MILWAUKEE — Five days after the assassination attempt, former President Trump is scheduled to formally accept the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday at the climax of the 2024 Republican National Convention.
The shooting at a Trump rally in western Pennsylvania on Saturday, which left the gunman and one spectator dead, had an immediate impact on the tone and message of the convention and altered the former president’s speech.
Trump’s campaign said this week that after his close encounter with death, he would use his speech to call for unity in the face of tragedy, rather than criticizing his political opponents.
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Former President Trump, bloodied from the face, is escorted off stage by Secret Service agents during a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. Rebecca Droke/AFP via Getty Images (Rebecca Droke/AFP via Getty Images)
“It’s going to be a very different speech, honestly,” Trump said in an interview with the Washington Examiner on Sunday.
“This is an opportunity to bring the country together. I have been given that opportunity,” he stressed.
And in an email he sent to supporters the night before his speech, Trump said he would “share my vision for uniting our country and making it greater than it has ever been!”
The first three days of the convention were marked by a call for party unity, with former Republican presidential rival and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, a former U.N. ambassador to the United Nations who ran against Trump in a fierce primary, giving speeches in support of the former president.
Republicans are using the convention as a way to reunite the party and galvanize delegates and activists ahead of the final stretch of the campaign in which President Trump and President Biden face off again in 2024.
“This is clearly an opportunity to unite the country,” Trump campaign co-chairman Chris LaCivita said earlier this week, “but we have to remember that we’re in the middle of an election and we have to win that election.”
Former President Donald Trump arrives at the Republican National Convention (RNC) at Fiserv Forum, Wednesday, July 17, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Trump is also expected to take up “strength,” a central theme of his 2024 campaign, and contrast it with what he claims are Biden’s weaknesses.
Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, during an interview on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime” highlighted “President Trump’s strength and resilience, especially just days after the assassination attempt.”
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Miller also noted that the “tone” and “approach” of the former president’s speech “will be significantly different.”
“President Trump has spent a lot of time over the last few days dictating what he actually wants to do with the speech, saying, ‘I want to say this, and then I want to move on from there,'” Miller noted.
The Biden team doesn’t believe in the message of Republican unity.
Quentin Fulks, Biden’s chief deputy campaign strategist, told reporters this week that Trump and the Republican Party “will always choose greedy, anti-union extremists over American workers.”
Trump’s address to some 2,400 delegates and thousands of other attendees packed into Milwaukee’s Fiserv Arena, as well as millions of Americans who watched the Republican Convention, came less than two months after he was convicted of 34 felony counts in the first criminal trial of a former and current president in U.S. history.
On the second day of the Republican National Convention (RNC) held at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA on July 16, 2024, Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump applauds a gesture by Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. (Reuters/Elisabeth Franz)
But a few weeks later, Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump led to growing calls within Democrats for the president to abandon his 2024 reelection bid and drop out of the race.
And now, in the wake of last weekend’s assassination attempt, the president’s re-election has changed even further.
On the eve of the final night of the convention, Senator J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, acknowledged, “As we gather tonight, let us remember that this night could have been different — instead of a day of celebration, it could have been a day of heartache and mourning.”
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