He was preceded by a ritual of hype that featured Kid Rock rapping for the crowd to say “Fight, fight!” and “Trump, Trump!” and calling the former president “the most patriotic badass on Earth.” And then Dana White, huckster and chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, touted Trump as “the toughest, most resilient human being that I’ve ever met in my life.” He could have been introducing UFC superstars Quinton “Rampage” Jackson or Georges St-Pierre.
But Trump didn’t strut onstage. He wasn’t wrapped in a Superman cape. He talked more softly than I can remember in a major speech. And unimaginably, for me, in the opening portions of the speech, he talked about unity and healing. Even at the end, after he reverted more to type, he said, “With great humility, I am asking you to be excited about the future of our country.” Humility? Can Trump really have used that word about himself?
“We live in a world of miracles,” he said. “Every single moment we have on Earth is a gift from God.” Amen to that. And Trump had definitely earned the right to speak of being spared from tragedy.
But did we believe what he had to say? “The discord and division in our society must be healed,” he said. “We rise together or we fall together.” America couldn’t hope for a clearer statement of our present crisis. But is it really believable that the great divider is now a conciliator?
For years, the great Washington Post cartoonist Herblock always drew Richard M. Nixon with a gangster’s beard. But after Nixon won the White House in 1968, Herblock drew a new image, saying that every new president deserved a clean shave.
Does Trump deserve a clean shave? I was willing to imagine that he was a different man until he launched into a denunciation of Democrats for supposedly weaponizing the justice system. “I am the one saving democracy for the people,” he claimed. That appalling statement made it hard to imagine Trump as a man transformed.
As the speech went on, it became a Trump laundry list, often turning to vulgar talk about immigration and even a bizarre return to one of his most ill-chosen lines about the flesh-eating killer Hannibal Lecter. He rambled about pet peeves and supposed triumphs; the longer he continued, the less coherent he became. Even the captive convention audience seemed confused.
Trump has always dreamed of being a great man. He was the failed real estate tycoon, reborn as a TV celebrity, who turned to politics in his desire for public approval. He didn’t have a gift for leadership in his first term. Instead, he seemed to have a talent for poisoning nearly everything he touched, firing one official after another, failing to pass any major legislation. He exhausted the country. That’s why he was defeated in 2020.
Is he different today? The longer the speech went on, the more he seemed to remain the same vainglorious man who believes he “could stop wars with a phone call.”
Trump’s core identity, four years ago and now, is that he is at once the disrupter and the dealmaker. That dualism was on display in Milwaukee. He talks about strength so that he can compromise with adversaries; he disrupts allies to reassert American primacy.
The partisan tone increased as the speech dragged on. By the time he finished, he had hit all the predictable and, to me, false notes. He claimed President Biden had done more damage than “the 10 worst” presidents combined. Americans were “barely living” because of inflation. Biden had demonstrated “totally incompetent leadership.”
The foreign policy ideas Trump laid out sounded simple, but they were framed by magical thinking. Under Biden, he claimed, “we’re in a planet of war.” Trump claimed he would resolve wars in Ukraine and Gaza that, in his fantasy world, wouldn’t have ever started if he’d still been president. How? He didn’t say.
He invoked America’s defining moments — Valley Forge, Yorktown, Gettysburg, Midway — in asking the audience to “rise above past differences” and become “more united than ever before.”
Is he a different man? He spoke more quietly, at times, Thursday night. He expressed the desire to be a leader, rather than a divider. But the inner man? He may have survived the assassin’s bullet, but he remains the leader of a movement that wants to take America apart.
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