The lines of delegates snaking their way through security checks in the baking Milwaukee sun began hours before Donald Trump’s speech to the Republican convention. A rallying event following an attempted assassination has this week become a springboard to a November presidential victory for Trump which looks more nailed on by the day.
Heather Sprague, a delegate from Maine, was wearing a stretch dress emblazoned with Trump: Make America Great Again logos. A few steps away a small boy was dressed in a red Maga hat and tribute navy Trump suit. Glitzy ladies in pointed stilettos with bouncy blow-dried hairdos fought for space.
The keynote speech by a leader who had escaped death by millimetres and whose injured ear has become a hardy image of survival didn’t need much revving up. But then the Republican Party under Trump operates under the unofficial motto of More is More.
Against a backwash of intense infighting in the Democratic party about whether to ditch Joe Biden — now looking like a “when, not if” question — this has been a convention with the highest levels of political self-confidence we have witnessed in a pre-election rally since Barack Obama’s surge to power for the Democrats in 2008.
It got going with Hulk Hogan, an ageing wrestler with a chequered personal history and one of several celebrity attendees including comic Russell Brand and singer Kid Rock, growling a threat-promise that we should get ready: “Trumpomania will run wild again.”
The chairman of the Bill Graham evangelical movement thanked God for Trump’s escape from death — a claim echoed routinely from the platform as the campaign targets religious voters and amplifies a message that Trump was saved by divine providence — in order to recapture the White House.
Eric Trump, executive president of the Trump organisation, appeared with slicked-back hair and a shouty speaking style and scolded us long and hard with a grievance hit list, from trans rights to the Mexican border.
The stories were simple, folksy and highly unreliable: “My father turned New York streets to gold.” Subsequently, his father had made America great again, woven economic magic and avoided wars in the outside world — and would do so again, just better. Donald Trump had previously been silent at this convention but carefully-tended imagery had kept him as a spectral presence.
A concerted attempt to soften some of his edges is underway — pushing for independent voters who can supplement the Maga base. So the Trump clan at this convention has looked like an ultra high-net worth version of homely old TV saga, The Waltons. A small golden-haired granddaughter sat on his lap, wedged between Grandpa Trump and the newly-crowned vice-president candidate JD Vance and his Indian-born wife Usha.
Melania Trump, a sporadic presence since her husband left office in 2020, was regal yet stony in a fitted red suit, her lynx blue eyes fixed somewhere on the horizon. Several attempts had been made to persuade Melania to speak at the convention to no avail. “She shows up,” says a former press official on the Trump team when asked about her role.
There has been fretfulness among Republicans about how Melania would view another stint in the White House. Yet the couple, who have often appeared to be close to estrangement, looked okay with each other.
Trump thanked her for a “beautiful letter” calling for unity in the wake of the shooting. There was even an on-stage smooch and whisper in her ear in the farewell moments and her small, regal wave and that inscrutable, dentally-enhanced grin.
The whole shebang is really the Trump show — family, acolytes and spouse serve as the chorus line but there is only one star.
The single word TRUMP flashed up in bulb lights as the man himself arrived in front of a CGI image of the White House. He was close to tears, thankful to be alive and “running to be president for all of America not half of America”. It did not take long, however, until the red meat replaced the rhetorical salad course. The world was at peace when he was last in office. “Under President Trump, Russia took nothing”. He got along “very well with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un —he really misses me”. At home the border would be closed. Illegal migrants deported, oil drilling would resume, green energy transitions ripped up. The CNN fact checker counted 22 untrue statements, which is around par for the course in a long Trump speech. There is no doubt now that Trump means what he says — though many of his aspirations will turn out to be elusive on contact with the messier reality of economic and foreign affairs.
His choice for vice-president, JD Vance, is intended to double down on the sweeping ambition to create a Maga administration which will be a more focused and harder edged than the one during his first chaotic stint in power. “He is no neophyte,” Hogan Gidley, his press chief in the 2020 campaign told me. “He will be more focused next time and deliver more.”
Last night he sent a message to Vance: “You’re going to be around for a long time.” Life often works out differently around a maverick and self-centred leader. Vance has intellectual self-confidence and a network of Conservative influence from Silicon Valley, the heartlands of his native Ohio and an international network from populists like Hungary’s Viktor Orban to an urbane set of Britons including ex-chancellor George Osborne and former Cameron-era Tory strategist Steve Hilton.
Vance met wife Usha at Yale law school. “They’re very smart,” noted Trump indulgently — although being too “booksmart” often becomes an area of vulnerability for acolytes. But Vance will have to segue from ideologist to political street fighter after a relatively short stint as a senator and for all his influence is now firmly in line for any failures. Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as White House communications director, tweeted drily: “It’s the Trump cycle: he burns everyone. Vance is next.”
The Vances will also find themselves drawn into complex power play within the family dynasty. The campaign is co-chaired by Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara. “We’re all one big team,” she told the Washington Examiner.
Some incidental lines in last night’s colossal speech were a reminder that life in the Trump Succession drama is draining, for all its giddy privilege. “They have been subpoenaed (in court) more than anyone in the history of the United States”, Trump reflected with no apparent realisation that his own conduct might have led them there.
Since his exit from office in 2020, Trump has been convicted of a scheme to pay hush money to a model and last week a Florida court with a judge appointed under his presidency threw out a case on the mishandling of classified documents. None of this has impeded his march on the White House. But there were flaws too. The risk, as one strategist puts it, that his vanity and self-absorption leads Trump to “winning the same voters over and over again”.
How successful his appearance will prove in expanding his appeal to undecided voters or Democrat switchers is still uncertain. He promised unity and a bigger tent — Maga for the nation, not just the base. But the familiar hobby horses proved irresistible. Trump, we are reminded, will do Trump. And he will win or lose on those terms alone.
