What’s it like to stare at Donald J Trump for an hour and a quarter, from a little under 10 metres away?
It is very strange and intense.
Once I made it out onto the main floor of the convention (this took four hours), pushed through the crowds of officials and delegates and journos, and manoeuvred myself into an aisle with a half-decent view of Trump sitting in the bleachers, I lost interest in listening to the speeches up on stage. I just wanted to, well, stare at the guy.
Here was the visage we’ve all seen countless times, in photos and videos and cartoons and memes, the guy who’s upended American politics and dominated headlines for the past decade — unedited, unfiltered. The platinum Rogaine-for-men combover thatch, gleaming stiff with (probably) hairspray, the skin not as orange as you might think. The chin jutted forward, somehow making a manly asset of his jowls. The perpetually pursed lips and the now-totemic bandage on the ear, resembling a tiny pillow, marking the spot where a bullet grazed just days ago.
But in person, Donald Trump also looked — or felt? — quite different. The square, white bandage on his right ear made him seem vulnerable, frail, a bit like my granddad at 80-ish, who briefly sported a bandage on his ear after having a melanoma removed. (No doubt this response has been considered in detail by a small army of PR experts.)
And his mouth — which we’re so used to seeing in an array of angry and/or defiant frowns — was instead projecting nonstop positivity. He smiled thoughtfully, his lips a mostly flat line, with the faintest upturned corners at each end. He beamed dozens of ear-to-ear beams, somehow always keeping those lips together (his teeth were not in evidence, at any point).
Trump performed these meticulously coached facial expressions for the hundreds of cameras trained on him for his entire appearance. There was a tangible sense of the work he was putting in to keep projecting certain emotions — beneficence, grace, gratitude.
At times Trump seemed genuinely, spontaneously pleased with how well things were going. At other times he looked extremely tired — especially when he had to stand up. In the 74 minutes I watched, he stood up and sat down probably a dozen times. But at least four or five times, everyone around him stood up — including the newly anointed vice president, JD Vance, looking gittery-eyed and triumphant — while Trump stayed sitting.
The fact he wasn’t speaking, but reacting to other people’s words, made him seem much more like an ordinary human than speechifying Trump does. The muted passivity of his reactions, the sense of him emanating consistently appropriate emotional responses, strengthened this effect. Of course, it’s easy to smile beneficently when your daughter-in-law calls you a “lion … bold … strong … fearless“, when a parade of sycophants say things like “Things were good under Donald Trump, but everything has gone to hell under Joe Biden,” over and over again, and when a frenzied crowd of thousands kept breaking into chants of “We love Trump!” and “Fight! Fight! Fight!”.
Lurking behind this heart-warming spectacle is the spectre of Project 2025, a 900-plus-page document written by conservative figures in anticipation of Trump getting reelected, and a reflection of the whole operation being a lot more organised this time around. Vox characterises Project 2025 as “taking a hardline religious-right agenda”, as well as consolidating executive power (basically, making it much easier for Trump to do whatever he wants, and/or whatever he’s encouraged to do by libertarians, anti-abortion lobbyists and so on).
The Daily Beast goes further, with Danielle Moodie talking of “Republican fascists … want[ing] bloodshed”. Kevin Roberts, one of the co-writers of Project 2025 and president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said last week that “we are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless — if the left allows it to be”. But in the room with the Republicans, the message is that they want nothing more than to love each other, and keep their women and children safe from fentanyl and border-crashing rapist murderers. (Oh, and woke trans people.) Who could argue with that?
Earlier in the day, five out-of-state police officers (from Columbus, Ohio) fired 30 rounds into Samuel Sharpe, Jr., a 43-year-old local Milwaukee man. Sharpe was 1.6 kilometres outside the RNC’s exclusion zone, in King Park, a longstanding “tent city” where numerous homeless people live. Sharpe was apparently holding a knife in each hand and threatening another man; it took the Ohio police a full 15 seconds to go from noticing Sharpe to killing him. Locals I spoke to said they were planning a protest for next week, once the “racist” interstate police have left. During the five hours of RNC speeches, which were heavy on law and order and “back the blue” (police, not Democrats), the shooting went unmentioned.
Instead, over-excited Idaho delegates on the floor were yelling out “We love you, Trump!” and “Idaho loves Trump!” Sometimes Trump would respond with a smile and a finger pointed in their direction.
Considering the events of Saturday, everything felt terribly fragile. It seemed insane that all this crowd — this extremely hyped-up crowd — could get so close to a man who had almost been shot and killed just three days ago.
With the gift of a superficial wound to his right ear, Trump is in the final stages of metamorphosing into a messianic figure. Reporters are making inevitable comparisons with Reagan, JFK and Abraham Lincoln.
And in the process, his past life is falling away — his shady and failed business deals, his ex-wives, the litany of sexual harassment allegations, that whole Capitol riots thing, the court cases, and his just plain nastiness. In his place, according to the speakers onstage, stood a family man, a friend, a good guy.
Maybe he doesn’t need to speak at all.
