The 2024 Republican National Convention is a happy place. That’s unusual. In recent cycles, whether the nominee has been John McCain, Mitt Romney, or Donald Trump, there have always been substantial pockets of discontent within the arena. If there’s broad discontent within the party among attendees this year, they’re doing an awfully good job hiding it.
The sunny vibe is especially unusual because the now-official party nominee was shot in the ear on Saturday, coming literally within an inch of his life. What could explain the way delegates and other conventiongoers so quickly moved beyond that trauma and pivoted to joy?
The only way to put it is that Republicans are feeling invincible.
Trump was already leading the election before Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance kicked off an ongoing multiweek spectacle of the Democratic Party’s destroying itself in the broad light of day. Trump was then leading by more. Then he survived an assassination attempt. If possible, he is now likely leading by even more. Republicans are riding a euphoria they have never quite experienced during Trump’s time in politics. It’s unusual. They can’t help but speculate about divine intervention.
“There’s almost a providence about it,” Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall told me and another reporter.
Republicans aren’t worried about the little stuff these days. If there was any discontent heading into the convention, it was the Trump campaign’s rewriting of the party platform’s abortion section, which for the first time in decades doesn’t call for a federal ban at a certain stage of fetal development. After the shooting, no one cared about that anymore.
But they’re not even sweating the rather large question of which Democrat Trump will run against in November. Marshall, for one, speculated that after the assassination attempt, “I don’t think you could give Kamala Harris the nomination. She would say no to it.” In other words, she wouldn’t want to be the sacrificial lamb in a year that Democrats, in Marshall’s view, appear poised to lose.
It wasn’t the only time I heard that line of thinking. Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, a social conservative group, assessed that Democratic efforts to oust Biden would peter out after the assassination attempt “because ultimately they don’t want to waste one of their up-and-coming stars now that the country is much more likely to elect Donald Trump.”
I spoke to Schilling and Marshall at a doozy of an event that the American Principles Project was throwing at a Milwaukee bar outside the Fiserv Forum. The APP, in conjunction with Orange County Choppers—the custom motorcycle maker chronicled on the much-memed show American Chopper—was gifting Riley Gaines, the former college swimmer protesting the inclusion of transgender women in women’s sports, a new custom motorcycle that it unveiled at the event. Schilling, Marshall, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and American Chopper star Paul Teutul Sr. were there for the honors and to share their beliefs against “boys in girls’ sports.”
Teutul told me, at first, that he didn’t care whom the Democrats ran.
“All I look at is that [Trump] needs to win,” he said. “I don’t look at who he’s running against.” Then, though, he said in a quieter voice, “definitely Joe Biden.” But Teutul has felt really good about Trump’s chances “ever since that controversy with them trying to arrest him and stuff like that.”
Greg Reiman, a guest of a Wisconsin delegate (his wife), was strolling around the plaza outside the Fiserv Forum Tuesday morning. He showed me a photo of how close he had sat to the Trump family the previous night and noted that Eric Trump had smiled when he had said hi to him.
Reiman has been taking a “little pleasure” in watching the Democratic infighting of late. He did concede, however, that “there’s only a twinge, and just a twinge, of feeling bad for Joe Biden” because “maybe he’s been held in a bubble and doesn’t realize how bad he’s looking.”
If there’s anything keeping Republicans’ euphoria in check, it’s a feeling that the sinister Democrats might still have more tricks up their sleeve. One thing that truly locked-in partisans on, yes, both sides have in common is a belief that the other side’s operatives, strategists, and other pooh-bahs are masters in dark magic, capable of anything.
“The [Democratic] Congress members, the senators, it seems like they’re kind of giving up because they know Joe’s not going anywhere,” Reiman reasoned. “But the Carvilles, the real operatives behind the scenes, they’re too cutthroat, too mean. They play to win, and they don’t give a shit who gets run over in the process. Even Joe Biden.”
The “guys behind the scenes,” he said, would “unplug your life support machine just to charge their phones.”
Whether it’s by divine providence, sorcery from party operatives, or something else, political fortunes can flip in a switch. There’s no better example of that than the 2016 election, when Trump was written off as having any chance of winning, for a new reason, every day. And around the 2016 convention, much of the conversation was about which major party figures weren’t even bothering to attend the event, either for personal political reasons or to keep their fingerprints off Trump’s takeover of the GOP.
That’s less of a conversation this time. The party really is united. On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—who didn’t speak with Trump and for more than three years would barely say his name—made a point of announcing Kentucky’s delegates for Trump during the roll call of the states. (He was booed throughout, which was funny. Reintroduction into Trumpworld doesn’t happen overnight.) McConnell’s deputy and potential successor as Republican leader, South Dakota Sen. John Thune, also had a strained relationship with Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election. He was right there on the convention floor too during Trump’s nomination.
“I know, at least on the Senate side, we’re very unified. The Trump campaign, the president himself, our Senate leadership, all the entities, everybody’s working together,” Thune said. “I think that we are very, very unified coming out of this, which I think is exciting.”
Trump’s felled rivals from the primary, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, both were last-minute additions to the program, after initially planning not to come. I did, however, run across one Republican primary candidate who was not yet on board with the team. Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor whose anti-Trump positions made him a ripe target for Trump’s jokes about his low polling numbers, was loitering around inside the convention’s security perimeter Tuesday morning. But even he is beginning to sound as if he’s getting close.
“He certainly has shown strength, resilience, and now a tone that reflects the need to bring America together, so I applaud that,” he said of Trump. He would take that into consideration as he determines “where I go in this election.”
“When you look at what the Republicans offer versus what the Democrats offer,” he said, “I’m a Republican.”
I was speaking on the convention floor Monday to Forgiato Blow, the right-wing rapper behind such songs as “Boycott Target.” He was wearing a T-shirt featuring the now-famous Evan Vucci photograph of Trump raising his fist onstage in Butler, Pennsylvania, above which read “IMPEACHED. ARRESTED. CONVICTED. SHOT,” and below which read, “STILL STANDING.”
I asked Blow what his first thought had been, seeing the news about the attempt on Trump’s life. Anger? Concern? No.
“I said, ‘The election’s over.’ ”
