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‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’: Trump emerges as an American messiah with swagger
“Fight! Fight! Fight!”The crowd had thought he was dead, Donald Trump recalled on Thursday night, and he wanted to let them know he was OK. “So I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousands of people that were breathlessly waiting and started shouting, ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’”The sublime image of Trump at last Saturday’s rally, face bloodied, fist raised, with Secret Service agents and the Stars and Stripes completing the tableau, flashed up on giant TV screens. Delegates at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee responded as one.“Fight! Fight! Fight!” they chanted, punching their own fists in the air in unison. Trump had taken a bullet for them. Their fervour suggested they would be willing to take a bullet for him. A Maga army on the march. A frightening spectacle for American democracy.In that moment it was clear that Trump’s survival of an attempted assassination had turned him into a figure that transcends politics, an American messiah with swagger. His power over the crowd, summoning anger and sympathy and ecstasy with a flick of a switch, evoked dark chapters in Europe in the 20th century.Like demagogues of the past, Trump understands spectacle. His instinctive response to a bullet shaving his ear, sparing his life by a quarter of an inch, was a masterpiece of self-mythology. At the convention on Thursday, in an arena that normally hosts the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, he delivered raw political entertainment.Big screens showed Trump doing his awkward, fist-pumping, flat-footed dance to the sound of Village People’s Y.M.C.A. To Democrats, comedians and much of the world, it is a preposterous sight. To the Trump faithful, it makes him human and lovable.His wife, Melania – rarely seen these days – walked out to the strains of Beethoven’s Symphony No 9 in D minor, joining Trump children Don Jr, Eric, Ivanka and Tiffany in the stand. Musician Kid Rock, wearing black hat, dark glasses and shiny cross, sang: “Say fight fight, say fight fight! Say Trump, say Trump!” The crowd repeated the lines in response.Then came Lee Greenwood singing God Bless the USA, in effect the Trump theme song. Again the crowd joined in. Bright lights began flashing on stage. A white panel slid upwards like a curtain for the big reveal. There stood Donald J Trump, 78, former US president and Man of the Ear, against the backdrop of five giant letters: “TRUMP.”It was camp and gaudy and kitsch and very Trumpy. Soon after, the entire stage set was transformed into a digital image of the White House – four years after Trump broke protocol by addressing the Republican convention from the actual White House. “USA! USA!” chanted a crowd that held “Make America great again!” and “Fire Joe Biden!” signs. Some shouted: “We love you!”Then, in a hushed arena, came Trump’s retelling of the attempted assassination and warning that he may never tell it again “because it’s too painful to tell”. He delivered it in a cadence that, as one former Barack Obama aide noted, was like a bedtime story for kids when the goal is to lull them to sleep.“I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God,” he said, wearing dark suit, red tie and ear bandage. “In watching the reports over the last several days, many people say it was a providential moment. Probably was.”Indeed, numerous convention speakers at the convention have suggested that Trump was saved by divine providence. Ben Carson, his former housing secretary, suggested that God “lowered a shield of protection” over Trump. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives, quoted Benjamin Franklin: “God governs in the affairs of men.” Trump’s son Eric offered: “By divine intervention and the angels above, you survived.”For nine years Trump had tapped into the great American trauma of race and made it about him. Now he has turned religion into a personality cult.He recounted: “Once my clenched fist went up, high into the air – you’ve all seen that – the crowd realised I was OK and roared with pride for our country, like no crowd I have ever heard before. Never heard anything like it.”This was the man who once inspired a crowd to storm the US Capitol in an attempted coup. Now the scene in Milwaukee recalled Eleanor Roosevelt’s account of her husband Franklin’s inauguration as US president in 1933: “The crowds were so tremendous. And you felt that they would do anything – if only someone would tell them what to do.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere was more theatre from the greatest showman. Paying tribute to Corey Comperatore, who died at the Pennsylvania rally, Trump walked over to Comperatore’s fire jacket and helmet, which were hanging on a stand behind him. He leaned over and kissed the helmet and asked for a moment of silence in honour of the former fire chief.It was so far, so good for “New Trump”, the man who had supposedly been changed forever by a near-death experience. He would now be “contemplative” and “softer” and “unifying”, we were told. And he began promisingly enough, telling the convention: “I am running to be president for all America, not half of America because there is no victory in winning for half of America.”But it did not take long for the old unhinged demagogue to come roaring back. In a 90-minute speech cribbed from his rallies, he vowed to “drill baby drill” and “close those borders” on his first day in office. He baselessly accused Democrats of “cheating” in elections , denounced Washington DC as “a horrible killing field” and warned of a planet “teetering on edge of world war three”.Trump also spoke of a “massive invasion at our southern border” and claimed immigrants were flooding in from prisons, mental institutions and insane asylums. Cue his now familiar and dated Hollywood film reference: “The late great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner.” Having promised to mention Joe Biden by name, he did so 40 minutes in with scathing criticism.David Axelrod, a former Obama strategist, told CNN: “This is the first good thing that’s happened to Democrats in the last three weeks. This really reminded everyone why Donald Trump is fundamentally unpopular outside this room.”The long, rambling speech was at odds with an otherwise disciplined convention that, while shocking by the conservative standards of Ronald Reagan or George W Bush, felt less raucous and extreme than the “Lock her up!” chants of 2016. The red meat came with a hint of pink and garnish of moderation.There were few references to “stop the steal” or January 6 insurrectionists being “hostages”. There was little boasting about the overturning of Roe v Wade, the constitutional right to abortion. There was no real effort to blame Democrats for the attempt on Trump’s life. Even the vendors were selling mostly pro-Trump products rather than anti-Biden gear.In short, it was a do-no-harm convention for a party feeling confident but cautious as Democrats implode over whether to ditch Biden. But Trump, of course, blew all that up with his grievances and lies. When the divine demagogue finally wrapped, his family joined him on stage as thousands of gold, red, white and blue balloons descended. A singer performed Nessun dorma from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot. None shall sleep indeed. More
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Trump’s divisive speech and a rightwing mirror world: key takeaways from RNC day four
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
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
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
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 pick of JD Vance is a clear signal: this is a fight over America’s identity | Steve Phillips
Donald Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate is a clear and unmistakable message that Republicans are waging a holy war over the very identity of this nation. In choosing the Ohio senator, the former US president has selected and elevated a person who is one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders and whose primary qualification for national leadership is articulating the grievances of white people unhappy with the country’s changing racial composition.Rather than even pretend to reach out to the less rabid Republicans who backed Nikki Haley in the primaries or attempt to win greater support among Latinos by choosing Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, Trump has simply doubled down on his crusade to make America white again.Traditionally, vice-presidential selections aim to broaden the party’s appeal by signaling a commitment to a specific constituency or sector of the electorate. Barack Obama selected Joe Biden in 2008 to racially balance the ticket and reassure white voters that he’d have a veteran, moderate, white male political leader at his side. Biden, in turn, chose a younger woman of color to run with him to inspire and acknowledge the critical importance of women and people of color to the Democratic coalition.Trump had the opportunity to make a similar, more traditional, move. In many ways, Rubio would have been the smart pick; he’d have been the first person of color on a Republican ticket, and could plausibly have tried to appeal to Latinos and peel off some support from that cornerstone of the Democratic coalition. Others in the Republican party wanted Trump to calm the fears of the more moderate voters who had backed Haley over Trump’s bombast and division.But, true to form, Trump rejected all that counsel and went with the cultural warrior, Trump critic turned sycophant Vance.By any measure, Vance – who has no prior political experience and has only been a senator for 17 months – is grossly unqualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, but that is not surprising given that Trump himself is arguably the least qualified person to ever occupy the Oval Office. Vance’s primary qualification is his ability to articulate the anguish of white working-class Americans. Through his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy and his rhetoric as a candidate and now senator, Vance has done little else of note in his life than complain about how America is no longer a white-dominated country, a fact that has been painful and disorienting and hard to accept for a considerable number of white people.What perhaps poses one of the greatest dangers to this country is that Vance, like Trump, has already proven that he is committed to aggressively hacking away at the fraying social fabric that binds this nation together. Most alarmingly, Vance has said that if he had been vice-president on 6 January 2021, he would have done what Trump wanted and blocked electors from states that voted for Biden. Vance has raised money for insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the elected government of the United States and who sought to block the certification of an election in which all 50 governors – Republican and Democratic alike – certified results that showed Biden won the presidency.Vance’s contempt for democracy and democratic institutions was on full display as well in the immediate hours after the Trump rally shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, last Saturday. Before anyone even knew who the shooter was, Vance was tweeting that Biden was to blame.Electorally, the implication of Vance’s selection is that it locks into place the contours, dynamics and stakes of the election.The journalist and analyst Ron Brownstein presaged this reality 12 years ago when he described modern American politics as a battle between two constellations of people, which he called the Coalition of Restoration and the Coalition of Transformation.Democrats, he observed, “are now operating with a largely coherent Coalition of Transformation that will allow (and even pressure) them to align more unreservedly with the big cultural and demographic forces remaking America”. Conversely, Obama’s 2012 re-election “clearly stamped the Republicans as a Coalition of Restoration, overwhelmingly dependent on the votes of whites unsettled by those changes”.In my books, I describe these groupings as the New American Majority and the Modern-Day Confederates, but the concepts are the same, and the implications for contemporary elections are far-reaching and under-appreciated.In each successive presidential election since Obama was elected, all that has really mattered is which coalition of voters the nominee is championing, AKA What Side Are You On?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat dynamic will play out again this fall, as Trump has simply doubled down on trying to rally his Coalition of Restoration to turn out in large numbers. The good news for Democrats is that the Coalition of Transformation is larger than the Coalition of Restoration. Republicans know this in their bones and in their spreadsheets, and that is why they are relentlessly focused on voter suppression, introducing nearly 800 different pieces of legislation designed to make it harder to vote, according to Ari Berman’s book Give Us the Ballot and the Brennan Center’s 2021 analysis.Census data and election results over the past 40 years further affirm the fact that the Coalition of Transformation is larger. With the sole exception of 2004, the Democratic nominee for president has won the popular vote in every single presidential election since 1992. The logical result of one party rooting its politics in appeals to white racial fears and resentment is that the other party gets the majority of support from people of color.In a country where nearly half of the residents are people of color (41%) the Republican party remains overwhelmingly monochromatic; according to a Pew Research analysis, 83% of Republican voters are white. Conversely, 72% of people of color supported Biden in 2020, and no Democratic nominee has ever received less than 83% of the African American vote since the advent of exit polling in 1976.By picking Vance, the Republicans show they are not going to try to broaden their coalition: they’re just going to go harder with their shrinking coalition and focus on getting their supporters to the polls. Democrats need to have similar clarity and focus, and devote their resources and energy to maximizing voter turnout from now until election day. If they can do that, they will win – and JD Vance’s voice, and Trump’s, will remain far from the White House.
Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color, and author of Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority and How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good More
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Trump’s Republican convention speech: how to watch and what’s at stake
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
