Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley said during a television appearance that former President Donald Trump played a major role in finalizing the Republican National Convention, which was an overwhelming success. Breitbart News Daily On Friday, Trump explained that he came up with the idea to attend each night of the convention, which focuses on forgotten men and women of America.
Whatley said he had originally planned to go to Pennsylvania on Saturday, the day Trump narrowly escaped death, but had to go to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to prepare for the party’s convention.
“So I was on the floor going through some last-minute checklists and templates and talking to some people and then we got the news that he’d been shot and, of course, at that point we went into a different mode,” he said, describing what it was like that weekend when he got the later call and suggesting that despite what Trump had just been through, he still intended to head to the convention and be there every night.
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“Because he wasn’t supposed to be here until Thursday. … He was supposed to fly back from Butler to Bedminster on Saturday night, and they said, ‘He’s there. He’s coming tomorrow.’ So he ended up flying here on Sunday,” he said, recalling Trump’s first appearance on Monday night, a moment he said he’ll never forget.
“I’ll never forget, we were backstage and right before he came out on Monday, I said, ‘Sir, when you walk through that door, this place is going to melt,’ and the response was just amazing. I mean, it was just like wow. And I think it had an effect on him. I think you could see it in his face. The love he received was powerful,” Whatley said.
Indeed, the energy in the room was palpable, with many saying Trump seemed like a different person after absorbing everything in just two days after nearly losing his life. Trump credited his survival to “God alone,” telling the crowd on Thursday that it was only by “the grace of Almighty God” that he was even standing there.
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“As someone said yesterday, it seems like he needed to be there every day. It was good that he was there and could see what was going on in our country in light of what had happened,” host Mike Slater said.
“Then that first exit you mentioned, the whole country saw the change in him. He may have been holding back tears, but I wouldn’t have been able to hold them back,” he added.
“It was a really moving moment,” Whatley agreed, adding that Trump wanted to send a message to Americans: “I’m here. I’m not going away. And I’m here to stay.”
“This man literally wakes up every morning wanting to fight for the American people,” he said, noting that while Trump can do anything in the world, “he wants to wake up every day, put on a suit and fight for the American people.”
“And that’s what we wanted to show about Donald Trump, right?” he said, adding that the convention wasn’t necessarily about Trump, it was about the American people, but they were trying to frame the argument around Trump to show that he is truly on the side of the people.
“We wanted to show them that Trump is real and that he’s a fighter,” he said, noting that Trump also played a role in other aspects of the convention, such as the stage design.
“He was directly involved. I mean, we laid out the stage layout in front of him and we let him choose the stages. We went through the speaker line-up with him every day. This was a show. This is Trump the showman and he was really, really, incredibly involved in so much of it,” he added.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6 to 9 a.m. ET.
