“It just blows your mind.”
The day after surviving a shooting, Donald Trump invited friends and allies to his private club in Bedminster, NJ. Surrounded by a coterie of trusted confidants, the former President recounted the twists of fate that spared him a gruesome death. At the moment a gunman opened fire on Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday, the former President was pointing toward a large screen over his right shoulder showing immigration data when a bullet grazed his right ear. “If I turned my head one more second later,” Trump told the group, according to Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas, “it would have gone straight through my head.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The surreal moment was all the more dramatic coming just two days before the start of the Republican National Convention. While the motive of the shooter remains unknown, the incident has turbocharged the Trump campaign and the thousands of MAGA diehards in Milwaukee this week. For years, Trump has turned his long list of complaints about sinister forces out to destroy him into a rallying cry for his base. He decried both the Mueller probe and his two impeachments as “hoaxes” intended to tear down his presidency. He has castigated his multiple criminal indictments as politically motivated witch hunts.
Now, that narrative of victimhood and persecution has reached a crescendo as authorities investigate what they’re calling an assassination attempt against the former President. It’s the kind of historic event that can reshape an election. The GOP convention unfolding in its wake sets the stage for a defiant and emboldened Trump to capture the public’s imagination with the themes that have animated his White House campaign. “This happening on the eve of this huge event where the whole political world is going to be watching is pretty remarkable,” says Jon Seaton, a veteran Republican operative who worked on George W. Bush’s and John McCain’s presidential campaigns.
But while Trump will reinforce his core message that a cabal of elites—whom he calls “the enemy within”—will stop at nothing to prevent his return to power, sources close to the former President say he’s recalibrating his primetime Thursday night speech in the wake of his near-death experience. They say he will spend less time excoriating his opponent, President Joe Biden, and more time trying to unify the country. Trump will also harness his penchant for theatrics, promising his followers that he’s emerging from the Butler, Pa., crime scene as a warrior on their behalf.
It’s a plot point one would more likely expect in a Hollywood movie than real life. Equally cinematic was Trump’s real-time reaction to the shooting. Once Secret Service snipers neutralized the gunman, agents hustled Trump off the stage. But before evacuating him, Trump, with blood covering his ears and face, pumped his fist in the air and yelled “Fight!” That image will become a mainstay of the GOP confab, according to sources familiar with the RNC’s planning, reinforcing the portrayal of Trump as a survivor. “He’s just a gangster,” says Hogan Gidley, a former Trump White House official. “It just blows your mind.”
That’s not the only way the convention will address the attack. Rep. Cory Mills of Florida, a combat veteran, suggested that Republicans will press for a Congressional probe into the security failures, similar in structure to the kind that was conducted after a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “The same way they had a J6 investigation,” Mills tells me, “we now need to have a J13 investigation.” Other GOP members of Congress, such as Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas, have also called for a special investigatory commision.
Beyond his running mate, who Trump is set to announce on Monday, the lineup for the four-day gathering is replete with MAGA celebrities and Republican lawmakers and down-ballot candidates. Following the rally, Trump’s estranged primary rival Nikki Haley agreed to come and speak, signaling that disparate factions within the party who don’t subscribe to the America First creed are closing ranks around Trump.
Sources close to Trump say he doesn’t want to ostracize undecided voters he could pull into the fold. “There may be fewer attacks and more sticking to his vision,” says Jackson, who flew to Bedminister after the shooting to spend Sunday with him. Jackson, who was Trump’s White House physician, examined his injury and traveled with him to Milwaukee on his private plane, Trump Force One. “A piece of the top of his ear is missing,” Jackson tells me. “It bleeds a lot. You have to keep the bandage on it, because it’s not a laceration. A bullet hit it.”
The images of a wounded but still standing Trump are sure to take center stage at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum. To Trump and his allies, it provides the kind of boost that nothing else could. “He was already going to win,” says Mills. “Now I think it’s going to be even a larger margin.”
