Trump received a hero’s welcome from an audience that is unified behind him and feeling confident in his chances of winning back the White House.
Milwaukee — Three and a half years ago, Donald Trump departed the White House feeling dejected by a narrow electoral loss that he refused to concede. The next two years looked similarly grim: Former allies launched primary campaigns against him, former donors stayed on the sidelines, and a sea of pundits predicted his campaign would be dead in the water come 2024.
But Thursday evening, he received a hero’s welcome from a convention audience that is completely unified behind him and feeling unusually confident in his chances of winning back the White House. This week’s confab in Milwaukee, which kicked off on Monday just two days after an assassination attempt at a Saturday rally in Pennsylvania, marks a remarkable Trump rebound that seemed unthinkable to most political insiders even a year ago.
“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” Trump said in a speech that recapped the events leading up to and following the assassin’s attempt on his life, and included a moment of silence for Corey Comperatore, the firefighter who lost his life shielding his family that day. “For the rest of my life I will be grateful for the love shown by that giant audience of patriots.”
After kissing Comperatore’s firefighting helmet, which accompanied him onstage, Trump began the speech with an appeal to national unity, telling the crowd and the viewing audience that he was there to “lay out a vision for the whole nation.”
“To every citizen, whether you are young or old, man or woman, Democrat, Republican, or Independent, black or white, Asian or Hispanic, I extend to you a hand of loyalty and friendship.”
The former president followed up the unifying message with a harrowing blow-by-blow account of his experience on Saturday, explaining what was going through his mind after an assassin’s bullet ripped through the top of his ear, coming less than an inch from ending his life in front of tens of thousands of his supporters in a Pennsylvania field.
“As you already know, the assassin’s bullet came within a quarter of an inch of taking my life,” Trump said. “So many people have asked me what happened, and therefore, I’ll tell you what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time, because it’s too painful to tell.” He went on to explain that he realized immediately that he had been shot but was inspired by the composure his supporters showed, refusing to run and standing their ground as shots from the elevated sniper rang out.
From there, Trump launched into a meandering diatribe on his administration’s accomplishments and the failures of his successor, whose name he only deigned to mention once in a speech that ran to more than an hour and a half.
“I’m not going to use than name again,” Trump said after slamming President Biden for presiding over record illegal immigration and contributing, Trump argued, to multiple ongoing international crises.
Trump’s Thursday night speech capped a jubilant GOP convention and 2024 redemption arc that contrasts sharply with the utter despondency that has set in within the Democratic Party over Joe Biden’s post-debate electoral viability. Cultural icons like Hulk Hogan and UFC founder Dana White fired up the crowd ahead of Trump’s speech in Wisconsin, a state he won in 2016 but lost four years ago to Biden.
This time around, he’s hoping for a battleground-state blowout. In a stemwinder that deviated quite a bit from the teleprompter remarks, Trump promised to combat inflation, protect entitlements, exempt tips from taxes, project strength overseas, and secure the border by launching the “largest” deportation operation in American history. “The middle class will prosper like never, ever before,” he told the crowd.
Trump allies say this week’s post-assassination attempt convention has given Americans a new glimpse of the former president’s fighting spirit — the kind of spirit that drives a man to raise his fist into the air and pose for the cameras only moments after a bullet nearly killed him.
“There’s a very warm side, there’s a very human side to him that the left-wing media doesn’t portray,” says John McLaughlin, a longtime Trump pollster. “But I think that’s coming across now.”
There’s a new feeling in the air these days, a sort of Trump amnesia that’s driving many former skeptics into his camp as President Joe Biden continues to face pressure to drop out of the 2024 race. The list of new Trump converts includes billionaire donors like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Pershing Square Capital Management CEO Bill Ackman, both of whom have been critical of the former president in the past but are now all in on a second term.
And there’s an insistence from those who’ve known Trump for years that something’s changed since he almost lost his life last weekend. “He’s always been extraordinarily determined. He’s always been extraordinarily persistent,” longtime Trump confidante Roger Stone told National Review in a brief interview earlier Thursday. “What I see now about him is kind of a new calm. A new clear understanding that his life was spared for a purpose. It’s a slightly different Donald Trump than we’ve seen before.”
This week’s rally-around-the-flag effect comes as the news cycle continues to look dire for Democrats. On top of intra-party efforts to push him out of the race, Biden came down with COVID and a federal judge in Florida dismissed the classified documents case against Trump. Then came the cherry on top of an already terrible week: the president forgot the name of his own Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, calling him “the black man” — during an interview with Black Entertainment News.
Against this backdrop is the understanding among Republicans that the post-GOP convention political landscape could look very different very soon. As Democrats continue to knife Biden in public and in private, Trump-allied super political committees are already reportedly commissioning polls that game out how the GOP nominee would fare in a general election matchup against possible replacements.
Publicly, allies continue to project confidence that Americans are ready to rocket a Republican back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue no matter the Democratic nominee. “I don’t care who they give us,” Republican Senator Roger Marshall told National Review here Thursday morning. “The Democrats are in disarray. The Republicans are unified. It’s their policies, that’s the problem.”
Another problem is that the Democrats have been playing down concerns about Biden’s infirmity for years now, says says Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt. “I think Trump’s gonna win in a landslide, whether it’s President Biden, or they switch him out and they throw somebody else in there,” Stitt said in an interview earlier Thursday. “Democrats need to play the long game because people are gonna say, ‘Oh, well, they’ve been lying to us the whole time.’”
For now, at least, Republicans are counting their blessings that the Democrats are stuck with Biden.
Trump, for his part, ended the lengthy post-assassination attempt speech with a return to his 2016 message: “To all of the forgotten men and women who have been neglected, abandoned, and left behind, you will be forgotten no longer.”