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Donald Trump and the MAGA-fied Republican Party will take over the city of Milwaukee in Wisconsin this week as the GOP nominating convention takes place over four days.
At the top of every delegate’s mind this week? Saturday’s surreal scene at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman was killed by the Secret Service after attempting to assassinate the former president in a shooting that left one spectator dead and two others seriously injured. An already momentous event will now be underscored by a new layer of security, as the country reels from one of the most shocking outbursts of political violence in decades.
Trump, having lost just one state in the months-long primary slog against Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and other opponents, is guaranteed to be his party’s nominee when it’s all said and done. The former president will then embark upon his third bid for the White House, now under the cloud of 34 felony convictions (with three other criminal prosecutions on the way).
This week’s Republican National Convention will be informative not only for any drama that plays out on the convention floor, but also for what it says about the kind of general election campaign Trump will run over the 109 days between his acceptance of the nomination and the November election.
Trump’s attempted assassination is likely to be a major topic of speakers and much talked about among attendees, which will include state and county-level Republicans from around the country. Here’s what to look out for.
Running mate drama
The main story on day one: Who will be Donald Trump’s running mate for the general election?
Sources inside Trumpworld have told journalists for weeks that the contest is down to three men: Marco Rubio, JD Vance, and Doug Burgum. The latter, a governor from North Dakota who dropped out early on from the 2024 GOP primary, is thought to be losing favor while the two senators Vance and Rubio are still duking it out for Trump’s rose.
The four-day convention will also be a glimpse into the kind of administration Trump hopes to lead come January 2025. His opponent, Joe Biden, is facing an unprecedented rebellion within his own party after a shocking debate performance at the end of June during which Biden stumbled over his words and repeatedly lost his train of thought, unable to effectively rebut Trump’s lies.
Polling shows the incumbent president trailing in every swing state he won against Donald Trump in 2020. Thanks to current realities in the House and Senate, a Trump victory in November would likely be accompanied by respective Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress.
The shooting
Saturday’s shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, is sure to shake up the presidential race and have a profound effect on politics in America during an already divided time.
The gunman, a 20-year-old whose motivations have not been identified, and his actions have already spawned a host of conspiracy theories as Republicans try to point fingers at Democrats for the violence.
Even as Trump and other prominent Republicans stay away from the more outlandish conspiracies being spread in the wake of the shooting, one can expect misinformation and speculation to play a major role this week. That much was evident in the response from JD Vance, one of the finalists who may be announced at Trump’s running mate, on Saturday.
“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance posted on Twitter. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Winning back the battleground states
Expect efforts by Republicans to shmooze voters in battleground states — particularly Wisconsin, which is hosting the RNC and is one of the swing states won by Biden in 2020 in his victory over Trump that year. The incumbent president won the state by just one percentage point last time around, and last Thursday, Biden’s campaign identified the state in a memo released to reporters as crucial once more to his path to victory this year.
Trump, meanwhile, insulted Milwaukee as a “horrible” city at a campaign rally earlier this year — but one can assume that he and others will take a stab at smoothing things over during the convention.
Trump has clearly noticed his sudden advantage, and held his fire for several days after his meetup with Biden in Atlanta. That pause quickly ended, however, with the former president asserting at a rally that Biden’s convicted-felon son Hunter was running the show at the White House. The president’s adult son has indeed been reportedly managing his father’s communication with friends and outside advisers and has sat in on meetings at the White House, according to multiple officials.
Project 2025
With his opponent in apparent freefall, Trump has turned his attention to the RNC itself and tried to shield himself from the inevitable counter-punching from the Biden campaign and its allies. On Truth Social, the former president distanced himself from Project 2025, a blueprint for radically slimming down and transforming the federal government to fit a far-right conservative vision.
Numerous figures in and around Trumpworld including Trump’s ex-aide John McEntee are connected to the project, which was crafted by a host of conservative groups led by the Heritage Foundation, a convention sponsor of the RNC.
Just how much attention Project 2025 and its supporters receive at the convention will be a sign of how much Trumpworld plans to be alligned with the far-right agenda.
Anti-abortion crusade
The actions and rhetoric of anti-abortion groups will be particularly illuminating this coming week. There’s an argument playing out in the media over whether the Trump/RNC 2024 campaign platform takes a direct stance on a national abortion ban.
The platform draft does not contain any language about support for passing legislation in Congress to ban or restrict the practice nationwide, but its inclusion of language supporting the fetal personhood argument — which posits that unborn fetuses have rights of due process under the Constitution — has led many Democrats to argue that the GOP is indicating its support instead for a total ban on abortion through the court system.
Anti-abortion crusaders have been split over the party platform, with groups like Students for Life Action and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America applauding what remains in the platform. Others, like Mike Pence, have condemned it as not extreme enough on abortion.
With Trump ascendant in the polls and his opponent facing unprecedented issues vexing his campaign, the relevance of the RNC will take on new weight as voters of all political stripes tune in to see what very well could be in store for American governance for the next four years.
