USA 2024: – 112, soft tones between Biden and Trump after failed attack. Rep convention begins

Donald Trump is already in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the convention that is to officially nominate him as the Republican candidate for the White House opens today. Stepping off his plane, less than 24 hours after the failed assassination attempt he was the target of on Saturday night in Pennsylvania, the former president raised his fist, repeating the now iconic gesture he made after being grazed by a bullet in his right ear while holding a rally in Butler.

Trump, in a suit and shirt, appeared to be in good condition. In an interview with the New York Post, given on the plane, he had said: ‘I shouldn’t be here, I should be dead…’, calling the attack ‘a very surreal experience’. Campaign sources say the former president is ‘fine’ and is ‘on a high’.

In another interview with the Washington Examiner, Trump said that at the Republican convention he would make ‘a completely different speech’ from the one he had already prepared, referring to what had happened as ‘an opportunity to unite the country’. ‘The speech I was going to make on Thursday would have been amazing,’ he said, ‘if it hadn’t been for the bombing, it would have been one of my most incredible speeches. But, now, ‘I have been given this opportunity’ to try to bring a fractured country back together.

Apparently, it is the same spirit that animates President Joe Biden, who on Sunday evening, addressing the nation on live prime-time television, said that the Union must not ‘go down the road of political violence’. Tomorrow Biden will record a television interview that was supposed to be about the black vote in America, but is now going to start with the failed assassination attempt. Biden had planned a mission to Texas today, but cancelled the trip after the attack on his rival.

If Biden, who was unaccustomed to it, and Trump, who was the champion of it, seem to be moving away from the inflammatory rhetoric, allies of the tycoon continue to denounce the president’s and the Democrats’ speeches as having armed them with the hand of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who shot the former president, wounding him, and killed one person and wounded two others, before being shot dead by a security apparatus sniper.

USA 2024: the Milwaukee convention, programme and speakers
Unlike in 2016 and 2020, the tycoon arrives at the convention with a party totally behind him, with no internal dissent – and, if there had been, the failed assassination attempt would have silenced him – while President Biden has to face a fracas, within the party and among the tamers, because of his age and physical condition.

At the convention, Trump must announce his deputy. On the shortlist, there are – various media reports – three white men left: North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, 67; Florida Senator Marco Rubio, 53 – but president and vice-president cannot be residents of the same state – and Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, 39, in whom Trump sees ‘a young Abraham Lincoln’, not because of his political stature but because of his shaggy beard.

At the kermess there will be Melania, so far absent from the campaign, as from her husband’s trials; but it is not clear what role she will play. The children will be present, with the unknown of Ivanka, who together with her husband Jared Kushner has withdrawn from this new political adventure of their father’s – the failed assassination attempt, however, has brought them closer together -. Former rival Nikky Haley is not invited, but some predict that she will be there (she supports Trump and has released her delegates); Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who withdrew from the race for the nomination after the Iowa primaries, will certainly be there.

The 2400 or so delegates will have to approve the platform and formally ‘invest’ the ticket, i.e. Trump and his deputy, who will make their acceptance speech on Thursday. The platform has been slimmed down and filed down by the tycoon, especially on the issue of abortion, on which the states must decide. Gone are the references to ‘traditional marriage’ as a union ‘between a man and a woman’. Also gone is the emphasis on reducing the national debt, replaced by the milder phrase ‘reducing government waste’.

Today’s headlines are ‘Make America Wealthy Once Again’, the economy; ‘Make America Safe Again’, crime and immigration; ‘Make America Strong Again’, security and foreign affairs; and ‘Make America Great Once Agan’, the closing speeches.

Trump’s campaign publishes a list of speakers: among others, there are rapper and model Amber Rose, controversial anchor Tucker Carlson, investor and podcaster David Sacks, former advisor Peter Navarro, who just got out of jail for contempt of Congress; and, again, evangelical preachers and wrestlers, entrepreneurs and country music stars, sons and daughters-in-law, former rival converts and ‘dissident’ trade unionists – the major trade unions are Democratic fiefdoms -.

Some of the speakers make the African-American and Latino communities frown, just as Trump strives to improve his grip on these slices of the US electorate – but seven out of 10 blacks and ‘Latinos’ have an unfavourable opinion of him -.