Republican presidential candidate and former president, Donald Trump, speaks during the final day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee.Paul Sancya/The Associated Press
The purpose of an acceptance speech at an American national political convention is for the nominee to introduce himself to the voters. Donald Trump needs no introduction.
When Richard Nixon, familiar to Americans after three appearances on national political tickets, delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in the Miami Beach Convention Center in the summer of 1968, he did so with a new persona. He was the self-proclaimed “New Nixon.” In the four days after the attempt on his life at a Pennsylvania rally, Mr. Trump repeatedly indicated that he would give an acceptance speech that would present a new profile for a man undertaking his third presidential campaign – a New Trump, perhaps.
He delivered – up to a point.
Like Mr. Nixon, he sought to portray himself as changed, different from the past. Like Mr. Nixon, he was calmer. And like Mr. Nixon, who that evening more than a half century ago repeatedly employed the phrase “We are a great nation,” Mr. Trump made repeated references to American greatness, or the greatness that he pledged to restore, if given the chance to return to the White House after four years not so much in the political wilderness – he remained a constant presence in the American conversation – as in a forced Florida exile.
Some 1,450 kilometres away from Fitserv Forum and Mr. Trump’s promise of providing “the four greatest years in the history of our country,” a separate drama was unfolding on the Delaware seashore. There, Mr. Trump’s great rival, President Joe Biden was besieged with pleas to leave the race and apparently was beginning to come to peace with the notion that he cannot mount another campaign.
Mr. Biden’s withdrawal would change the Democratic campaign, but it also would transform the Republican campaign, shaped for months with the notion that Mr. Trump would face an aging Democratic gladiator slow on his feet and vulnerable to charges that he has lost the physical stamina and mental acuity to mount a competitive campaign – or should he win, to execute the duties of the presidency.
In both parties, a great reckoning is under way. Mr. Trump’s speech reflected that.
There were, to be sure, elements of the “kinder, gentler” strand that the Bush family – reviled in today’s Republican Party but still accounting for 12 years of GOP presidencies – preached and practised. Mr. Trump employed some of that, in part for show, in part to meet the moment, in part to demonstrate that it could be part of his portfolio. “We rise together,” he said, “or we fall apart.”
The ancient warrior, bloodied but unbowed, made an effort to put on display the soft side of Trumpism, an aspect reinforced by glimpses of him sitting with his grandchildren on his lap.
“I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America,” he said, a departure from his first term, where he aimed his policies and appeal to what became known as the Trump “core.” He retained that subdued tone while describing his ordeal “in the fading sun” following “a loud whizzing sound” during the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. “I felt safe because I had God on my side,” he said, and then he embraced the fire gear of Corey Comperatore, the volunteer firefighter who was killed while shielding his family from gunfire during the shooting.
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump gives his acceptance speed as the turnout coat and helmet of former Buffalo Township Volunteer Fire Department chief Corey Comperatore, who was killed at his rally last week, is displayed on Day 4 of the Republican National Convention, at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S., July 18, 2024.Mike Segar/Reuters
But as much as the New Trump had been foreshadowed, the combative Old Trump was on display as well. Unlike the old-soft-shoe dance, it seemed natural, not forced. It was fist-in-the-air, fight-fight-fight rhetoric that lived up to what his son, Donald Trump Jr. characterized Wednesday night as Trump Tough.
“We must rescue our nation from failed and incompetent leadership,” he said, calling the United States under President Joe Biden “a nation under decline” and said the world was “teetering on the edge of World War Three.” He called on the Democrats to stop the legal cases that he called “partisan witch hunts” against him and said, in reference to his rivals’ claims that he was a dictator-in-waiting, “I am the one saving democracy for the people of our country,” he said.
He said the Biden administration has virtually opened the Southern border, charged that waves of criminals and mental patients from other countries were murdering Americans and creating a crime spree, and quoted Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban— elements of his speech that are sure to be picked apart by Democrats.
His personal attacks on Mr. Biden were spare, but they were unsparing. “The damage that he has done to this country,” Mr. Trump said, “is untenable, unthinkable.”
Back in 1968, Mr. Nixon – on the verge of victory against a candidate emerging from a divided Democratic Party – said, “We are going to win because at a time that America cries out for the unity that this Administration has destroyed, the Republican Party…stands united before the nation tonight.”
That was the message Mr. Trump sought to sow in the American psyche, a generation later, before a vastly changed party in a vastly changed country and world.