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 primetime 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 him to 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 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 at two in the morning when he’s got his phone in his hand and an impulse in his head.”
As the final night of the convention got under way on Thursday in Milwaukee, opinion polls had Trump, 78, 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.
Trump’s arrival at the convention ahead of his nomination and speech drew a standing ovation from attenders. The former president, still wearing a bandage over his ear, grinned widely and also clapped and gave a fist pump, wearing his characteristic red, white and blue suit and tie combo.
Speaking ahead of Trump’s appearance, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson addressed the assassination attempt and praised Trump’s response.
“In that moment, Donald Trump, months before the presidential election, became the leader of this nation … And I have to say, you know, I think it changed him,” said Carlson. He said he reached out to Trump after the shooting and that “[Trump] said not a single word about himself. He said only how amazed he was and how proud he was of the crowd, which didn’t run.”
Trump’s son Eric delivered a speech that hit back at critics who say Trump’s incitement of the crowd that stormed the Capitol on January 6, persistent attempts to stop Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s election win and insistence that the 2020 election was marred by fraud make him “a threat to democracy”.
“He has defied the predictions of every political pundit. He fills stadiums across our country. He energizes Americans to the issues facing this nation, and does so with unvarnished honesty,” Eric Trump said.
Other speakers included Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, who pumped up the Trump administration’s record. “We put America first every single day,” he said, listing the lack of major new wars, anti-migration policies and “destroying Isis”. Pompeo then joked that Biden only “shuffles” across the global stage, amid a crisis in Biden’s re-election campaign over his age and acuity.
The retired wrestler Hulk Hogan also took to the stage, calling Trump his “hero” and tearing off a blazer and black shirt to reveal a red sleeveless “Trump Vance” shirt underneath, amid roars from the crowd.
Melania Trump was expected to appear at the Republican convention on Thursday but, in a break with tradition, would not deliver remarks, according to people familiar with the matter. The former president’s wife has been conspicuously absent in recent months, including from the New York criminal trial where Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Throughout the week, 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.”
Some at the convention have shifted their emphasis from “Make America great again” 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.”
In another move aimed at softening Trump’s image, his granddaughter Kai Madison Trump made her debut on the political stage on Wednesday. “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.”
Republicans’ show of harmony offers a stunning contrast with Democrats, who have spent weeks mired in intra-party tensions over whether Biden, 81, should abandon his re-election campaign 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.”
The Trump shooting, 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.
Some Republicans hope 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 that he had intended to deliver biting remarks against Biden until the shooting prompted him to throw them out.
Speaking at a CNN-Politico Grill event on the sidelines of the convention on Thursday, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives, said: “I am so looking forward to his address tonight because I think it’s going to be momentous, I think it’s going to be historic, and he’s going to talk about unifying the country, which is why he changed the content of the speech.”
Trump is understood to have been reworking his remarks with his speechwriter Ross Worthington, 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.”
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.”
Many of the speeches in Milwaukee have been centered on the theme of law and order. Delegates waved signs that said, “Mass deportation now” and chanted, “Drill, baby, drill!”
Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: He’ll talk about unity and use all the buzzwords for one night but let’s not kid ourselves: it’s an act.”
Joanna Walters contributed reporting
