Trump calls for unity: ‘I am running to be president for all of America, not half’

Donald Trump closed the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee with a call for unity, albeit a unity focused around him. “The discord and division in our society must be healed. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart,” he said, in a speech marked by the assassination attempt he suffered last Saturday. “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America. There is no victory in winning for half of America,” he said in a lengthy address filled with the usual doses of bogus claims and hyperbole. Trump painted an apocalyptic picture of the United States, and presented himself as the nation’s savior.

Except for the first 15 minutes, in which he made a call to heal wounds and recounted with some emotion how he experienced the attempt on his life, the speech sounded like most of his rallies, only in a more subdued and perhaps more boring tone. He spoke for more than an hour and a half, the longest nomination speech ever recorded, until the blue, red, white and gold balloons descended from the roof of the Fiserv Forum, in Milwaukee (Wisconsin).

Trump had already said that he would soften his message in the wake of the assassination attempt at the Butler (Pennsylvania) rally. And at first he did. “I stand before you this evening with a message of confidence, strength and hope. Four months from now, we will have an incredible victory and we will begin the four greatest years in the history of our country,” he said. “Together we will launch a new era of safety, prosperity and freedom for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed,” he added, before discussing the attempt on his life.

“Let me begin this evening by expressing my gratitude to the American people for your outpouring of love and support following the assassination attempt at my rally on Saturday,” he began. “As you already know, the assassin’s bullet came within a quarter of an inch of taking my life. So many people have asked me what happened, and therefore I will tell you exactly what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time because it is actually too painful to tell,” he said before recounting how he experienced the attack. He explained how turning to look at a graph about illegal immigration saved his life, although he attributed it to God’s will. The former president produced a firefighter’s helmet and jacket that belonged to Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief who died during the assassination attempt on Saturday. Trump paid tribute to the victim, kissing his helmet and asking for a few moments of silence for him.

After speaking of the attack for around 15 minutes, the former president again called for unity, but also for the criminal charges against him to be dropped and for what he calls a “witch hunt” to end, with charges that he considers unconstitutional. He celebrated a judge’s decision to close the case of the Mar-a-Lago papers. The call for unity comes after days of frontal attacks against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at the convention. And while he avoided most of the authoritarian remarks with which he has peppered his speeches over the past year, Trump immediately launched into another attack on Joe Biden’s administration.

The Democrats, through Vice President Kamala Harris, had anticipated that strategy and criticized that the most divisive figure in American politics now presents himself as a unifier. “If you claim to stand for unity, you need to do more than just use the word. You cannot claim you stand for unity if you are pushing an agenda that deprives whole groups of Americans of basic freedoms, opportunity and dignity,” she said Thursday at a rally in North Carolina.

Road to the White House

Trump hopes to return to the White House after the Milwaukee convention. A frequently dysfunctional party that has experienced a thousand and one internal battles in Congress in the last two years has given an image of almost impeccable unity, only altered by some minor episodes and altercations. The candidate wants to avoid at all costs scaring away moderate and independent voters. He knows that his people are mobilized, especially after Saturday’s attack, so he is trying to show his kinder side.

Melania Trump, the candidate’s wife, appeared to music from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was her first appearance at the convention, and she did not give a speech as is customary for the spouses of candidates. She was dressed in red, the color of the Republican Party.

The former president is the first convicted felon to be elected as a candidate for one of the two major parties. He leaves Milwaukee to great acclaim, while a good part of the Democrats have undertaken a demolition operation against the president, Joe Biden, to ensure that he does not run for re-election. Pressure from Democratic leaders in Congress has begun to bear fruit. Biden has had conversations with his party’s leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer; with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. He has become more receptive to their warnings that he stands little chance of defeating Trump and that he could drag the party down in his defeat.

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