MILWAUKEE — Former President Donald Trump accepted his party’s nomination Thursday in his first speech since a gunman tried to assassinate him, delivering an address that recounted his brush with death as the raucous crowd at Fiserv Forum fell to a rapt silence.
Cautioning that he would only detail his story once because it’s “actually too painful to tell,” Trump recalled moving his head ever so slightly while he was speaking at a Saturday rally in rural Pennsylvania. A bullet grazed his ear rather than striking his skull.
“I had God on my side,” he said of the attack, which left another attendee dead and two seriously injured. His right ear still bandaged from the gunshot wound, Trump seemed at times somber as he spoke in grave terms.
His emotional narrative of his near-death experience opened a lengthy speech that began with pledges to heal partisan divides that he and his allies often inflamed, then veered into attacks against President Joe Biden and his policies.
With his most conciliatory language, Trump promised to usher in an administration that will represent “all of America, not half of America” and heal the “discord and division in our society.”
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
But he also undercut his own argument by going off script throughout his speech, which at times resembled his stream-of-conscious style at rallies more than a formal acceptance address.
He labeled former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy,” attacked “witch hunt” prosecutions against him and spread more false claims of election-rigging. And he painted a dark picture of illegal immigration, rampant inflation and a world “teetering on the edge of World War III.”
Trump made direct mention of Biden sparingly, framing his rival in near-apocalyptic terms.
“The damage that he’s done to this country is unthinkable,” Trump said. “Unthinkable.”
A turnabout
Trump entered the final day of the Republican National Convention as the front-runner, with solid leads in polls of Georgia and other battleground states that Joe Biden captured in 2020. He is basking in a reversal of fortune that has remade the rematch.
In his past two quests for the White House, Trump was the single-biggest source of division within the Republican Party — and the greatest uniter of Democrats who forged a coalition from the far left to the center right to defeat him.
Now it’s Democrats who are confronting a growing rebellion to push Biden out of the race after the president’s shambling debate performance in Atlanta and the uneven attempts that followed to reassure voters and party leaders that the 81-year-old is fit for the job.
Trump, by contrast, enjoys nearly unanimous support from the party’s rank and file and elite, with skeptical voices either driven out of the party, defeated at the ballot box or quieted in the name of Republican unity.
And Trump’s allies are increasingly confident that Georgia is slipping in his direction, and some party leaders say the campaign only needs to drive out base turnout rather than appeal to swing voters to shatter the alliance that elected Biden four years ago.
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
But others warn frequently of the perils of overconfidence. During a stop in Milwaukee earlier this week, Gov. Brian Kemp said the roughly four months until the November vote is an “eternity in politics, and a lot of things can happen.”
‘No longer silent’
Trump’s speech marked a monumental political turnaround since his reelection defeat in 2020, when his rampant lies of election fraud and attempts to overturn the results had many Republicans ready to move on.
Since then, Trump has survived an impeachment proceeding that charged him with “incitement of insurrection,” rebuilt his tattered electoral coalition and battled felony criminal charges in four jurisdictions, including an election-interference case in Fulton County.
Along the way, missteps and setbacks that would have seemingly undone any other candidate only bolstered his support.
Just seven weeks ago, for instance, he was found guilty of 34 felony counts in a New York hush money case. But polls show the unprecedented conviction has had little impact on his support.
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
Since then, Trump’s hand has only grown stronger after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity upended the legal cases against him and Biden’s debate debacle turbocharged Democratic division about the president’s future.
Trump’s speech capped a Republican nominating convention that began just 48 hours after a gunman tried to take his life, missing by mere centimeters at a weekend rally in rural Pennsylvania. Trump’s bloodied, clenched-fist rally to “fight” has become his campaign’s calling card.
But the Republican convention has been anything but a somber affair, with GOP speakers dishing out red-meat attacks against Biden that have electrified Trump loyalists who entered the four-day gala stunned and infuriated by the attack.
The final day featured the most eclectic lineup of the convention. Tucker Carlson and Kid Rock fired up the crowd throughout the night, and retired wrestling star Hulk Hogan ripped off his suit jacket and shirt to reveal a bright-red Trump-Vance tank top. The crowd exploded into cheers.
“As an entertainer, I try to stay out of politics,” said the wrestler, whose real name is Terry G. Bollea. “But after everything that’s happened to our country over the past four years, and everything that happened last weekend, I can no longer stay silent.”
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