The main security entrance for the great, the good, the sequinned cowgals and cowboys heading into the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee takes them beneath the Starbucks canopy at the side of the Hyatt hotel, where the small foyer is distinguished by a gold plaque marking the spot of the assassination attempt on Teddy Roosevelt. “Woah,” one young Republican in a red blazer and loafers said when he noticed it, and that said it all. Assassination, whizzing bullets, the ghosts of dead presidents, miracles, the resurrection: it has all been in the background to the triumphal gathering of Donald Trump’s Republican Party in sunny Milwaukee.
In October 1912 this had been the Gilpatrick’s Hotel. Roosevelt had napped for the afternoon. Across the street, John Schrank, a Bavarian immigrant who had blown a large inheritance, had spent the day drinking beers in Herman Rollfink’s saloon. He had trailed Roosevelt for 24 days, from the southern states and through Illinois to here, trying to pluck up the courage to kill him because, he would later claim at his trial, the ghost of William McKinley – another slain president – had told him do so. This week the same street is a bazar of Trump caps and proclamatory T-shirts. I’m voting for the felon! I’m 1776% sure no one is taking my guns! If you voted for Biden you owe me gas money!
But 110 years ago, a crowd waited to greet Roosevelt on a darkening evening when he left the hotel. Schrank stepped forward, as Jack Ruby would step forward half a century later, produced a gun and fired. The bullet pierced Roosevelt’s spectacles case and travelled through the folded speech he carried. It stopped before it punctured his lung. Roosevelt declared himself well enough to continue and after ordering that no harm come to his would-be assassin, he proceeded to the hall.
“Friends, I ask you to be quiet,” he told the audience, still bleeding. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” He spoke for 90 minutes, and the young American century moved on.
It was no surprise that Trump invoked Roosevelt’s name when he spoke on Wednesday night while his father sat watching the gallery. Trump’s near-death experience and miraculous survival in last Saturday’s attempted assassination are two sides of the same coin and occurred on live television. A bullet from an AR rifle grazed his ear because he happened to turn his head at just the right moment. The bullet fired by 20-year-old Thomas Crooks was the inverse of the “magic bullet” theory, which spawned endless speculation in the wake of the assassination of John FitzGerald Kennedy in 1963.
Somehow, the bullet missed Trump in a quirk of luck and happenstance so unlikely that many in Milwaukee believed it to be the handiwork of a higher power. The Trump who appeared in the Fiserv Forum on Monday night was feted as a miracle. It was the constant and understandable reference point throughout the parade of speeches this week. Voice has always been the most potent element of the Trump persona but now his mere presence among his followers is enough.
Each night, he sat and listened to a series of speeches in which he was invariably projected as the saviour of the United States. If there was any lingering doubt that Trump had claimed ownership and fealty of the Republican Party, it melted away over those successive nights when everyone, even former primary rivals Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, pledged loyalty. The old party grandees were nowhere in evidence. When Mitch McConnell, who will bow out in November, cast the Kentucky votes for Trump, he was roundly booed.
It was a tricky week to define because the euphoric mood and the red, white and blue colour scheme didn’t match the essential darkness of the message. The United States depicted by many of the Republican speakers is a broken and unpleasant place. You could take the transcript of any speech but here’s a snippet from Kimberley Guilfoyle, a former actor, lawyer and journalist who was married to Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and is now engaged to Donald Trump Jr:
“Donald Trump will once again make our country strong, safe and prosperous,” she said on Wednesday night, annunciating every sentence as though swearing an oath on the Bible. “He will make America feared by our adversaries and respected by our friends. And most importantly he will always put America first.
“After four years of Joe Biden’s disastrous America Last agenda, our country is more dangerous, vulnerable and impoverished than anyone thought possible. President Trump handed Biden a booming economy and a strong nation. All Joe had to do was leave it alone and take a nap. But Joe just couldn’t help himself. Joe Biden cannot lead America. He cannot even lead himself off a stage. Now Americans are drowning in inflation. Insanity spreads like a cancer in our schools. We are closer to World War three than any time in my life.
“And we are facing an unprecedented invasion of millions of illegal aliens across our border. Rioters and looters go free while Biden and the Democrats persecute American heroes like Donald Trump. Tens of millions of Americans are made to feel like enemies in our own country, an enemy for wanting to defend our border, for not wanting our children indoctrinated in school, for not wanting to erase our history, for praying to our god, saying what we think and fighting for what we believe.
“It is no wonder that the heroes that stormed the beaches of Normandy and faced down communism say they don’t recognise our country any more. This is not an accident. The powerful elites in the swamp will say anything to crush the America First movement. But. We. Will. Never. Give. Up. And neither will Donald J Trump.”
Her fiance also spoke on Wednesday night.
“No matter who you are, you can be a part of this movement to make America great again. Look at me and my friend JD Vance – a kid from Appalachia, and a kid from Trump Tower in Manhattan. We grew up worlds apart, and now we’re both fighting to save the country we love.”
This was true. Vance and Don Trump jnr are inseparable and now that they both sport bro’ beards, along with Eric Trump jnr, they are sometimes hard to distinguish. The beards are symbolic of something but nobody seems quite sure what. The frontier spirit, perhaps. But the Duke wore no beard. The Gipper wore no beard. And with the Trump boys and Vance, it’s a fine line as to whether they are wearing the beard, or the beard is wearing them. The only certainty is that the coolers in Stockholm and the scenesters in Brooklyn are all set for a visit to the barber this weekend.
It would take many, many words to get through Vance’s vision for the United States but here is a synopsis of his belief system: tariffs on imports, economic isolation, let Ukraine sink or swim, a hardliner on women’s reproductive rights (“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he once replied when asked if incest or rape merited exceptions), closing the southern border, deportation of undocumented, scouring the DC bureaucratic class and revitalising the American industrial heartland.
There was no mention of abortion in Vance’s lengthy speech nor of Ukraine. It was a Maga light manifesto and, as with all the other speeches, it revolved around the assurance that Trump will right all wrongs. Listening to speech after speech, the effect was of a sort of sun dance, where a new model army of Republicans are dream-fulfilling through incantation a version of America that is their very own Hy-Brasil.
The entire week was building inexorably to the moment when Trump would take the stage on Thursday night. But in the build-up to that moment, a shift was occurring back in Washington. On Wednesday word emerged that Biden had tested positive for Covid. Footage showed him stiffly alighting the steps of Air Force One, smartly dressed in his presidential bomber jacket and baseball cap. He paused at the top of the steps like a man expecting to wave to the vast crowd, only to realise that night had fallen and the tarmac was empty. Everybody was gone.
This was the message his closest political allies, orchestrated by Nancy Pelosi’s steely guidance, were desperately trying to get him to understand. And on Thursday it was reported that Biden was engaged in a bout of soul searching and had become more receptive to the idea of stepping away.
The peculiar thing is that the name of Biden was included in every speech in Milwaukee. They could not shut up about him – his failings, his frailties, his weaknesses. He was the butt of a thousand lame jokes. He had become the symbol of all the wrongs the new Republican Party had vowed and promised to wipe out. Now, it seemed, he might disappear of his own accord, a turn which may spook what has been an extraordinarily well-calibrated Republican campaign.
When the embattled director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, arrived at the convention centre, she was quickly approached by Wyoming senator John Barrasso and Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn. Both assumed the personalities of tenacious door-stepping reporters, chasing her down the hall for answers as to what had happened in Pennsylvania.
“I’ve got a message for her,” Blackburn said in a social media post afterwards. “She can run but she cannot hide because the American people want to know how an assassination attempt was carried out on former president Donald Trump.”
And this was the mood: happy and ominous, and overwhelmingly confident that the election is over in everything but name.
Earlier in the week, Florida representative Matt Gaetz, one of the rising stars of the new party, tackled Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, as he gave an interview to CNN’S Kaitlan Collins.
“Are you speaking tonight, Kevin? You would get booed off the stage,” Gaetz shouted gleefully. As he turned around, he found himself face to face with a burly McCarthyite who told him: ‘Shut up Gaetz. Don’t be an asshole.’
Gaetz, used to posing for photographs with adoring fans at this convention, seemed shocked.
“Dude, I don’t even know you are man,” he said agreeably.
“It doesn’t f**king matter who I am. You’re an asshole.”
Gaetz scuttled away, chastened. The exchange was posted on to social media and received millions of views and comments revelling in his discomfort. Gaetz, after all, had dished it out often enough. It was a small but telling moment, a portent of possible discord and arguments should the polling numbers change and this stunning show of choreography and promise of a new world order should begin to fall apart.
But it will not fall apart, not if the figurehead has his way. On Thursday it was announced that the celebrity speakers for the night would be Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan. They may not seem like the rarest fruit in the vast tree of American stardom, but the Trump brand has seldom required (or acquired) celebrity endorsement. After all, the “house band” for the week is Sixwire, a Tennessee-based covers outfit and fine musicians who won’t have made much of a dent in the election budget. (In 2016, at the last full Democratic convention, Paul Simon and Alicia Keyes performed).
But they only care about one star here. And shortly after 9.30pm, after the crowd were treated to a rap tribute by Kid Rock and a glowing introduction by Dana White, who gave the world the UFC, Trump took to the stage. Trump is determinedly liminal in is approach to life but a sacred hush fell when he reflected on the events of last Saturday and told the crowd: “I am not supposed to be here.”
It was as close to vulnerability as Trump has ever ventured in public and as close as he ever will. An hour and a half later, after a long speech on familiar themes and promises, the balloons came down and the extended family of Trump, the children and grandchildren, took to the stage. They gazed out at the adoring crowd as though the New Yorker who entered politics on a whim less than a decade ago wanted them to see, with their own eyes, their Republican Party, the party of Trump: their inheritance.
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