reaction to Saturday’s failed attack. According to these sources, “unity” was always intended to be one of the convention’s themes. That was the initial focus, but now it has a double meaning: as a show of unanimous support for Trump and his platform after a tumultuous season – a highly divisive primary, with several dead bodies along the way, and the candidate’s first criminal conviction for the attack. Stormy Daniels case—and now as a gesture of national reconciliation, something that President Joe Biden has also advocated for.
However, much of the convention agenda will be dedicated to criticizing the Democrats’ management. Divided into four thematic blocks, the four days of the convention will review Trump’s main lines of attack, which have always been the driving force of his campaign (his proactive side is summarized in the 16 pages of the platform or electoral program). Attacks on Biden’s economic management, the border crisis or the unfounded increase in insecurity and crime, everything will be worth it to demonstrate what the Republicans consider to have been a poor performance of the presidency by the Democrat. And it will be in these attacks where many expect that not only the reproaches will come out, but also the demons that have always been there: the rage and anger that since 2016 have defined Trump and have also defined the party’s turn towards him.
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