Republican national convention 2024

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      Trump’s divisive speech and a rightwing mirror world: key takeaways from RNC day four

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      For all the claims from his supporters that surviving an assassination attempt had left Donald Trump a “changed” man, one more softened and spiritual, the Trump who accepted his party’s nomination on Thursday night was deeply familiar: same divisive rhetoric, same divisive policies.But the Republican crowd that surrounded Trump was certainly cheerful and energized. “I have never been to a more fun convention, or a convention with better vibes,” the ousted Fox News host Tucker Carlson told them, and his unscripted comments seemed to capture a real mood. Biden and the Democrats are foundering, Trump narrowly survived a terrifying attack, and Republicans appear to believe that Trump has already won the election.Here are five takeaways from the night:1. Trump talked about his assassination attempt for the first, and he said, final timeLike many his supporters, Trump said he believed he had been protected by God last weekend, but he also emphasized how moved he had been by the behavior of his supporters when he was shot. When faced with a hail of bullets, he said, most crowds would have panicked and tried to flee, but his did not.After the Secret Service members “pounced” on him to protect him from the gunfire, Trump said: “There was blood pouring everywhere, yet, in a certain way, I felt very safe, because I had God on my side, I felt that.”“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” Trump said later, and when the crowd began to chant: “Yes you are! Yes you are!” he responded, “But I’m not – and I’ll tell you. I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God.”Trump also said he could see a look of sorrow on the faces of his supporters, who watched him go down and assumed that he had been shot in the head and was dead. When he stood up again and lifted his fist, he said, the crowd responded in a way that he had never heard before.“This massive crowd of tens of thousands of people stood by and didn’t move an inch,” Trump said. In fact, he said, many of them stood and started looking for the sniper and pointing at him. “Nobody ran, and by not stampeding, many lives were saved,” Trump said, saying he believed “the reason is that they knew I was in very serious trouble”.“For the rest of my life,” Trump said, “I will be grateful for the love shown by that giant audience of patriots that stood bravely on the fateful evening in Pennsylvania.”2. Trump may be ‘changed’ after the assassination attempt, but he didn’t sound that changed In the early minutes of his speech, Trump delivered some of the “unity” rhetoric that he told journalists he had planned.“The discord and division in our society must be healed,” Trump said. “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.”But soon after the somber beginning to his “unity” speech, Trump turned cheerful and chatty, first praising his friends, and then, soon enough, railing in a familiar way against “crazy Nancy Pelosi”, calling Biden one of America’s worst presidents, and then, to cheers, referring to Covid once again as the “China virus”.“I hope you will remember this in November and give us your vote. I am trying to buy your vote. I’ll be honest about that,” Trump later quipped to the voters of Wisconsin, talking about the $250m the Republican national convention is supposed to bring to the Wisconsin economy.“We’re never going to let it happen again. They used Covid to cheat,” Trump said, continuing to deny he lost the 2020 election to Biden.Though sources said Trump would simply not use Biden’s name in his speech, he did, saying: “If you took the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States – think of it, the 10 worst – added them up, they will not have done the damage that Biden has done.”3. The Republican convention is a mirror world: ‘I am the one saving democracy,’ Trump saysThroughout their convention, Republicans have taken key Democratic lines of attack and claimed them for themselves. In the world of the Republican national convention, the Democrats are the ones who are undermining US democracy, not the party whose supporters stormed the US Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 election. “Biden is acting like a dictator,” the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, said in a speech on Wednesday.Republican politicians kept reciting the names of women who have been raped or sexually assaulted by immigrants, while blaming the Democratic party’s immigration policies for putting them at risk. They didn’t talk about Trump being found liable of sexual abuse in a civil trial brought by the magazine writer E Jean Carroll, or the allegations of sexual misconduct he has faced from more than two dozen women. Biden and Harris were called criminals, rather than the candidate who has been convicted on 34 felony charges, and whose convention featured a Trump ally who had just been released from federal prison.“The Democrat party should immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and labelling their political opponents as an enemy of democracy, especially since that is not true,” Trump said on Thursday. “In fact, I am the one saving democracy for the  people of our country.”4. Trump again pledges to carry out the largest deportation in US history Before Trump spoke, other Republican politicians devoted large swathes of time during their convention to demonizing undocumented migrants, blaming them for a host of social ills, and advocating not just for a border wall but also “Mass deportations now.”Trump’s speech mirrored the convention as a whole, with a major focus on attacking migrants as criminals and rapists, and claiming, without evidence, that countries like El Salvador had seen decreases in crime because they were shipping all of their murders to the US. (Human rights organizations continue to speak out about the effects of mass arrests in El Salvador.)Trump again promised “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” and pledged that his deportations would be “even larger than that of president Dwight D Eisenhower from many years ago. You know, he was a moderate but he believed very strongly in borders. He had the largest deportation operation we’ve ever had.”5. Trump promises ‘two things on day one’ … ‘Close our borders’ and ‘drill, baby, drill!’Trump also joined other Republicans throughout the week in touting the GOP as the party of fossil fuel, as Republicans repeatedly chanted: “Drill, baby, drill!”Climate change experts and activists have said that both Trump and his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, are likely to pursue a “methodical” climate crisis denial presidency that would include increasing production of fossil fuel, ignoring mainstream climate science and undermining or overturning rules to reduce emissions.One of the everyday Americans invited to speak at the convention earlier in the week was the petroleum engineer Sarah Phillips, who criticized Biden and the Green New Deal. “The hydrocarbons that are being extracted are a true gift,” Phillips said. “Our society and our standard of living could not exist without fossil fuels.”“These liberal senators shut down the Keystone Pipeline,” the Montana senator Steve Daines said earlier on Thursday. “An America First majority – we’re going to drill, baby, drill!” More

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      Trump calls for unity then returns to familiar attacks in lengthy speech

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      Donald Trump recounted the attempt on his life in dramatic detail as he formally accepted the Republican nomination for president on Thursday evening in Milwaukee in a speech that began with a call for unity and then turned into meandering attacks on his political rivals.“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” Trump said to an electrified crowd at the Fiserv Forum. Speaking in a subdued, quiet tone, Trump called his survival a “providential moment” and said: “I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God.”“I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America,” he said at the start of his speech, which lasted around 91 minutes. He was interrupted by chants of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” from the audience.Trump went on to kiss the helmet and embrace the uniform of Corey Comperatore, the firefighter who was killed as he shielded his family as Trump was shot at in Butler Township, Pennsylvania.But that tone ended shortly after.Trump went on to attack Democrats over the numerous criminal cases that he faces. “The Democrat party should immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and labeling their political opponents as an enemy of democracy, especially since that is not true,” he said.“If Democrats want to unify our country, they should drop these partisan witch-hunts.”Improvising and moving away from prepared remarks, he went on to label Nancy Pelosi “crazy”. And he falsely accused Democrats of cheating in the 2020 election – a topic that speakers during the previous week nearly avoided entirely as they looked towards the next election. “The election result we’ll never let that happen again. They used Covid to cheat.”At one point in his speech Trump declared: “I am the one saving democracy for the people of our country.” Trump and allies unsuccessfully sought to overturn legitimate election results in several swing states in 2020 and stop congressional efforts to certify the vote. He faces criminal charges both in Georgia and the federal system for those efforts.Trump promised to lower inflation and “end every single international crisis”, without mentioning anything specific about how he would do so other than drilling for oil and closing the border.“If you took the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States, think of it. The 10 worst. Added them up, they will not have done the damage that Biden has done,” he said, pledging to only use the president’s name once in his speech.Much of his convention speech resembled the freewheeling stump speeches Trump has become known for. He pledged “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” while reciting falsehoods about who was coming into the United States. Claiming that countries were emptying asylums to send people to the US, Trump veered into a bizarre segue about Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal villain from the film Silence of the Lambs.“Has anyone seen Silence of the Lambs, the late great Hannibal Lecter, he’d love to have you for dinner,” Trump says.He lied about crime levels – claiming crime was rising when it is actually falling.Mark Boldger, a Texas delegate, told the Guardian he thought Trump was off his usual rhetorical track. “He was all over the place,” said Boldger. “I think he might’ve put a few people to sleep tonight and I don’t like that. I don’t think he worked the crowd into the fever he normally does.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe shooting, Boldger speculated, “really shook him up”.The speech capped off a four-day coronation of his candidacy that showcased the complete control he has over the Republican party. Thursday evening, like the rest of the convention, was an event in which Trump and his campaign tried at every turn to project machismo.Trump entered the convention hall on Thursday to a thumping rendition of AC/DC’s Back in Black. He was preceded on the stage by the wrestler Hulk Hogan – whose real name is Terry Bollea – who tore open his shirt to reveal a Trump campaign shirt underneath. Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, introduced Trump.Melania Trump, who has rarely been seen or heard from in public, received loud cheers as she entered the convention floor to classical musical. JD Vance, the Ohio senator who Trump tapped to be his running mate, watched the speech in a VIP box with his wife, Usha. Trump thanked several other people who spoke at the convention before acknowledging his new running mate.At the end of his speech, Trump returned to the teleprompter script, and to the shooting in Butler in which he nearly lost his life. “If the events of last Saturday make anything clear, it is that every single moment we have on earth is a gift from God,” he said.He ended on a central promise of Trumpism, pledging that it would be easy to improve America quickly.“No one will ever stop us,” he said. “Quite simply put, we will very quickly make America great again.”Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Biden campaign chair, said: “President Biden is running on a different vision. He’s running for an America where we defend democracy, not diminish it. Where we restore our rights and protect our freedoms, not take them away. One where we create opportunities for everyone, while making the super wealthy finally pay their fair share. That is the future President Biden believes in and is the future that millions of our fellow Americans believe in too. The stakes have never been higher.”Alice Herman contributed reporting More

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      Trump’s Republican convention speech live: former president to formally accept nomination

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      Good evening US politics blog readers, and thank you for joining us as we cover the last night of the Republican national convention. Donald Trump is set to formally accept the GOP’s nomination to be its presidential candidate with a speech at the convention’s end. Before that, we’ll be hearing from a slew of speakers in a night themed “Make America great once again”. These include Tucker Carlson, the rightwing commentator who has struck off on his own show after Fox News fired him last year, the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO, Dana White, and the retired professional wrestler Hulk Hogan.As he usually is, Trump is the star of the show, and the convention has him scheduled to speak for a whole 90 minutes, beginning at 9pm CT. This will be his first public address since an assassin tried to kill him on Saturday, and he’s still sporting a bandage on his right ear from the attempt, which led to the death of a rally-goer. This will also be the highest profile speech Trump has made since his first debate with Joe Biden in late June. The president’s fatigued performance in that showdown has led to a growing wave of Democrats – reportedly including the party’s leaders in Congress – to urge that he reconsider his bid for a second term in office. The Republicans, meanwhile, have been united around Trump, and his speech this evening will serve as a chance for him to elaborate on his plans for a second term in office.Here’s what we’ll be watching out for:

      Will Trump cast himself as a unifier? After his brush with death on Saturday, the former president has tried to play up the theme in his statements, and several speakers at the convention thus far have tried to cast him as a family man – perhaps as a way to detract attention from his often tawdry legal troubles.

      Convention speakers over the past three nights have made plenty of rightwing policy promises – but not quite as many as expected. Though attendees have waved signs reading “Mass deportations now” and some speakers have claimed, without evidence, that undocumented people have cast ballots, there has not been much mention of conspiracy theories around the 2020 election, plans to use the national guard to carry out mass deportations, or Trump’s vow to have the justice department to retaliate against his enemies. Will the former president mention those themes in his speech?

      Who else might Trump attack? It’s a given that he’ll go after Biden, but the Democrat is facing a backlash not seen in decades to his re-election campaign, and could step aside. Some earlier convention speakers have made a point of criticizing Kamala Harris, perhaps as a hedge to her ascension as the Democratic candidate. We’ll see if Trump follows suit.
      We’ve put together an explainer going through the finer details of the closing evening of the Republican national convention, including when Donald Trump is expected to speak, how you can watch his address, and who else from the Trump family may be in the room.Give it a read here:Over the past three nights, several speakers at the Republican national convention have tried to rehabilitate Donald Trump’s image by telling the public that what they have heard about the former president isn’t quite right. The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington takes a closer look at the campaign to “Make Trump Human Again”: Even before Donald Trump takes the stage at the Republican national convention on Thursday night, promising a speech on national unity rather than the usual partisan rancour, his team has laboured hard in the wake of the rally shooting to give the impression that he is a changed man.Gone was the Trump of “this American carnage”, the victim of witch-hunts who, if returned to the White House, would unleash a whirlwind of retribution on his enemies and be a dictator on day one. In its place was Trump the candy-peddling grandfather, the kiss-me-goodnight father, the comforting mentor and patriotic healer.It was as if the official theme of the week, Make America Great Again, had been hurriedly replaced by a new slogan: Make Trump Human Again.Kai Trump, the former US president’s 17-year-old granddaughter, helped set the tone. In a convention address on Wednesday she shared her big secret about the 78-year-old Republican nominee.“To me, he’s just a normal grandpa. He gives us candy and soda when our parents are not looking.”The theme of a “caring and loving” Trump – Kai’s words – was reminiscent of the narrative that has long been projected by Joe Biden, who presents his candidacy as a choice for dignity, respect and civility. It was as if the Trump team had adopted Biden’s playbook as empathiser-in-chief.Good evening US politics blog readers, and thank you for joining us as we cover the last night of the Republican national convention. Donald Trump is set to formally accept the GOP’s nomination to be its presidential candidate with a speech at the convention’s end. Before that, we’ll be hearing from a slew of speakers in a night themed “Make America great once again”. These include Tucker Carlson, the rightwing commentator who has struck off on his own show after Fox News fired him last year, the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO, Dana White, and the retired professional wrestler Hulk Hogan.As he usually is, Trump is the star of the show, and the convention has him scheduled to speak for a whole 90 minutes, beginning at 9pm CT. This will be his first public address since an assassin tried to kill him on Saturday, and he’s still sporting a bandage on his right ear from the attempt, which led to the death of a rally-goer. This will also be the highest profile speech Trump has made since his first debate with Joe Biden in late June. The president’s fatigued performance in that showdown has led to a growing wave of Democrats – reportedly including the party’s leaders in Congress – to urge that he reconsider his bid for a second term in office. The Republicans, meanwhile, have been united around Trump, and his speech this evening will serve as a chance for him to elaborate on his plans for a second term in office.Here’s what we’ll be watching out for:

      Will Trump cast himself as a unifier? After his brush with death on Saturday, the former president has tried to play up the theme in his statements, and several speakers at the convention thus far have tried to cast him as a family man – perhaps as a way to detract attention from his often tawdry legal troubles.

      Convention speakers over the past three nights have made plenty of rightwing policy promises – but not quite as many as expected. Though attendees have waved signs reading “Mass deportations now” and some speakers have claimed, without evidence, that undocumented people have cast ballots, there has not been much mention of conspiracy theories around the 2020 election, plans to use the national guard to carry out mass deportations, or Trump’s vow to have the justice department to retaliate against his enemies. Will the former president mention those themes in his speech?

      Who else might Trump attack? It’s a given that he’ll go after Biden, but the Democrat is facing a backlash not seen in decades to his re-election campaign, and could step aside. Some earlier convention speakers have made a point of criticizing Kamala Harris, perhaps as a hedge to her ascension as the Democratic candidate. We’ll see if Trump follows suit. More

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      ‘Make Trump Human Again’ seems to emerge as Republicans’ new theme

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      Even before Donald Trump takes the stage at the Republican national convention on Thursday night, promising a speech on national unity rather than the usual partisan rancour, his team has laboured hard in the wake of the rally shooting to give the impression that he is a changed man.Gone was the Trump of “this American carnage”, the victim of witch-hunts who, if returned to the White House, would unleash a whirlwind of retribution on his enemies and be a dictator on day one. In its place was Trump the candy-peddling grandfather, the kiss-me-goodnight father, the comforting mentor and patriotic healer.It was as if the official theme of the week, Make America Great Again, had been hurriedly replaced by a new slogan: Make Trump Human Again.Kai Trump, the former US president’s 17-year-old granddaughter, helped set the tone. In a convention address on Wednesday she shared her big secret about the 78-year-old Republican nominee.“To me, he’s just a normal grandpa. He gives us candy and soda when our parents are not looking.”The theme of a “caring and loving” Trump – Kai’s words – was reminiscent of the narrative that has long been projected by Joe Biden, who presents his candidacy as a choice for dignity, respect and civility. It was as if the Trump team had adopted Biden’s playbook as empathiser-in-chief.The approach was picked up by Trump’s newly-enshrined vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance. The Ohio senator and author of Hillbilly Elegy told the convention audience that he had recently witnessed Trump tell his elder sons Don Jr and Eric that he loved them, kissing them both on the cheek as he said goodnight.His boys “squirmed the same way my four-year-old does when his daddy tries to give him a kiss on the cheek”, Vance said.Outside the immediate family, Trump’s political family passed the baton around in earlier speeches at the convention. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Republican governor of Arkansas, not only portrayed Trump’s close shave in Pennsylvania on Saturday as an intervention from “God Almighty”, she also portrayed him as a champion of women’s rights as though E Jean Carroll and Stormy Daniels had never existed.Sanders went on to laud Trump as an avuncular mentor, comforting her when she was his much-maligned White House press secretary. She recalled harsh criticism she had endured from members of the public and from journalists, especially at MSNBC.The then sitting president pulled her aside, she said, “looked me in the eye, and said: ‘Sarah, you’re smart, you’re beautiful, you’re tough, and they attack you because you’re good at your job’”.“That’s the Donald Trump I know,” Sanders added.Whether Trump can sustain the new soft-soap image presented of him in Milwaukee this week remains to be seen. He is certainly trying to cement the Maga makeover.According to Axios, he specifically instructed aides to direct prime-time convention speakers to avoid expressions of outrage in their response to Saturday’s shooting. Instead, national unity has been the name of the game.Numerous speakers linked Trump’s fist-raised pose having survived the gunman’s bullet to his newly cast image as a unifier. “He can stand defiant against an assassin one moment and call for national healing the next,” the vice-presidential nominee said glowingly.In the past eight years, America has become accustomed to various adjectives attached to Trump. They include “strong”, “patriotic” and “great”; and “incompetent”, “racist” and “narcissistic” – take your pick.What neither supporters nor detractors have tended up until now to connect to him is the word “moral”.And yet Elise Stefanik, the fourth-ranking Republican in the US House, chose just that word on the convention stage to describe a convicted felon. “President Trump will bring back moral leadership to the White House,” she said.The new look Trump, and the political strategy that appears to undergird it, has required considerable sacrifice on the part of some of his peers. We will probably have to await Ron DeSantis’s memoir to know the emotional price paid by the Florida governor when he praised the man who had derided him as “Ron DeSanctimonious” and a “disloyal dog”.We can similarly only conjecture what paroxysms Nikki Haley went through to give her “strong endorsement” to the man who mocked her husband for being absent while deployed to Africa with the national guard, and who butchered her birth name Nimarata, scathingly calling her “Nimbra”. More

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      Trump’s Republican convention speech: how to watch and what’s at stake

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      The biggest event of the Republican convention kicks off Thursday night, with Donald Trump’s address to thousands of party loyalists in attendance.Trump appeared at the opening night of the Republican national convention on Monday, when he was greeted with thunderous applause, marking his first public appearance since surviving an assassination attempt at his campaign rally. Earlier in the day, Trump announced JD Vance, the Ohio senator and once vocal critic of Trump, as his running mate.Vance formally accepted the Republican vice-presidential nomination on Wednesday, with a speech that presented the Republican party as a champion of working-class Americans while denouncing Democrats as out of touch and ineffective.Other speakers on the third day of the convention included Matt Gaetz, Newt Gingrich, Peter Navarro, Greg Abbott, Kellyanne Conway, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Donald Trump Jr.Notable speakers at the convention so far have also included Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who both challenged Trump for the GOP nomination but backed him at the convention. Sean O’Brien, Ted Cruz, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Ben Carson, Kristi Noem, Rick Scott, Tim Scott and Tom Cotton also spoke at the convention.When is Trump’s convention speech?Trump is expected to deliver remarks on Thursday evening, the final day of the Republican convention, as delegates officially vote to nominate him as the party’s presidential candidate. His speech is scheduled to begin at 9p.m.Earlier this week, Trump told the Washington Examiner that he rewrote his convention speech to focus on calls for national unity. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now,” he told the paper.“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together,” he said, adding that the speech will be “a lot different” from the original draft.What else to know?After surviving Saturday’s assassination attempt, Trump suggested he had been changed by the experience and wanted to project a message of unity during his convention speech. In an interview Sunday, Trump said he is reworking his remarks with speechwriter Ross Worthington. He had intended to deliver biting remarks against Joe Biden until the shooting at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, prompted him to throw it out.The test of whether Trump will lead the effort to promote a spirit of unity, or whether it was more of a directive aimed at his surrogates, will probably come when he delivers his speech on Thursday.Where can I watch it?The Guardian will have live coverage of the speech. All major networks will carry convention coverage, including CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, Fox News and C-SPAN. PBS said it will begin broadcasting each night at 6pm ET.A livestream of the convention is also available on the GOP Convention website.Will Melania be in the audience for Trump’s speech?Former first lady Melania Trump has made very few public appearances or statements since Trump left the White House. She did not attend the 27 June debate against Joe Biden, nor did she appear at any of Trump’s court appearances during the hush-money trial.Following Saturday’s assassination attempt against Trump, Melania released a statement condemning the man who authorities say tried to assassinate her husband. She described the shooter as “a monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine”.Melania will attend the convention, according to Eric Trump, but she is not confirmed as a speaker.What about Ivanka Trump?Ivanka Trump has spent the last several years distancing herself from politics, having served as an advisor in her father’s White House. She and her husband Jared Kushner testified before the House committee investigating the January 6 attack.The eldest daughter of the former president was absent in November, 2022 as Trump announced his bid for re-election. “I do not plan to be involved in politics,” she said in a statement at the time.Eric Trump confirmed Ivanka will attend the convention; however unlike in 2016, she’s not confirmed as a speaker.Tiffany Trump is not on the list of confirmed speakers but was in the crowd Monday night. Barron Trump was invited, but will not attend “due to prior commitments”, according to a statement released by his mother, Melania.Trump’s eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump; Eric’s wife, Lara Trump; and Guilfoyle (Donald Jr’s finance) are listed as speakers. More

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      Trump expected to plead for national unity in first speech after assassination attempt

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      With political winds at his back, Donald Trump on Thursday is expected to use his first speech since surviving an assassination attempt to plead for national unity.Strategists view the Republican national convention address, likely to be watched by tens of millions of Americans on prime time television, as a unique opportunity to redefine the former US president as more palatable to moderate voters.But critics remain sceptical that a Trump reset can last, citing past supposed “pivots” that were hyped by the media only for the septuagenarian to soon revert to dark, divisive and incendiary outbursts.“That was a profound existential moment and I’m sure it’s impacted him in the short run, but you are who you are,” David Axelrod, a former chief strategist for President Barack Obama, said. “He isn’t by habit or orientation a unifier.“Maybe so long as the race is going well others can persuade him that it’s better to be quiet than noisy. But you never know what happens in two in the morning when he’s got his phone in his hand and an impulse in his head.”In opinion polls, Trump is running 11 percentage points ahead of where he was nationally in the 2020 race of the White House. He is surfing a wave of sympathy and adulation after his right ear was injured by a would-be assassin’s bullet at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.Two days later, his ear bandaged, Trump received a hero’s welcome from cheering, sign-waving supporters at the convention in Milwaukee. Some echoed Trump’s initial response to “Fight! Fight! Fight!”Speaker after speaker suggested that Trump’s life was spared by God’s providence so that he can continue a sacred mission for the nation. But they backed away from early accusations that Democrats were to blame for the shooting.Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, who on Saturday tweeted that the Joe Biden campaign’s rhetoric “led directly” to the attempted assassination, struck a different tone in his convention address on Wednesday night.“Now consider what they said. They said he was a tyrant. They said he must be stopped at all costs. But how did he respond? He called for national unity, for national calm literally right after an assassin nearly took his life.”He added: “He is tough – he is – and he cares about people. He can stand defiant against an assassin one moment and call for national healing the next. He is a beloved father and grandfather and, of course, a once in a generation business leader.”In another move aimed at softening Trump’s image, his granddaughter Kai Madison Trump made her debut on the political stage. “He calls me during the middle of the school day to ask how my golf game is going and tells me all about his,” she said. “Grandpa, you are such an inspiration and I love you. The media makes my grandpa look like such a different person but I know who he is.”Some have shifted their emphasis from “Make America great again” (Maga) to “Make America one again”. Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, told the convention on Tuesday that Americans should remember “there is more that unites us than divides us”.In a nod towards moderation, Trump invited his erstwhile Republican rival Nikki Haley to speak. She was greeted with cheers and some boos but quickly quelled the latter by giving Trump a full-throated endorsement. “You don’t have to agree with Trump 100% of the time to vote for him,” she said. “Take it from me.”Republicans’ show of harmony offers a stunning contrast with Democrats, who have spent weeks mired in intra-party tensions over whether 81-year-old Biden should abandon his reelection bid after a hapless debate performance. A national NBC News poll found that just 33% of Democrats are satisfied with Biden as their party’s presidential nominee, versus 71% of Republicans satisfied with Trump.Speaking at an event in Milwaukee organised by the Cook Political Report and University of Chicago Institute of Politics, Republican pollster and strategist Tony Fabrizio said: “Right now the Democrats are the perfect circular firing squad and, while they’re the perfect circular firing squad, we have the run of the field, and the run of the field for us is to do exactly what we are doing. Running the messaging we are running. The president doing what the president is doing.”Trump’s near-death experience, and the ensuing national attention, present an opportunity when he formally accepts the party’s nomination to face Biden in a rematch of 2020. His wife Melania and daughter Ivanka, both of whom have been mostly missing from the campaign trail, are expected to attend.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome Republicans hope that Trump can recreate Ronald Reagan’s defiant optimism after he survived an assassination attempt in 1981, casting himself as unifier-in-chief. On Sunday Trump told the New York Post newspaper that he had intended to deliver biting remarks against Biden until the shooting prompted him to throw them out.Trump is understood to have been reworking his remarks with his speechwriter Ross Worthington since the shooting, according to a person close to Trump, and has discussed making himself sound like he is still the president, as opposed to just a candidate.But at an event hosted by the Axios website, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, suggested that even if Trump shifted to a gentler tone, his core political attacks were likely to continue. “You can be nicer on the margins but you still have to call out insanity when you see insanity,” Trump Jr said when asked about more caustic language turning off potential voters, for instance on transgender issues. “That’s different, that’s not about tone.”Trump Jr also said that, even though he believed that Trump’s unity tone would last until the vice-presidential debate, he expected Trump to counter-punch if attacked by Biden, who recently urged the country to tone down the political rhetoric in a televised address from the Oval Office.“I think he’s going to be tough when he has to be. That’s never going to change. He’s not going to just take an attack. My father will always be a fighter, that’s never going to change, but he’s going to do his best to moderate that. He’s never going to stop being Trump when attacked, that’s what makes him an effective leader because he doesn’t cower under fire – quite literally.”At an event hosted by Georgetown University on the sidelines of the convention, Trump’s co-campaign chief Chris LaCivita acknowledged that the unity messaging would not come at the expense of winning the election in November.LaCivita said: “This is obviously an opportunity to bring our country together. But let’s not forget we’re in the middle of a campaign. Our focus is very much on putting everything back squarely on the issues that are hurting everyday Americans and providing them an answer to those.”Indeed, for all the talk of a softer, more inclusive Trump, he has sat in a box in the convention hall alongside extremists such as Tucker Carlson, a broadcaster who has promoted white nationalism and praised Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the representative who once floated a conspiracy theory involving “Jewish space lasers”.Many of the speeches in Milwaukee have been centered on the theme of law and order and infused with Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, with speakers angrily denouncing Biden’s southern border policies and referring to an “invasion”. Delegates waved signs that said, “Mass deportation now” and chanted, “Drill, baby, drill!”There are also some striking absences: the former president George W Bush, the former vice-president Mike Pence and senators Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine), Todd Young (Indiana), Mitt Romney (Utah) and Rand Paul (Kentucky) are all skipping the convention.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “‘New’ Trump is teleprompter Trump. He comes out once every six months or so, sticks around for a few minutes and then disappears. He’ll talk about unity and use all the buzzwords for one night but let’s not kids ourselves: it’s an act.” More

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      Key takeaways from day three of the Republican national convention

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      Republicans had a new chant on Wednesday night: not just “Trump! Trump!” but also “JD! JD! JD!” in honor of Trump’s new vice-presidential pick, Ohio senator JD Vance, who introduced himself to the country Wednesday night in a confident and personal primetime address.Also new: the professionally printed signs reading “Mass Deportations Now,” a reference to Trump’s campaign pledge to engage in the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history.Here are five key takeaways from the night:1. Republicans are simply not talking about abortionDuring his race for the US senate in Ohio, Vance said that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. In 2022, he said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally”, expressing sympathy for the view that a national abortion ban was necessary to stop women from traveling to different states in order to get abortions.A section on Vance’s Senate website, accessible as late as Monday, read, simply, “End abortion,” calling him “100% pro-life, a Huffington Post reporter noted. By Wednesday, that message had vanished, as Vance’s old website simply redirected to Trump’s presidential campaign site.Vance similarly erased his anti-abortion views from his primetime speech to the RNC on Wednesday, and as my colleagues have noted, he’s far from alone. There’s been a conspicuous silence on abortion throughout the Republican convention, as well as on other issues that Republicans appear to see as weaknesses, like Project 2025 and the future of American democracy.2. Warm reaction to Vance’s bestselling life story, as ‘hillbilly’ aims for White House The Republican national convention crowd was already eating out of Vance’s hand, as the charismatic 39-year-old Ohio senator talked them through the life story that made him into the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, a 2016 memoir that became a 2020 feature film starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.Vance had described growing up “a working-class boy born far from the halls of power” in Middletown, Ohio, with a single mother who struggled with addiction, and a tough, loving grandmother who kept him from falling prey to a local drug dealer. He described his journey from the Marine Corps, to Yale, to working in venture capital, to being chosen as Trump’s vice-presidential pick.He neatly contrasted his youth to Biden’s age, noting policies Biden supported when he was in high school, and saying: “Joe Biden has been a politician in Washington for longer than I’ve been alive.” Then, talking about other single mothers like his, who had struggled with addiction but never given up, he revealed that his mother, Beverly Aikins, was in the RNC audience with him, and that she is “10 years clean and sober”.“I love you, mom,” he said, suggesting that she might he able to celebrate her full 10 years of sobriety next year in the White House.As the cameras panned to Vance’s smiling mother, she mouthed, “That’s my boy! That’s my boy!” And the crowd started chanting, “JD’s mom! JD’s mom!”3. It’s clear that JD’s job is to woo the rust belt Vance shouted out to his home state of Ohio in his speech, but he quickly cut off the chants of “O-H-I-O,” quipping, “We gotta win Michigan too.”His speech was threaded with references to rust belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Kentucky, which he connected to the struggles of his Ohio hometown, and to the importance of restoring American factories and American manufacturing.Vance described a series of economic and foreign policy choices Biden made over his long career that, he argued, hurt American workers, particularly those in towns like he grew up in. Some observers saw the speech as a rewriting of Vance’s own life narrative, shifting from Hillbilly Elegy’s preoccupation with Appalachian poverty’s connection to cultural problems and personal responsibility, to instead blaming politician Joe Biden for creating the conditions that left the people he grew up with, impoverished.Strikingly, Vance came onstage to the country twang of Merle Haggard’s 2005 protest ballad, America First, which expressed the singer’s opposition to the Iraq war.4. Republicans highlighted grief and anger over the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021Some of the family members of the 13 soldiers killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack at Kabul airport during the “disastrous” US withdrawal from Afghanistan spoke at the RNC to criticize Biden.Alicia Lopez, whose son, Corporal Hunter Lopez, was killed on 26 August 2021, said: “Despite our pleas for answers and accountability, they have pushed us away and tried to silence us. The Biden administration has not owned up to the bad decisions, they have not been transparent about their failures and their so-called leaders work to protect themselves, rather than our sons and daughters who took the oath to defend our country.”A mother-in-law of a marine killed at Abbey Gate said that Trump, in contrast, had spent dedicated time with family members, offering them what she felt was genuine support in their grief. The family members were also featured in a video in which they said that when they met with Biden as their loved ones’ bodies arrived at a military base in Delaware, the president appeared to check his watch during the ceremony.Other pro-Trump veterans also spoke to the lasting sense of anger and betrayal they felt in witnessing the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and in the struggles and fears of the Afghans they had worked with who were left behind as the Taliban seized control of the country.“Throughout our careers, we never had regrets about our service, but this moral injury caused many of us to ask: ‘Why did we serve, if this was the outcome?’” Scott Neil, a retired green beret, said.A scathing state department review of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan concluded that both the Trump and Biden administrations were to blame as “during both administrations there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow”.But the RNC’s focus on the withdrawal also took aim at one of Biden’s political strengths. As someone who has lost family members to a car accident and cancer, he has often been praised for his ability to grieve with people, and offer them support in moments of profound loss, even being referred to as “the designated mourner”. But on Wednesday, the RNC offered multiple speakers who portrayed Trump as the man who would comfort Americans in their grief and Biden as a self-involved politician.5. Chants of “Bring them home” as parents of 7 October hostage speak Orna and Ronen Neutra, whose son, Omer Neutra, was kidnapped during the 7 October attack in Israel, said Trump had supported them, asked the RNC for continued support in securing their son’s safe return. Omer is one of eight American hostages, Ronen Neutra said.“President Trump called us personally right after the attack, when Omer was taken captive,” Ronen Neutra said. “We know he stands with the American hostages. We need our beautiful son back and we need your support. We need your support to end this crisis and bring all the hostages back home.”Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent Harvard Divinity School student who was part of a group of students who filed a lawsuit alleging that Harvard failed to address antisemitism on campus, also spoke, as did members of a University of North Carolina fraternity who held up an American flag during a pro-Palestine campus protest.Chris Stein and Carter Sherman contributed reporting More