Trump arrives in Milwaukee for RNC following assassination attempt

The Independent

Trump lands in Milwaukee ahead of the Republican National Convention, where he will likely be officially confirmed as the party's candidate.

Transcript

00:00Just two days, of course, after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

00:04One of the most important events in an American election year is set to begin.

00:08Trump, who is the presumptive Republican nominee, has arrived in Milwaukee ahead of that Republican

00:14National Convention.

00:15The Secret Service says security measures are already tight in and around the venue

00:19there.

00:20Brendan O'Connor is a professor of American politics at the University of Sydney's U.S.

00:25Studies Center.

00:26He joins us live from Sydney.

00:28Thanks for your time.

00:29Clearly, as I was saying there, the Republican Convention would be a major event in the political

00:33calendar.

00:34But, of course, following the attempt on Trump's life, it's now said to be extraordinary.

00:38And so much, of course, will matter exactly on how Trump chooses to react and what words

00:43he will choose to use.

00:46What do we expect?

00:48Well, these events are always heavy on crowd participation.

00:54Large audience of delegates who usually seem like they've had very large amounts of fizzy

00:59sort of sugary drinks, excitement, balloons, lots of American flags.

01:04I think that atmosphere will be amped up, obviously, after the near-death shooting of

01:09Donald Trump.

01:10There will be also, I think, a sense of Trump playing a kind of victim that everyone's out

01:15to get him, including this lone shooter.

01:17So I think it will just, as you said, be a convention at fever pitch, where they're usually

01:24at a kind of level of a combination of a kind of political rally and a children's birthday

01:30party with balloons and all the rest of it.

01:32So quite the sort of spectacular event.

01:36The assassination attempt seems to have coincided with Trump being allowed back on certain social

01:41media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

01:44I mean, he seems to, on both of those platforms so far, to have restrained some of his perhaps

01:49worse instincts after the attempt on his life.

01:54The speed, of course, in which he turned the shooting into a political opportunity

01:58seems to reveal a lot about his instincts.

02:02Yes, there isn't a side of Trump that really enjoys whipping up the crowd, getting the

02:09mob to be enjoying the kind of ecstasy of criticism of various elements of American

02:17society, claiming that America is as bad as it's ever been, but with him it will be as

02:22great as it could ever be.

02:23So this sense of emotive politics which surrounds Trump is why some people see it as more like

02:30a cult movement than a political party.

02:33And it has very much transformed the Republican Party into much more of a party based on what

02:39we might call populist ideas or even bordering on authoritarian ideas, rather than being

02:45a party of the sort of center right that was for low taxes, limited government, put people

02:50like Mitt Romney forward who'd been a former consultant at Bain Consultancy.

02:56Those days of the Republican Party seem quite a distant memory, and that was only 2012 when

03:02he was the candidate.

03:04Those around Trump, though, of course, have been slightly less restrained than Trump himself.

03:07I'm thinking of J.D. Vance, who might end up, of course, being announced at this convention

03:11as the vice presidential candidate.

03:14He's accused the left of vilifying Trump while saying that the fact that Trump survived the

03:18assassination attempt shows that he is chosen by God.

03:21I mean, the rhetoric is pretty extraordinary coming from certain sectors of the Republican Party.

03:29Yes, as I suggested before, the volume's already at 11 and the conference hasn't started.

03:34So I think there is the sense that whenever something goes wrong, it's the left.

03:39That was one of the arguments put out on January 6, 2021, that people, that Antifa, the left

03:47wing protested, had gone into the Capitol building.

03:50That wasn't true. In these events, we seem like we want to speed up time instead of working

03:56out if this was just a sad, lonely, very disturbed young man that shot Donald Trump.

04:02Everyone's got an opinion before we've got the facts.

04:05And so this sense that everything is to be politicized, everything is to be used against

04:10your opponent, no matter what the evidence, is one of the tragedies of American politics

04:16today. And Trump, I think, has been pretty central to that, claiming Obama was born in

04:20Kenya and many other things that don't stack up, that he won the last election when the

04:26results were clearly that he lost the last election.

04:29So we live in a world of kind of make-believe, to some extent, in American politics at the moment.

04:35Yeah, and of course, the absence of facts spawn a million conspiracy theories all over social

04:39media at the moment. Brendan O'Connor, many thanks for joining us.

04:43My pleasure.

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