Trump appears at RNC with bandaged ear days after assassination attempt
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Donald Trumpmade a triumphant entrance during the first night of the Republican National Convention on Monday, receiving a raucous ovation from the party faithful two days after a would-be assassin's bullet grazed his right ear.
Trump walked into the Fiserv Forum in downtown Milwaukee with a thick bandage over the ear as the crowd chanted "Fight! Fight! Fight" and pumped their fists, a reference to his reaction in the moments after he was wounded.
The former president mouthed the words "Thank you" and settled into a box with some of his children and U.S. Senator J.D. Vance, Trump's choice for running mate announced earlier in the day.
Trump is due to formally accept the party's nomination in a prime-time speech on Thursday and will face Democratic President Joe Biden in the Nov. 5 election.
The four-day convention began less than 48 hours after a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one supporter. The gunman was shot dead and his motive remains unclear.
During Monday's session, the party gave speaking slots to six everyday Americans who highlighted the impact inflation has had on lower and middle-income families, while Republican leaders assailed the Biden administration as being out of touch.
"Our God still saves," Scott said. "He still delivers and he still sets free. Because on Saturday the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but an American lion got back up on his feet and he roared!"
Vance is deeply popular with Trump's core supporters, but it remains to be seen whether he can broaden the ticket's appeal. He shares Trump's aggressive approach to politics, and his conservative statements on issues such as abortion could turn off moderate voters.
Soon after Trump's afternoon announcement, Vance emerged on the convention floor with his wife Usha, shaking hands with and hugging delegates who swarmed the couple. He is scheduled to address the convention on Wednesday.
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS AT ISSUE
Biden told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland that Vance is "a clone of Trump on the issues," while other Democrats criticized Vance's record on reproductive rights.
In an interview on Fox News on Monday night, Vance said he backed Trump's position that each state should decide for itself whether to permit abortion.
Opinion polls show a close race between Trump, 78, and Biden, 81, though Trump leads in several swing states that are likely to decide the election. Trump has not committed to accepting the results of the election if he loses.
The head of the main fundraising super PAC supporting Trump's campaign, Taylor Budowich, said on X that MAGA Inc. had raised more than $50 million on Monday.
Billionaire Elon Musk is planning to donate around $45 million a month to a new pro-Trump super PAC, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with his intentions. Musk endorsed Trump after the assassination attempt on Saturday.
Item 1 of 17 Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump greets Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance as he attends Day 1 of the Republican National Convention (RNC) at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S., July 15, 2024. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
[1/17]Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump greets Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance as he attends Day 1 of the Republican National Convention (RNC) at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S., July 15, 2024. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly Purchase Licensing Rights, opens a new tab
Following the shooting, Trump said he was revising his acceptance speech to emphasize national unity, rather than highlight his differences with Biden.
"The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would've been two days ago," Trump told the Washington Examiner.
The day began with yet another in a string of recent legal victories for Trump when U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon threw out federal charges accusing him of retaining classified documents after leaving the White House.
Trump is due to be sentenced in New York in September for trying to cover up a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in the weeks before his 2016 election victory.
But his other two indictments on federal charges in Washington and state charges in Georgia - both related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat - are mired in delays and could be significantly limited after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in July that he had immunity for many of his official acts as president.
"This dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts," Trump said on Truth Social on Monday, also referencing the prosecutions of hundreds of his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
NO PLACE FOR VIOLENCE
The shooting attempt on Trump's life immediately altered the dynamics of the presidential campaign, which had been focused on whether Biden should drop out due to concerns about his age and acuity following a halting June 27 debate performance.
Nearly two dozen of Biden's fellow Democrats in Congress have called on him to end his reelection bid and allow the party to pick another standard bearer.
The focus this week will be squarely on Trump.
Having consolidated party control, Trump could seize on the opportunity to deliver a unifying message or paint a dark portrait of a nation under siege by a corrupt leftist elite, as he has done at times on the campaign trail.
Trump has frequently turned to violent rhetoric in campaign speeches, labeling his perceived enemies as "vermin" and "fascists."
Following Saturday's shooting, Biden sought to lower the temperature after months of heated political rhetoric.
"There is no place in America for this kind of violence," Biden said in an address from the White House on Sunday.
In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Biden said it was a "mistake" to tell donors last week it was "time to put Trump in the bullseye" but noted that Trump has often used incendiary words.
Biden ordered an independent review of how the gunman could have come so close to killing Trump. Congressional investigators also sought to question the head of the U.S. Secret Service, which is responsible for protecting the former president.
GOP delegates cheered as Donald Trump made an appearance at Monday’s Republican National Convention kickoff, less than two days after an assassination attempt on the former president and shortly after he announced Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his vice presidential pick.
Former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson is seated in Trump’s family box at the RNC, sitting two seats away from the former president. Trump is immediately flanked by Vance and Florida Rep. Byron Donalds.
Just a week after the AFL-CIO reaffirmed its backing of President Biden, another union leader came and spoke at the Republican National Convention.
Teamsters Union President Sean O’Brien said workers are being taken for granted and sold out to big banks, big tech and the corporate elite. O’Brien said the Teamsters “are not beholden to anyone or any party” and will work with a bipartisan coalition.
“I don’t care about getting criticized,” O’Brien said as he defied organized long-standing support of Democrats.
Trump shook hands with people as he entered, including his son, Donald Trump Jr.
He’s standing near his vice presidential pick, JD Vance. Trump is smiling and mouthing, “Thank you.”
Trump’s vice presidential pick rose to national prominence when he detailed his upbringing in a widely read memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“I actually understand a little bit what people are going through,” Vance told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “Yeah, it was tough when I was dealing with it, but now I really do think it’s a blessing that’s given me a perspective a lot of politicians don’t have.”
JD Vance’s wife, Usha, has left the law firm where she worked after her husband was chosen as Trump’s running mate.
“Usha has informed us she has decided to leave the firm,” Munger, Tolles & Olson said in a statement.
“Usha has been an excellent lawyer and colleague, and we thank her for her years of work and wish her the best in her future career.”
Vance met Usha at Yale, where she received both her undergraduate and law degrees. She spent a year clerking for Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he served as an appeals court judge in Washington, followed by a year as a law clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts.
Eight years ago, in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, J.D. Vance was a bitter critic of Donald Trump.
Publicly, he called the Republican presidential candidate an "idiot" and said he was "reprehensible." Privately, he compared him to Adolf Hitler.
But by the time the former president tapped Vance to be his running mate on Monday, the Ohio native had become one of Trump's most ardent defenders, standing by his side even when other high-profile Republicans declined to do so.
James David Vance's transformation - from self-described "never Trumper" to stalwart loyalist - makes him a relatively unusual figure in Trump's inner circle.
Democrats and even some Republicans have questioned whether Vance, who wrote a bestselling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" and is now a U.S. senator from Ohio, is driven more by opportunism than ideology.
But Trump, who survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania campaign rally on Saturday, and many of his advisers see his transformation as genuine.
They point out that Vance's political beliefs - which mix isolationism with economic populism - dovetail with those of Trump, and put both men at odds with the old guard of the Republican Party, where foreign policy hawks and free market evangelists still hold sway.
Republican Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, whom Vance has described as a mentor, told Reuters that Vance shifted his views on Trump because “he saw the successes that President Trump as president brought to the country.”
In particular, Vance's vocal opposition to U.S. aid for Ukraine in its war with Russia has delighted Trump's most conservative allies, even as it has upset some Senate colleagues.
"He understands what Trump is running on and, unlike the rest of the Republican Party in Washington, agrees with it," conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, a vocal Vance supporter, told Reuters.
Vance, 39, was born into an impoverished home in southern Ohio. His pick may help boost the Trump campaign's Rust Belt bona fides in a race that will be determined by voters in a handful of battleground states, including nearby Pennsylvania and Michigan, though his conservative views may be a turn-off for moderate voters.
"To the extent that he can do anything for the ticket, it would be to recapture being the voice of the American dream," said David Niven, an associate professor of politics at the University of Cincinnati who has worked as a speechwriter for two Democratic governors, referring to Vance's rise from poverty to U.S senator and vice presidential candidate.
After serving in the Marine Corps, attending Yale Law School, and working as a venture capitalist in San Francisco, Vance rose to national prominence thanks to his 2016 book "Hillbilly Elegy." In that memoir, he explored the socioeconomic problems confronting his hometown and attempted to explain Trump's popularity among impoverished white Americans to readers.
He was harshly critical of Trump, both publicly and privately, in 2016 and during the opening stages of his 2017-2021 term.
"I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler," he wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016.
When his Hitler comment was first reported, in 2022, a spokesperson did not dispute it but said it no longer represented Vance's views.
By the time Vance ran for Senate in 2022, his demonstrations of loyalty - which included downplaying the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump's supporters - were sufficient to score the former president's coveted endorsement. Trump's support helped put him over the top in a competitive primary.
In media interviews, Vance has said no "Eureka" moment changed his views on Trump. Rather, he gradually realized that his opposition to the former president was rooted in style rather than substance.
For instance, he agreed with Trump's contentions that free trade had hollowed out middle America by crushing domestic manufacturing and that the nation's leaders were too quick to get involved in foreign wars.
Item 1 of 5 US Senator JD Vance listens to former President Donald Trump address the Pool Press outside the Manhattan Criminal Court room during trial in NYC May 13 2024. Mark Peterson/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
[1/5]US Senator JD Vance listens to former President Donald Trump address the Pool Press outside the Manhattan Criminal Courtroom during trial in NYC May 13 2024. Mark Peterson/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens a new tab
"I allowed myself to focus so much on the stylistic element of Trump that I completely ignored how he substantively was offering something very different on foreign policy, on trade, on immigration," Vance told the New York Times in June.
In the same interview, Vance said that he met Trump in 2021 and that the two grew closer during his Senate campaign.
Vance declined to be interviewed by Reuters for this article and his spokesperson declined to comment on it.
The Ohio senator's detractors see his shift in views as a cynical ploy to ascend the ranks of Republican politics.
"What you see is some really profound opportunism," said Niven, the politics professor.
One issue where his position appears to have converged with Trump is abortion.
Vance implied in a 2021 interview that victims of rape and incest should be required to carry pregnancies to term, and in November he described a vote by Ohioans to add the right to abortion care to the state's constitution as a "gut punch."
This year, he said he supports access to the abortion pill mifepristone, a view that Trump shares.
RELATIONSHIP WITH TRUMP
Before Vance developed a relationship with the former president, he grew close with Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, according to several people familiar with their relationship.
Vance first caught Trump Jr's eye when he opposed aid to Ukraine during the Ohio Senate primary in 2022, according to one of those people, a position that put him at odds with the other Republicans in the race.
Vance's personal relationship with Trump developed for the most part during the Republican presidential primary earlier this year, that person said. Vance's decision to endorse Trump in January 2023, well before some other vice-presidential hopefuls, served as an important demonstration of loyalty, that person added.
In February 2023, Trump and Vance visited East Palestine, Ohio, the site of a toxic train derailment, a trip that raised Vance's national profile. They portrayed Democratic President Joe Biden's decision at the time not to visit the working-class community as a betrayal of middle America.
The White House noted at the time that federal agents were on the scene almost immediately after the derailment and that visiting a disaster site can distract from local recovery efforts. Biden eventually visited East Palestine roughly a year later, in February 2024.
Behind the scenes, Vance has helped convince wealthy donors to open their wallets to Trump, according to two people with knowledge of Trump's fundraising operations. Vance, for instance, helped put together a Bay Area fundraiser in June hosted by venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, one of those people said.
Off the campaign trail, some of Trump's highest-profile allies - including Donald Trump Jr, Carlson, and Steve Bannon - have been delighted by Vance's brief tenure on Capitol Hill. All of those individuals have legions of conservative followers, and their approval may help drive Republicans to the polls.
Vance's skepticism of corporate America, support for tariffs, weariness of foreign entanglements and his youth make him a leading voice of a new Republican Party that is more focused on the working class than big business in the eyes of supporters.
"I think that in terms of bringing to the ticket, he can articulate the pain that American families are feeling better than almost anybody else," said Senator Barrasso.
Vance has been criticized for just copying Trump.
"Vance is an echo to Trump," said Niven, "not a new voice."
President Joe Biden is on the brink of failing to win a key labor endorsement as leaders of the 1.3 million-member Teamsters union consider backing no candidate at all in the U.S. presidential race, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Vance’s bestseller about his roots in rural Kentucky and blue-collar Ohio made him a national celebrity soon after its publication in the summer of 2016 and became a cultural talking point after Donald Trump’s stunning victory that November. The Ohio Republican has since been elected to the U.S. Senate and, as of Monday, chosen as Trump’s running mate in the former president’s quest for a return to the White House. He is 39 and would be the youngest vice president since Richard Nixon, who served two terms under Dwight Eisenhower, starting in 1953.
In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance reflects on the transformation of Appalachia from reliably Democratic to reliably Republican, sharing stories about his chaotic family life and about communities that had declined and seemed to lose hope. Vance first thought of the book while studying at Yale Law School, and completed it in his early 30s, when it was eventually published by HarperCollins.
“I was very bugged by this question of why there weren’t more kids like me at places like Yale ... why isn’t there more upward mobility in the United States?” Vance told The Associated Press in 2016.
Sales for “Hillbilly Elegy” now total at least 1.6 million copies, according to Circana, which tracks around 85% of hardcover and paperback sales. Ron Howard adapted the book into a 2020 movie of the same name, earning Glenn Close an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. Within hours of Trump’s announcement Monday, it was No. 1 on Amazon.com, surging from No. 220 earlier in the day.
This book cover image released by HarperCollins Publishers shows “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” by J.D. Vance. Author J.D. Vance’s book “Hillbilly Elegy” provides a vivid tour of the stark world he grew up in, set mainly in the Ohio city of Middletown that was hit hard by its dominant steelmaking company’s decline, but also in his family’s home eastern Kentucky hills region. (HarperCollins Publishers via AP)
Lt. Governor Jon Husted nominates Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, during the Republican National Convention Monday, July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, gives a thumbs-up to supporters as he is introduced during the first day of the Republican National Convention on Monday, July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
“I felt that if I wrote a very forthright, and sometimes painful, book, that it would open people’s eyes to the very real matrix of this problem,” Vance told the AP in 2016. “If I wrote a more abstract or esoteric essay ... then not as many people would pay attention to it because they would assume I was just another academic spouting off, and not someone who’s looked at these problems in a very personal way.”
Vance’s book, subtitled “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” was initially praised by conservatives for its criticisms of welfare and what Vance saw as “too many young men immune to hard work.” Reviewing “Hillbilly Elegy” in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher praised Vance’s contention that public policy does little to “affect the cultural habits that keep people poor.”
After Trump’s election, Vance’s book became an unofficial guide for liberals baffled both by Trump’s rise and by the bonds shared between some of the country’s poorest residents and the wealthy New York real estate man turned TV star.
At the same time, “Hillbilly Elegy” was heavily criticized, including by some from the Appalachian communities Vance was portraying. Common critiques were that it flattened rural life and sidestepped the role of racism in politics.
Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, arrives on the floor during the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum, Monday, July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Delegates add Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, to their signs during the Republican National Convention Monday, July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and his wife Usha Chilukuri Vance arrive on the floor during the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum, Monday, July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Sarah Jones, writing in The New Republic that she grew up in poverty on the border of southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennessee, called the book a list of “myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class.”
In The Guardian, Sarah Smarsh wrote that Vance offered a narrow perspective on American poverty.
“Most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia,” Smarsh wrote. “That sometimes seems the only concept of them that the American consciousness can contain: tucked away in a remote mountain shanty like a coal-dust-covered ghost, as though white poverty isn’t always right in front of us, swiping our credit cards at a Target in Denver or asking for cash on a Los Angeles sidewalk.”
The first night of the RNC was supposed to be about the economy, to unite voters of all ideological persuasions who are frustrated by high prices. But some of the biggest applause lines came from harsh criticisms of transgender people.
It’s a reminder that cultural issues motivate the GOP base as much as financial ones. A trio of speakers unabashedly went after Democrats who have sought greater acceptance for transgender people. Of particular outrage to Republicans this year was Biden marking Transgender Day of Visibility. It happened to overlap with Easter in 2024, a byproduct of the Christian holiday being based on the lunar calendar.
To many in the LGBTQ+ community, it was a coincidence. But to many Republicans, it was an insult.
“They promised normalcy and gave us Transgender Visibility Day on Easter Sunday,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. “And let me state this clearly, there are only two genders.”
Sen. Ron Johnson said at the convention it was all part of a “fringe agenda” that “includes biological males competing against girls.”
Rep. John James tried to equate it to part of a broader critique of Democrats, saying that they promised to offer the country hope and had failed. “Our daughters were sold on hope, and now they’re being forced on the playing fields and changing rooms with biological males,” James said.
Former first lady Melania Trump is expected to attend the RNC later this week, according to two sources familiar with her plans.
Melania Trump, who has largely avoided public appearances, did not appear next to the former president as he entered the convention earlier tonight.
In a statement following the attack, she called her husband a “generous and caring man,” noting that the shooter saw him as “inhuman” and lamented that “his human side” was buried beneath the “political machine.”
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is arguably responsible for the GOP’s biggest policy accomplishments, particularly in installing conservative judges at all levels of the judiciary. But that didn’t matter much to the Trump-friendly crowd at the RNC, which greeted the Kentucky Republican with boos — a tangible rejection of someone demonized as an establishment Republican who has insufficiently supported the former president.
Just a short while later, Vance enjoyed a much different reception. The second-youngest U.S. senator — and the first millennial to appear on a major party ticket — received raucous applause when he walked onto the convention floor for the first time as Trump’s running mate.
The dueling moments offered a window into the changes that have swept the GOP under Trump — bookending an era in which McConnell has gone from one of his party’s most powerful leaders and incisive tacticians to getting jeered on the convention floor by his own party’s activists.
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