The Second Coming officially began at about 9.30pm on Thursday and was ushered in if not by the angels then by the unlikely combination of Kid Rock and Ultimate Fighting Championship mogul, Dana White.
Everything about the ceremonials and speechifying in Milwaukee this week was a prelude to this moment, when the man who had survived an assassin’s bullet took his place among the Republican grassroots again. If they loved Donald Trump before, then the bizarre and shocking event of the past week moved the relationship in to a different realm.
He looked the same when he took to the stage to rapturous applause: still The Donald in the familiar navy suit, white shirt and red tie. But that rectangular gauze bandage (now a fashion accessory/sign of empathy among the Maga faithful) was a reminder that everything was different, everything was changed.
“I am not supposed to be here,” Trump told his people shortly into a speech delivered with a tired voice.
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“Yes you are,” they chanted back in a strange echo of the old Barack Obama refrain from 14 years ago.
“Yes you are.”
Trump smiled and nodded and not for the first time in his life, he begged to differ.
“But I’m not.”
The advance notices promised a nomination acceptance speech that had apparently been revised in the aftermath of that horrifying attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania. There had been whispers that the experience had somehow changed him, as near death experiences often do. He would preach a message of unity.
And shortly after he took the stage, he acknowledged that over the past five days he had been asked how he felt, in those terrifying seconds. And he told the crowd he would tell them, speaking about the shooting once and once only because it was “too painful to tell”. And just like that, he took the crowd there.
“It was a warm beautiful day in the early evening in Butler township in the great commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Music was playing and the campaign was doing really well. I went to the stage and the crowd was cheering wildly. Everybody was happy. I began speaking very strongly, powerfully and… happily because I was discussing the great job my administration did with immigration at the southern border,” Trump recalled.
For much of the week, the noise levels in this arena have been incessant, with endless dad guitar rock and speakers bellowing and a formidably enthusiastic crowd. But for the five or 10 minutes that Trump took Republicans back to the field in Pennsylvania, he cast a spell of silence and held them in his palm, like any good preacher man.
Listening to him, you could but wonder if the shock of the incident has yet to fully register with him: whether he has had time to fully absorb the sequence of events which has brought him from that podium in Butler to this crowded room in Milwaukee, with no time for reflection.
All week, this convention had been designed to show a different side to Donald Trump: the adored father, the grandfather of 10, the caring everyman, the guy who loves music. The implicit – and explicit message – was that he had been demonised and, as his wife said, dehumanised over the eight years since he entered and blew through the rules and conventions of US politics like a tornado.
On Thursday morning, his son Eric was on television predicting that in years to come, his father would be mentioned in the same breath as “the Washingtons, the Lincolns”. The closest his speech came to touching on Lincolnian empathy was when he told the crowd that “this election should be about the issues facing our nation and how to make America free successful and great again”.
“Now is the time to remember that we are all fellow citizens: we are one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. And we must not demonise political disagreement which is what has been happening in our country at a level nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said.
This was new! Was he about to offer an olive branch against the notional aisle to the Democrats? No, he was not.
The best way to do that, Trump said, was to drop the litany of phoney legal charges against him, a thought that seemed to snap him out of the reflective reverie and back to the campaign figure he has always been, preaching fire and brimstone, levelling charges at Joe Biden and “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and returning to the familiar theme: the halcyon days of 2016-2020 against the moral, financial and social ruination of 2020-2024.
It was a very long and meandering way of assuring everybody that Trump is just fine. All the old hits were played, from “Drill Baby, Drill” to an apocalyptic vision of the border to draining the swamp to “our horrible killing field” that Washington DC has become. It was the message from the rally trail, the one he would have delivered in Pennsylvania and with which he will tour the country all summer and into the autumn.
Still, it remains to be seen if he will be able to do as he intends and not speak about Pennsylvania again. Throughout this long, wandering acceptance speech, it was never far from his mind.
[ Trump gunman had carried out internet searches on Biden and other public figuresOpens in new window ]
“Just a few short days with you my journey with you nearly ended. We live in a world of miracles and none of us know God’s plan or where the adventure will take us,” he said, reminding the crowd that even though a shooter tried to stop him, he could never have succeeded, he said.
“It has always been about you. It is the biggest movement in the history of the country. It can’t be stopped. It can’t be stopped.”
And after he finished, Melania appeared, followed by Donald jnr and Ivanka and…all the Trumps. The balloons, red, white and blue fell from the heavens. And there it was: a dynasty. The Republican’s version of Camelot in a troubled summer.
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