The New Trump Is Always the Old Trump

Thursday’s speech was a fitting climax to a confused convention that spun wildly between partisan culture war and appeals to national comity.

For a brief moment last night, Americans saw Donald Trump try something new: stick to a script. Addressing delegates at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, the former president—and freshly anointed Republican nominee—read slowly and dramatically from a teleprompter as he recounted his near-death experience in Butler, Pennsylvania.  

“I’ll tell you exactly what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time, because it’s actually too painful to tell,” he said.

The details were bracing, but the delivery was oddly labored—as if Trump was speaking in a foreign language that he hadn’t quite mastered.

Then, about 15 minutes into the speech, Trump veered from his scripted remarks. The teleprompter, which could be viewed from inside the convention hall, stopped rolling and Trump started riffing. He griped about his many indictments and the failed attempts to impeach him. He let slip a few of his favorite partisan epithets—“Crazy Nancy Pelosi,” “Deface the Nation.” Having returned to his usual derogatory style—and sounding much more natural as a result—Trump trained his attention on his opponent.

“If you add up the 10 worst presidents, they wouldn’t have done the damage that Biden has done,” Trump said, but quickly caught himself. “Biden—I’m not going to use that name anymore.”

Trump had apparently broken a rule he’d been given: The Republican’s advisers had been boasting before the speech that Trump wouldn’t even mention President Joe Biden’s name. But he couldn’t quite help himself.

The spectacle Thursday night—which also included appearances by the professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, the UFC star Dana White, and Kid Rock, who sang a Trumpified version of “American Badass”—was a fitting climax to a confused convention that spun wildly, like Trump’s speech, between partisan culture war and appeals to national comity.

After Trump’s attempted assassination last week, the campaign signaled that the candidate would reach for an unfamiliar mantle: national unifier. He had tossed his “humdinger” of a convention speech, he told The Washington Examiner, and would instead give one focused on bringing the country together. His campaign leaked that convention speakers were being told to “tone down” their rhetoric. The nation was rattled, desperate for comfort, and Trump was going to provide it.  

“He understands there’s a moment,” Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign manager, said in Milwaukee earlier this week. “If there’s one person I know who’s capable of meeting the moment … it’s him.”

This was not necessarily obvious to anyone who had followed Trump’s political career up to this point, or watched his highly rated reality show, or read his books, or followed him on social media, or listened to him talk for more than 30 seconds. Trump, as a political phenomenon, has been defined by his divisiveness—by the subversive thrill his supporters get when he says something so outrageous that it seems almost as if he’s daring them to take offense.  

But just as they were descending on Milwaukee to nominate him for the third election in a row, Trump supporters were told the politician they had fallen in love with was a new man. And that reinvention came with new marching orders.

Ahead of Trump’s dramatic initial appearance in the Fiserv Forum on Monday evening, word spread on the convention floor that delegates should not yell “Fight! Fight!”—the words Trump had famously shouted as Secret Service agents surrounded him in Pennsylvania. The candidate’s arrival on the floor—his first public appearance since the assassination attempt—was meant to be cathartic and inspiring, scored to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” Not everyone obeyed their instructions, however. The result: Some of the delegates yelled “Fight! Fight! Fight!” while others countered with shouts of “Love! Love! Love!”

In certain moments this week, especially during the prime-time programming, you could hear the speakers adopt a more conciliatory tone. Nikki Haley spent the bulk of her remarks appealing to voters who disagree with Trump on some issues, as she does. And Marco Rubio tried to argue that “there is absolutely nothing dangerous or divisive about putting Americans first.”

In other moments, the efforts at magnanimity had a clunky, awkward feel. “The beauty of life itself transcends all political hatred and divisions,” said Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, near the beginning of a speech that ended with her startling some attendees with loud howls of “RISE UP! RISE UP!”

Unsurprisingly, some supporters didn’t bother with the softer, kinder Trumpism at all. Delegates waved signs that read MASS DEPORTATION NOW while the former Trump White House official Peter Navarro, just out of federal prison, delivered a bitter screed against the supposedly weaponized Biden Justice Department. Roger Stone granted interviews to right-wing media outlets while fans gathered to cheer him on. Laura Loomer chased CNN’s Jake Tapper through the convention halls, demanding that he apologize for causing the assassination attempt.    

The tension on display in Milwaukee was not factional. After eight years of political conquest, Trump’s successful purging of disloyal Republicans had produced a convention free of intraparty sniping or angst. Republicans acknowledged that Trump’s current lead in the polls, paired with the chaos in the Democratic Party, contributed to the optimism.  

[David A. Graham: The next Republican leader]

“You couldn’t script the last two weeks any better,” Kevin Cramer, a senator from North Dakota, said. “Since the debate, it’s just been good news after good news after good news.”

In conversations with delegates and GOP leaders, I could sometimes sense them straining to keep up with the campaign’s sudden vibe shift. When I asked Representative Burgess Owens of Utah how he’d reconciled Trump’s promised new tone with his pledge last year to serve as “retribution” for his supporters, Owens pushed back: “He never said he’s gonna be the retribution, other than success will be his revenge.”

Before Trump’s speech, I heard several delegates try to explain the former president’s expected pivot as a natural consequence of the shooting. “It’s a different Trump,” Karianne Lisonbee, a Utah delegate, told me, her voice breaking as she described his attempted assassination. “I don’t know how you could take a bullet and not be changed,” Stephanie Gricius, another delegate, chimed in. This idea of a reinvented Trump had been circulating all week in Milwaukee. Jim Banks, a Republican congressman from Indiana who sat with Trump in the convention hall Tuesday night, told Politico that the candidate looked like a spiritually renewed man. “The reality of it, as I sat next to him … for an hour and a half, there were a number of references to faith and God, and he was very moved by those.”

But by the time the balloons had fallen and Trump had left the stage, few in Milwaukee seemed to be talking about a “new Trump.”

Asked what he thought of Trump’s jabs at Pelosi and Biden, Brian Turner, a delegate from Florida, seemed unbothered. “You know what? He says things that other people will not say,” Turner said. “And we know that’s President Trump.” Their candidate was back to his old self. It must have felt like a relief.

Tim Alberta and Mark Leibovich contributed reporting.