US election campaign: Trump remains Trump – Republicans celebrate in Milwaukee

If you’ve heard one Trump speech, you’ve heard them all? No, this time it was going to be different. Just a few days after the assassination attempt on the Republican, the grand finale of the newly elected Republican presidential candidate at the Republican Party Convention was going to set a new tone. At least that’s what the 78-year-old’s campaign team said. But as special as the circumstances and setting in Milwaukee were – including balloons, appearances by ex-wrestler Hulk Hogan and musician Kid Rock – Donald Trump remains Donald Trump.

During his speech at the party convention, where Trump officially accepted the nomination as candidate for the election in November, Trump again wore his white bandage on his ear. The gauze bandage has already found imitators in the audience. Even his wife Melania came, a rare appearance that culminated in an awkward peck on the cheek.

For four days, Republicans in Milwaukee celebrated Trump frenetically. The big appearance on the final evening of the convention is not just any appearance. It is Trump’s first public speech since the assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, in which he was injured in the ear.

Trump talks about assassination

Trump describes what happened last weekend in Butler, where a gunman opened fire, killing one supporter and seriously injuring two others. “Blood was everywhere, and yet I felt very safe in a way because I had God on my side,” says the Republican. He will only tell the story once, it is too painful, he stresses. The deadly gun attack in the middle of the already heated US election campaign was an escalation, a turning point.

And Trump’s predecessors in recent days – such as the chosen vice-candidate JD Vance – painted the following picture: Trump is brave, strong, a fighter. And: Trump is a man of political moderation in the face of horror. “One moment he can stand defiantly against an assassin and the next call for national healing,” said Vance.

And Trump begins his speech in this tone, reading from the teleprompter: “The discord and division in our society must be healed.” He wants to be a president for all of America.

Relapse into the old tone

But the longer the 78-year-old talks, the less he sticks to the text. The lines on the prompter stop while Trump improvises large parts of his speech. Trump – as usual – paints a picture of a gloomy America, a “nation in decline”. He indirectly describes migrants as garbage. If you add up the ten worst presidents of the USA, they would not have caused the damage that the Democratic incumbent Joe Biden has caused.

Crime in the USA is so high that the next Republican convention will take place in Venezuela if the Democrats win, because it will be safer there, the former president predicts. The rest of the world is laughing at the USA. The solution: Trump.

Trump’s hour-and-a-half-long speech is hardly different from the lengthy speeches he gives at his campaign rallies. At the very end, he briefly calls for unity and for overcoming differences of opinion.

But anyone who thinks that the assassination has defused the rhetoric is wrong. This was shown not only by Trump’s speech, but also by the party convention in Milwaukee itself. The singer Kid Rock performs a song in which he shouts “Fight! Fight! Fight!” into the crowd. The audience roars back in unison – an oppressive atmosphere. These words, which Trump shouted after the assassination, are the motto of the huge party convention with tens of thousands of visitors anyway – they are shouted again and again.

Trump, the Savior

The spectacle looks like a scary fair in many ways: people with orange Trump wigs, Trump hats, Trump earrings, Trump shirts of course… Trump, Trump, Trump. And then there are the political messages of the party that Trump has completely under control: signs with the words “Mass deportations now”, speeches about the allegedly corrupt justice system, about lying media and the America First policy.

It is a party that is rallying around Trump without resistance. Even Trump’s former arch-rivals in the primary campaign, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, have caved in and backed Trump in Milwaukee.

“We have to go back to Donald Trump if we want to keep our rights and the way of life that we have become accustomed to,” said delegate Shelley Cygan from the state of Nebraska when asked about the presidential candidate. Trump is trying to win voters by stoking fears – and it’s working.

There is an invasion on the US southern border, warns Trump. It is spreading “misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction” in communities across the country. “No one has ever seen anything like this.” And then there is also “an international crisis the likes of which the world has rarely seen.” No one can believe what has happened.

Confident of victory in Milwaukee

At the party convention, the Republicans are celebrating as if they had already won the election in November. The drunkenness of victory is not only due to the alcohol, which is flowing in large quantities. Democrat Biden is a weak opponent after the disastrous TV debate. And the 81-year-old may not even be his party’s candidate for much longer – in the debate about his mental fitness, he has his back against the wall.

After the convention, Trump is in a stronger political position than at any point in this election campaign – or even in any of the three campaigns he has led since his first candidacy in 2016, writes the Washington Post. The New York Times judges that Trump promised in his speech to bridge political divides “only to then gleefully deepen them again.”

When the balloons traditionally float down from the ceiling at the end of the convention, Trump stands on the stage with his family and is cheered. In addition to Melania, even his daughter Ivanka, who has also been very scarce recently, has come. Trump smiles, waves, poses for the cameras. Shortly before, he kissed the fireman’s helmet of the man who was shot in the assassination attempt last week. According to US media, he gave the longest televised convention speech in US history. In doing so, he broke his own record.