MILWAUKEE — Former President Donald Trump — who left the White House only after an unprecedented campaign to undermine the results of his 2020 election defeat, culminating in a deadly insurgency at the U.S. Capitol — has completed one of the most disturbing comeback stories in American politics, accepting the 2024 Republican presidential nomination in Milwaukee, just days after surviving being grazed by an assassin’s bullet.
Trump, a convicted felon who was impeached twice as the 45th president, spoke Thursday night at the Republican National Convention while riding high in the polls, hopeful to become the 47th chief executive of the United States. His speech was lengthy — running for over an hour and a half, it was the longest in convention history — low-energy, and full of rambling digressions from his prepared remarks. Much of it was largely indistinguishable from his rally speeches, despite talk this week of Trump toning down his approach and focusing on unity following the assassination attempt against him on Saturday.
The former president began by thanking his supporters for the outpouring of sympathy and well wishes in the aftermath of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I will tell you exactly what happened and you will never hear it from me a second time because it is too painful to tell,” he said, before giving an extremely detailed account of the shooting as he experienced it. “There was blood pouring everywhere. But in a certain way, I felt very safe because I had God on my side — God on my side,” Trump said, adding: “Bullets were flying over us, yet I felt serene.”
“The ears bleed more than any other part of the body,” the former president added. “For whatever reason — the doctors told me that the ears bleed more. So we learned something.”
Trump’s right ear was grazed by a bullet fired by the gunman, who killed one audience member — former fire chief Corey Comperatore — at the rally and critically injured two others. Following his lengthy description of the shooting, the former president led a moment of silence for Comperatore, alongside a display of his firefighting jacket and helmet — which Trump kissed when he first took the stage.
Trump then lost momentum. The speech devolved into a rambling, digressive address in which he lavished praise on the night’s earlier speakers individually as if he were emceeing a private dinner at Mar-a-Lago. His delivery of the actual convention address was slow, soft, sleepy, and he began to lose the intensely partisan audience — so much so that even his familiar applause lines were not met with standing ovations.
The lack of audience energy was implausible considering the version of Trump who took the stage on Thursday presided over a Republican Party much transformed from the one that frayed itself over his nomination in 2016. With the cancellation of the 2020 in-person RNC during the Covid-19 pandemic, the eight years between Trump’s 2016 nomination and 2024 have seen the GOP transformed in his image, the exile of longstanding party power-players who opposed him, and the confirmation of MAGA nationalism as the dominant force in conservative ideology.
The four days of the RNC leading up to the former president’s speech was a festival of Trump idolatry — featuring everything from Republican lawmakers explaining how God delivered Trump to save America, to the golf pro at Trump’s club bragging about how far he can flush a four-iron, to Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt to reveal fresh Trump-Vance threads underneath.
The former WWE superstar and the rest of the RNC’s speakers repeatedly referred to Trump as tough as they come, in part because of how he responded to the assassination attempt the previous Saturday during a rally in Pennsylvania. In the aftermath of the shooting, Trump told The Washington Examiner and The New York Post that he had “thrown out” the original draft of his RNC speech in order to focus on “unity.”
“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger. Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now,” Trump told the Examiner, adding that it is “a chance to bring the country together.”
When Trump finally made it to the “unity” portion of his speech, it largely manifested as a public demand that all the charges in the various ongoing criminal trials against him be dropped. “If Democrats want to unify our country, they should drop these partisan witch hunts, which I’ve been going through great years. They should do that without delay and allow an election to proceed that is worthy of our people,” he told the crowd.
The former president accused Democrats of “destroying our country,” described former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as “crazy,” and called Washington, D.C., a “horrible killing field.” It took over 30 minutes before he finally made it to the theoretical meat of his campaign — his policy positions — which often entailed him listing more grievances. Trump once again claimed that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, accusing Democrats of using “Covid to cheat” him out of a win. He claimed that migrants were killing “hundreds of thousands of people a year,” that “illegal aliens” are “taking jobs from our Black population [and] our Hispanic population, and they are taking them from unions as well.” He called the Green New Deal the “Green New Scam” and bashed electric cars.
Despite efforts to present a more moderate facade for his movement at this convention, Trump has put forth a conscience-shocking MAGA agenda that includes rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants. He has claimed these residents are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, and has promised to conduct a campaign of mass deportation unrivaled in America’s often dark and xenophobic history. RNC attendees held up official party signage that read “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” and Trump spent a considerable portion of his address demonizing migrants.
Trump is the first nominee in history with a rap sheet — 34 felonies related to his attempt to cover up hush money payments to a porn star — and also faces a bevy of felony indictments for election interference, both federally and in Georgia. Nevertheless, the majority of the Republican Party elite who were in attendance Thursday seemed to have all but declared preemptive victory in the 2024 campaign against a flailing President Joe Biden. Still, some in the national party and conservative megadonor class who were here to toast their leader couldn’t shake the nagging fears that Trump could manage to “blow” the race after all — then wind up facing actual prison sentences on the other side of the presidential election.
Trump himself acknowledged he “better finish strong, otherwise we’ll blow it.”
Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, Trump now enjoys — and will enjoy during a potential second term in office — immunity for any crimes committed in his official acts as president. Trump has threatened to act as a “dictator” upon retaking office, as well as to enact a campaign of retribution against his political foes. He has frequently crusaded against the left as the “enemy within” the United States.
But for this week at least — for a campaign eager not to alienate too many critical swing voters in the homestretch of the race — Trump and his cohorts tried to slap a kinder, gentler veneer on the openly authoritarian and ferociously revanchist platform on which the former and perhaps future American president is running. Just hours before Trump began his speech, many of his fans, conservative luminaries, and Trump family members mingled, networked, and cracked jokes at hotels and bars near the downtown Milwaukee sports arena, giddily talking up Hulk Hogan’s then-upcoming Thursday night speech ahead of Trump’s own. In the lobby area of a hotel around the convention site, internationally famous fashion model Fabio — in a suit and tie, donning a media badge, for some reason — snapped photos with passersby and spoke of how excited he was for Trump’s address and how he was looking forward to checking out the after-party scene following the convention proceedings.
“Very excited!” the world-famous model declared.
In the ongoing Trump era of Republican politics, it was a fitting image for how an aspiring MAGA autocracy has presented itself: draped in reality-TV-style celebrity culture, in order to partially mask the staggeringly brutal policy implications that come with Trump’s brand.
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.