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.
