Former US President Donald Trump is set to take the stage at the Republican National Convention (RNC), where he will deliver a speech as the party’s standard-bearer, just five days after his inauguration. survive an assassination attempt.
Thursday night’s speech will cap a convention that has served as a powerful reminder of how Trump’s populist, pugilistic politics have transformed the Republican Party.
But spokesmen said Trump would adopt a more unifying message in the wake of Saturday’s attack, in which he was grazed in the ear by a gunman’s bullet.
Trump said he rewrote his speech after surviving the incident at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. His family and close allies have said the president has changed profoundly, while Trump and his supporters at the Republican National Convention have repeatedly dismissed the incident as a coincidence.
“I think you might see a little bit of a different version of Donald Trump tonight, maybe a little bit of a softer version than some of our fellow Americans have seen in the past,” Lara Trump, co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee and Trump’s daughter-in-law, told CBS News on Thursday.
“I don’t think you can go through what he went through on Saturday, a true near-death experience, and not be impacted by it,” she said.
Donald Trump Jr. echoed that sentiment.
“He’ll be tough when he has to be. We’ve seen that. He’ll never change,” the former president’s eldest son said at an event hosted by the Axios news site. “But I think there will be something. I think these are momentous occasions that change people permanently.”
Political observers wonder what a more unifying message from Trump will actually look like and to whom it will apply.
While Trump told the Washington Examiner this week that the attack was an “opportunity to bring the whole country, if not the whole world, together,” he and his supporters also coupled their message with one of defiance.
Trump’s recently announced running mate, Senator JD Vancesaid shortly after the shooting that President Joe Biden’s campaign rhetoric led to the assassination attempt, though he has since backed away from that claim.
RNC attendees seized on Trump’s call in the wake of the attack, chanting “fight, fight, fight” as a rallying cry. Wearing a bandage over one’s ear like Trump has become a symbol of solidarity.
Continuing the theme, Trump will also be introduced Thursday by Ultimate Fighting Championship Chairman and CEO Dana White and former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan.
Reporting from the convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane said the party’s platform, heavily influenced by Trump, has yet to reflect the promised change in tone.
“He is expected to say he is going to unite the country, but the platform – what the party says it is going to campaign on – is deeply divisive,” she said.
It includes promises to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, reinstate travel bans on some Muslim-majority countries, shut down the federal Department of Education and cut funding to schools based on how they teach about race and gender.
The party platform also pledges to “hold accountable those who abuse the power of government to unjustly prosecute their political opponents,” in an apparent reference to Trump’s conviction in a New York court in May on charges related to paying money to silence an adult film star and his two other criminal trials related to efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to Biden.
Democrats Divided
Thursday’s speech comes after a string of political victories by Trump in recent weeks.
A Florida judge on Monday dismissed a federal lawsuit alleging that the president withheld and hoarded classified documents after leaving the White House. The move comes after the Supreme Court ruled that U.S. presidents enjoy broader immunity than previously defined.
The Democrats have also become increasingly divided on the viability of Biden’s candidacy after a weak performance in last month’s debate.
On Thursday, US media reported that several prominent Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have pressured Biden to reconsider his candidacy.
The news came just hours after the White House announced that Biden had tested positive for COVID-19 while campaigning in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
