Nothing could be better for Donald Trump. It may seem like an overstatement less than a week after the former Republican president was the victim of an assassination attempt, at the age of 78, but the truth is that even that attack has cracked whatever resistance remained inside. The Republican Party is disappearing. And while the Democratic campaign is crumbling due to the collapse of his November rival Joe Biden’s candidacy, Trump is sailing headlong toward reelection.
The Milwaukee convention, which concluded yesterday with his speech formally accepting the nomination for the November presidential election, was a coronation, a celebration that crowned and deified him as the master and lord of a party already irrevocably transformed in its image and likeness under his designs, its interests and its aims, and also its undeniable political instincts.
It is the party of America First, recast, at least in its public message, as the party of workers, an image reinforced Wednesday in a powerful speech by his chosen number two, J.D. Vance. The Ohio senator, just 39, has become a key asset in the effort to restore the blue wall in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that Trump toppled in 2016 but then evaded when they fell away, due to chaos and extremism, a key part of the electorate: moderates and women.
With the party and its most loyal base already irrevocably capitulated, Trump wants to appeal to them, but also to black and Latino voters. And he is doing so by moving forward with a well-crafted machine, with a disciplined, surgically orchestrated campaign strategy that leaves absolutely nothing to chance and that shows remarkable stability.
Political resurrection
The pivot? To publicly tone down the more extreme elements of the MAGA movement, whether it’s abortion, social policies, or attacks on the democratic system and institutions. And to present himself as a leader with the courage to unite the country, unlike the weak Biden, even though immediately after the attack, his raised-fist cry that had already become a Republican slogan was “kill, kill, kill.” Against what? Against him?
Before the eyes of the country and the world, this caps a story of extraordinary political resurgence, as was almost everything else surrounding Trump a little over nine years ago, when he entered American politics to also effect a radical transformation. He is the only occupant of the Oval Office to have been impeached twice, the only one to have been convicted of criminal wrongdoing, and the one who has brought the country closer to the abyss of not allowing a peaceful transfer of power. He is the first to come close to what Grover Cleveland achieved in the 19th century: occupying the White House, then losing it, then winning it back.
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