This Isn’t a New RNC—Or a New Trump
For a moment after the shooting, a GOP tone shift seemed possible. Then the convention began.
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For a moment on Saturday, it felt as though we might start to see a gentler, more unifying political climate. But Donald Trump is still Donald Trump, and his message is incapable of bringing America together.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
- The MAGA plan to end free weather reports
- The flattening machine
- Tyler Austin Harper: What Biden’s defenders ask us to believe
Moments Are Fleeting
Well, that didn’t last long.
After Saturday’s assassination attempt, Donald Trump signaled that he would focus on unifying the country at the Republican National Convention. He told a Washington Examiner reporter that he had scrapped a speech focused on attacking Biden’s policies in favor of taking the chance to “bring the country together.” “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United,” he wrote on Truth Social the morning after the shooting. And a person close to Trump told The Washington Post on Sunday that the RNC’s planners “want speakers to dial it down, not dial it up.” But that quickly proved impossible for a party that has spent years marinating in grievance.
The mood on day one of the convention was, as John Hendrickson put it in The Atlantic today, “oddly serene.” But there were still signs of latent anger: When Trump walked out yesterday, after the opening prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, the delegates began chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!,” echoing Trump’s words after the attempted assassination.
Ron Johnson’s apparent speech mishap was an apt metaphor for the GOP’s inability to set a new tone: Instead of appealing to national unity, the senator from Wisconsin accused Democratic policies of being a “clear and present danger” to the country. Afterward, he blamed the teleprompter operator for not loading the new, more pacific speech he said he had intended to give.
As the night wore on, it became obvious that the problem wasn’t just the teleprompter. Impassioned speeches against Democrats’ policies are par for the course at the RNC, and such discourse is essential to our democracy. But yesterday’s agenda revealed something darker and angrier than policy disagreement. One featured speaker was North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, the state’s Republican nominee for governor, who declared just last week that “some folks need killing.” “It’s time for somebody to say it,” Robinson remarked in an appearance at a local church. “It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity.”
And yet, despite the GOP’s newfound outrage over incendiary rhetoric, he was still on Monday’s RNC program. The rest of the schedule is filled with more aggrieved voices from MAGA world. Later this week, the former Fox News host and Vladimir Putin apologist Tucker Carlson will take the stage. He is unlikely to present a message of healing.
But all of this was overshadowed by Trump’s choice of J. D. Vance as his running mate. Posting on X just two days before the announcement, the Ohio senator baselessly accused the Biden campaign of causing Trump’s attempted assassination with its “rhetoric.” On Monday, Vance got his reward.
Indeed, Vance would be a curious choice if Trump were genuinely interested in lowering the temperature. The Ohio senator has distinguished himself by a willingness to not only surrender his principles, but also embrace the language and conspiracism of MAGA trolls. He’s lashed out at Democrats for being “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.” As a Senate candidate, he blamed the fentanyl-related deaths of Republican voters on the Biden administration and stated that these deaths “look intentional.”
Far from being a voice of political comity, Vance has called loudly on the right to “seize the institutions of the left.” Vance has said that if Trump returns to power, he should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. … And then when the courts stop you, stand before the country” and say, quoting Andrew Jackson, “The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
And then there is Trump himself. Even as his team seemed to ask other Republicans to tone down their rhetoric, the former president continued to attack his critics in and out of the justice system on social media. The day after he was shot at, Trump was already relitigating his many grievances on Truth Social, and once again appeared to defame E. Jean Carroll, the woman he sexually assaulted.
As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts — The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME.
For a moment on Saturday, it felt as though we might start to see a gentler, more unifying Republican Party. But in politics, moments are fleeting, and as we were quickly reminded, Donald Trump is still Donald Trump—a man whose core message is incapable of bringing us all together again.
Related:
Today’s News
- Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey was convicted for participation in an international bribery scheme. He was found guilty on all 16 counts he was charged with.
- U.S. authorities received intelligence in recent weeks about an Iranian plot to assassinate Trump, which led to an increase in Secret Service security prior to his rally in Pennsylvania.
- President Biden is finalizing plans to support major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, The Washington Post reported.
Dispatches
- Work in Progress: “The legacy of failed presidential assassination attempts in the U.S. should temper expectations that this past weekend was a world-historical event,” Derek Thompson writes.
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Evening Read
The Secret Meaning of Prime Day
By Ian Bogost
This year marks the tenth Prime Day, the shopping holiday that Amazon invented for itself in 2015, in honor of the company’s 20th anniversary. The marketing effort was so successful, according to Amazon, that sales exceeded those from the previous year’s record-breaking Black Friday. Early Prime Day success was also measured in Instant Pot 7-in-1 multifunctional pressure cookers: 24,000 were purchased on the first Prime Day; on the second, 215,000.
The event has only grown since then, and not just in revenues but in meaning. Black Friday celebrates (and laments) the commercialization of holiday gifts—things people want, and that people want to give. Prime Day, as a ritual observance, has a different focus: not the desirable, but the ordinary. It celebrates the stuff you buy for boring reasons, or for no particular reason at all … Yet what was once essentially a colossal summer tag sale, created for the sole purpose of enriching one of the world’s largest companies, has somehow managed to take on certain trappings of an actual holiday. I hate to admit it, but Prime Day has attained the status of tradition.
More From The Atlantic
- Tim Alberta: “What the heck just happened?”
- The church of Saint Richard
- Adam Serwer: Nothing about the attempted assassination redeems Trump.
Culture Break
Read. Turn to these seven bedside-table books when you can’t sleep.
Listen. On the Good on Paper podcast, Jerusalem Demsas explores a remarkable school-choice experiment.
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