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MILWAUKEE — Not four years after Donald Trump’s eldest son boasted that the Republican Party belonged not to traditional Republicans but to his father, Republican delegates gathered at their nominating convention proved his point this week, demonstrating their obeisance to a convicted criminal who tried to end American democracy because he lost his reelection.
“Tonight, with faith and devotion, I proudly accept your nomination for president of the United States,” Trump said to wild cheers on Thursday night, exactly three years, five months and 28 days after leaving the White House in disgrace following his failed coup attempt.
Trump’s campaign aides have been pushing stories about how Saturday’s assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania had made him a more spiritual person and how Trump would offer a unifying message. And at the start, Trump did indeed offer a more somber tone.
“There was blood pouring everywhere, but in a certain way I felt very protected, because I felt that I had God on my side,” Trump said. He mentioned the retired fire chief who had been killed at the rally and showed his jacket and helmet, which had been brought on stage.
“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” he said.
The new tone lasted 17 minutes.
Then, he called on state and federal prosecutors to drop all four criminal cases against him, including the one in which he was convicted of 34 felony counts in May.
“The Democrat party should immediately stop weaponising the justice system and labelling their political opponent as an enemy of democracy,” he said.
At the 25 minute mark, Trump called former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy.” Eight minutes later, he accused Democrats of cheating in elections. Four minutes later, he insulted the news media, referring to the CBS News program “Face the Nation” as “Deface the Nation.”
And 38 minutes in, he repeated the lie that he used to incite the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol — that the 2020 election had been stolen from him through cheating. Immediately after that, he made liars out of staffers who had told reporters that he would never mention the name of the man who had defeated him, claiming Biden, by name, was worse than the previous 10 worst presidents combined.
The speech devolved from there into Trump’s standard, oft-used rhetoric from his rally speeches — that the economy on his watch was the best ever; that his trade agreements were marked improvements over the previous ones; that crime is currently out of control; and so on.
He also repeated promises and warnings with no basis in fact: that he would be able to balance the budget merely by increasing oil and gas production, or that an ongoing influx of illegal migrants would bankrupt Social Security and Medicare.
Through the entire 92-minute address, Trump won sustained adulation from the thousands of delegates, alternates and guests packed into Fiserv Forum, the home of the Milwaukee Bucks NBA team — although attentions began wandering at the 75 minute mark, as delegates began checking their phones.
It was a dramatic evolution from his first Republican National Convention eight years ago.
In 2016, a sizeable number of Republican activists gathered at the convention in Cleveland tried to take the nomination away from Trump because of his treatment of women, his racism, his history of cheating contractors in business, his uneven history on abortion and his open praise of dictators like Vladimir Putin.
Eight years later, all of those characteristics remain true, but Trump is now also a twice-impeached former president. And a court-adjudicated sexual abuser who, according to the trial, in the common parlance raped a woman. And a would-be autocrat who tried to overturn an election he lost. And, most recently, a convicted felon.
And yet, there was not even the whisper of open dissent this week, with speakers and delegates both instead attacking the police, prosecutors and judges involved in the criminal and civil cases against their leader.
“What can I say,” said one dispirited Republican National Committee member on condition of anonymity. “Here we are.”
In political conventions past, former presidents and nominees were treated as elder statesmen, with prominent speaking slots. At Trump’s convention, there is none of that.
Former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dan Quayle and former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney are all in good health, but none has a place in the new Trump party. Also unwelcome are Trump’s own former vice president, Mike Pence, and many of his top advisers, who instead have warned that Trump’s lack of fidelity to the Constitution makes him unfit to hold the office.
Instead, the speaking lineup leading up to Trump’s acceptance speech featured conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson, former professional wrestler and self-acknowledged racist Hulk Hogan and lawyer Alina Habba, who may be best known for representing Trump in a lawsuit he lost against a woman who said Trump had raped her and repeatedly defamed her by lying about it. The penultimate speaker, the one who introduced Trump onstage, was ultimate fighting impresario Dana White, whose caught-on-camera physical abuse of his wife in the past would have made his presence impossible, but which in the new Republican Party scarcely warrants a mention.
“Eight years, two impeachments, four indictments, 34 felony convictions, and one attempted coup later, the GOP is now fully 100% Trump’s party,” said Joe Walsh, once a Republican congressman from Illinois who broke with Trump early in his presidency. “And that speaks less to Trump’s strength, and much more to Republican fear and cowardice.”
The views of Walsh, who tried running against Trump in the 2020 GOP primary but dropped out after the Iowa caucuses, were not at all reflective, though, of the tens of thousands of attendees drawn from pro-Trump activists across the country.
Peter Quaglia, a former federal agent in the Department of Homeland Security, said none of the criminal cases against Trump bothers him, even the New York falsification of business records case on which Trump may be sentenced to prison in September. “I’m not even remotely concerned about it,” he said.
Carolyn Welsh, who is 80 and retired after serving five four-year terms as sheriff of Chester County in Pennsylvania, also does not see any of the criminal cases as a problem. “I have a shirt that says: I voted for the felon,” she said.
Two of the outstanding felony prosecutions against Trump are based on his coup attempt that culminated in January 6 Capitol assault. On the day of the attack, at a rally just beforehand, Donald Trump Jr, who also spoke at this year’s Republican convention, declared his father’s mastery of the party.
“This gathering should send a message to them,” the younger Trump told tens of thousands of his father’s followers gathered near the White House, referring to “weak” Republicans who had not agreed to help overturn his election loss. “This isn’t their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”
This week, Trump’s top campaign adviser, Chris LaCivita, used nearly identical language in an interview with The New York Times. He explained why the campaign had essentially shut down the process of letting delegates draft the party’s platform, and instead presented one to them as a fait accompli:
“What it says is that the Republican Party is Donald Trump’s party.”
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