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So much of a Trump rally is waiting in a crowd, anticipating his arrival. All week at the Republican National Convention, Trump was present but silent. He sat and observed the proceedings from his “Make America Great Once Again” box. Around the Convention, in Milwaukee, I heard speculation that, since Saturday, when a gunman had attempted to assassinate Trump, he was a changed man, or that maybe the blissful smile on his face was from painkillers he was supposedly taking for his ear injury. Reporters were told that Trump would write his own speech—it’s “really coming from the heart,” a campaign spokesperson said—which he would deliver on Thursday night. On Wednesday, one of Trump’s ten grandchildren spoke to the Convention—a gesture toward the next generation, the suggestion of a robust dynasty.
At the security perimeter between the R.N.C. and the city of Milwaukee, I watched two groups of Secret Service personnel deciding whether they would have to Tase a woman who was taking her clothes off as she whirled toward the fence. “It seems like she knows exactly the point where she has to stop,” one of the officers said. They gave her a bottle of water. Police officers from dozens of states had come to Wisconsin to provide Convention security. They crossed bridges over the Milwaukee River, on horseback and on bicycles and on foot, as a police boat patrolled the water below.
Inside the Convention center, I stopped at a table where two men were selling a coffee-table book of Trump’s tweets from 2009 to 2019 styled as poetry. Chapter headings included “Loathings” and “Amores”; “it has a robust glossary,” one of the men said. A passerby was looking to buy a Trump-branded Bible, but she signed the man’s petition to nominate Trump for Poet Laureate anyway. “He brings wealth and beauty to the country,” she said. “All the Democrats, they look like crap.” On the Convention floor, a delegate asked me for a piece of paper from my notebook, and then folded the white page into an ersatz ear bandage, in solidarity with Trump. Ear cuffs with American flags and the words “The day we dodged the bullet” were becoming the new post-assassination brand.
On the Convention’s final night, I stood next to the Wisconsin delegation, whose members were wearing hats in the shape of cheese. Sitting in his box, Trump held his youngest grandchild on his lap. Onstage, Tucker Carlson told the crowd, “I have never been to a more fun Convention or a Convention with better vibes.” Trump, he continued, had become “the leader of this nation” since the assassination attempt. His project wasn’t just to win but to “return democracy to the United States.” A man next to me waved a flag in the air, and told me what a special night it was: “It’s like 1984 again.”
The sense in the arena that America already belonged to Trump didn’t translate into complacency. I ran into a delegate I’d last seen a few months ago, in Florida, where he told me the election would be won in a landslide; since then, the delegate said he had registered twenty-two hundred nonpartisan voters as Republicans. “Phone-banking, mail-in voting, targeting voters who didn’t vote in the midterms—we went from violet to deep red,” he told me. He pulled out his phone to show me a news story claiming that Biden, who was sick with COVID at his beach house, was preparing to drop out of the race. Hulk Hogan had just taken the stage. “Let Trumpomania make America great again!” he screamed, ripping off his shirt.
When Trump finally came onto the stage, from behind a curtain that rose up to reveal him, like he was in “Chicago,” it seemed, at first, that we were meeting the new man I’d heard hinted at all week—vulnerable, misty-eyed, leading with love and gratitude. He began with a long soliloquy describing the assassination attempt, which might have been his best rally story yet. (He said he would only tell it only once, instead of adding it to the repertoire; it would be too painful to tell again.) After a while, though, he picked up essentially where he had left off, right before he was shot, at his rally in Pennsylvania. On the Convention screen behind him, Trump projected a chart tracking illegal immigration that he had been looking at when the shooting started, and launched into an hour-long speech that was nearly indistinguishable from his usual campaign fare.
Throughout the week, on the Convention floor, people held up signs that said “mass deportation now!,” a pastor prayed for protection from tyranny, and speakers railed against the “lawfare jackals” of the Democratic Party who wanted to jail them. “We’re actually going to go home and miss it,” Trump said, of the Convention. “It’s about love.” After he finished, an opera singer performed “Nessun Dorma,” the aria from Puccini’s “Turandot,” as the former President gazed out on the crowd. Thousands of balloons dropped into the arena, and attendees streamed out, balloons popping under their feet. Trump’s final imprint on the Convention was the addition of gold balloons to the traditional red, white, and blue. A delegate next to me, in Trump-brand sneakers, was ready to go. “It was great, but it was a bit long-winded,” he said. A local minister took the stage in front of the emptying room to offer a closing benediction. “Hey, time to pray!” one attendee shouted. Some stayed a minute longer, and then the staff struck the set.
Sourse: newyorker.com
