THE lines of delegates snaking their way through security checks in the baking Milwaukee sun began hours before Donald Trump’s speech to the Republican convention. A rallying event following an attempted assassination has this week become a springboard to a November presidential victory for Trump which looks more nailed on by the day.
Heather Sprague, a delegate from Maine, was wearing a stretch dress emblazoned with Trump: Make America Great Again logos. A few steps away a small boy was dressed in a red Maga hat and tribute navy Trump suit. Glitzy ladies in pointed stilettos with bouncy blow-dried hairdos fought for space.
The keynote speech by a leader who had escaped death by millimetres and whose injured ear has become a hardy image of survival didn’t need much revving up. But then the Republican Party under Trump operates under the unofficial motto of More is More.
Against a backwash of intense infighting in the Democratic party about whether to ditch Joe Biden — now looking like a “when, not if” question — this has been a convention with the highest levels of political self-confidence we have witnessed in a pre-election rally since Barack Obama’s surge to power for the Democrats in 2008.
It got going with Hulk Hogan, an ageing wrestler and actor with a chequered personal history and one of several celebrity attendees including comic Russell Brand and singer Kid Rock, growling a threat-promise that we should get ready: “Trumpomania will run wild again.”
The chairman of the Bill Graham evangelical movement thanked God for Trump’s escape from death — a claim echoed routinely from the platform as the campaign targets religious voters and amplifies a message that Trump was saved by divine providence — in order to recapture the White House.
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