In the euphoric early hours of this week’s Republican convention, one delegate suggested chiselling Donald Trump’s likeness into America’s ultimate secular shrine: Mount Rushmore.
Others looked beyond the secular.
To some participants in Milwaukee, Wisc., this convention has transcended the realm of earthly political gathering, into something imbued with religious significance.
It was their elated reaction to a split-second twist of fate over the weekend: an assassin’s bullet barely missing the former U.S. president’s skull, tearing across his ear, just two days before the convention started Monday.
So Trump stepped into a bath of adulation from thousands of party faithful, making his first public appearance since the shooting, arriving with a bandage over his right ear. Country singer Lee Greenwood sang God Bless the U.S.A., as Trump took his seat in the boisterous arena beside his just-named running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” attendees chanted, echoing the words Trump had uttered in the moment Secret Service agents whisked him away, streaks of blood across his face.
The convention was abuzz with talk of miracles. From the stage to the hallways, attendees spoke of Trump’s survival as the product of a divine plan for America.
“There is so much more energy [here] now,” said Zina Hackworth, an attendee from the St. Louis area.
“We actually see the hand of God has protected former president Trump.”
One Republican had just left church, and drove around the convention site with a decidedly less holy message hoisted on a flag on his red truck: “F–k Biden.”
“I believe that God wants Trump to bring the United States back to where it’s supposed to be,” said Craig Basile, a 62-year-old Wisconsin man, after Sunday mass.
Trump has also described his survival as miraculous.
As the four-day Republican National Convention in Milwaukee gets underway, Republican supporters and political analysts alike are taking a close look at the political discourse surrounding Donald Trump after an assassination attempt over the weekend.
‘I’m supposed to be dead’
In his first interview after the shooting, he told the Washington Examiner he turned just the right amount, at just the right time, and credited it as incredible luck or an act of God: “I’m supposed to be dead. I’m not supposed to be here,” he said.
He insists it will change him.
Trump said he’s ripped up his original convention speech, which he called extremely partisan, “brutal” and a “humdinger,” filled with rip-roaring attacks against the Biden administration and the Democrats.
“I can’t say these things after what I’ve been through,” Trump said, acknowledging that his political opponents include good people.
“I threw it out,” he said of the speech. “I think it would be very bad if I got up and started going wild about how horrible everybody is, and how corrupt and crooked, even if it’s true.
“Now, we have a speech that is more unifying.”
This reflects the official message of his campaign: His senior staff has ordered the campaign team to keep the rhetoric cool.
One top campaign official even deleted a social media post blaming U.S. President Joe Biden and the Democrats for the shooting.
A number of other politicians — Democrats and Republicans alike — have been saying the heated political rhetoric in this country urgently needs some cooling.
Even Marjorie Taylor Greene weighed her words carefully as she took the stage to loud applause.
As the far-right congressional firebrand began speaking, spectators shouted, “Give ’em hell,” but she started by thanking God for saving Trump, spoke of her hope for a better country, then reserved her customary scorn for transgender people, undocumented immigrants and politicians who fund Ukraine.
Trump’s wife Melania issued an uncharacteristically lengthy statement, urging Americans to start seeing each other’s humanity first, rather than partisan affiliation.
Former U.S. president Donald Trump left for the Republican National Convention a day after an assassination attempt at a campaign rally killed a bystander. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden called for unity as investigators searched for the shooter’s motive.
In name of ‘unity,’ forget Jan. 6: Trump
Will this talk of rhetorical conversion stick?
It faces tall odds. Trump himself has acknowledged that if his political opponents start attacking him, he might respond — and the moment of decency might prove ephemeral.
In fact, it’s been immediately tested.
After a Florida judge tossed out his classified-documents case, Trump, in a social-media post Monday, proposed dismissing all other charges against him — in the name of national “unity.”
This includes charges connected to his supporters’ attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in his attempt to steal an election; Trump referred to it as the Jan. 6 “hoax.”
The request struck his critics as a self-interested exploitation of the shooting; cloaking his affront to democracy, in an effort to heal it.
One protester at the convention site was livid at the news of the dropped documents charges Monday. She said the convicted criminal belongs nowhere near the White House again.
“I’m shaking right now,” said Darlene Garms of Milwaukee. “He’s divided this whole country.”
On the other side of the political divide on Fox News, segment after segment blamed the Democrats and the media for hateful rhetoric around Trump.
A ‘quasi-religious figure’
Prime-time host Jesse Watters blamed the media for likening Trump to a fascist. He did so in introducing his guest, Bill Barr, who happened to resign as Trump’s attorney general in 2020 as Trump was trying to undo that year’s U.S. election.
That unpleasant history did not come up.
Still, Barr said Democrats are overdoing it with the argument that American democracy will disappear if Trump wins.
“That is an apocalyptic and hysterical position that’s bound to lead to violence,” Barr said. “It’s ridiculous. He’s not the threat to democracy that they’re portraying.”
Another thing that did not come up on Fox News? Trump’s constant use of similar language, saying things like, “If we don’t win this election, we won’t have a country left,” or that the U.S. won’t survive another four years of Biden.
Trump has also joked repeatedly about the bludgeoning attack in former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home against her husband.
Maybe things are different now. We’ll get a sense, perhaps, during this convention, where he will be celebrated for days, then speak Thursday.
“He has been made a quasi-religious figure for the party,” said Kathleen Dolan, a distinguished professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
And maybe American politics won’t change all that much.
Asked about the vulgar insult against Trump’s opponent on his pickup truck, Basile, the Wisconsin man, replied that it’s a clear message — to the point — and there’s no shame in that flag.
“Best $25 I ever spent.”
Published at Sun, 14 Jul 2024 01:06:12 +0000
Judge hands Trump major legal victory, dismissing classified documents charges
A U.S. judge on Monday dismissed the criminal case accusing Donald Trump of illegally holding onto classified documents, dealing the former president another major legal victory in what some analysts believed was the most formidable case he was facing among his four criminal indictments.
Florida-based U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was nominated by Trump, ruled that special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the prosecution, was unlawfully appointed to his role and did not have the authority to bring the case.
It marked another blockbuster legal victory for Trump, following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on July 1 that as a former president he enjoyed immunity from prosecution for many of his actions in office. It comes two days after he survived an assassination attempt, and as he prepares to announce his vice-presidential running mate as the presumptive nominee at the Republican convention this week in Milwaukee.
Trump has been accused of taking thousands of papers containing some of the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets when he left the White House in January 2021 and storing them in a haphazard manner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Reportedly, another document may have been in Trump’s possession at a New Jersey property he owned.
The 37-count indictment included violations of the Espionage Act, which criminalizes unauthorized possession of defence information, and conspiracy to obstruct justice, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The charges included references to dozens of top-secret or secret documents.
The U.S. Justice Department will appeal the ruling, a spokesperson for the special counsel said in a statement.
Courts in other cases have repeatedly upheld the ability of the U.S. Justice Department to appoint special counsel to handle certain politically sensitive investigations.
“This ruling flies in the face of about 20 years of institutional precedent, conflicts with rulings issued in both the Mueller investigation and in D.C. with respect to Jack Smith himself,” said Bradley Moss, a lawyer who specializes in national security.
But Cannon’s ruling throws the future of the case, which once posed serious legal peril for Trump, into doubt. Smith is also prosecuting Trump in federal court in Washington over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, but the former president’s lawyers have not made a similar challenge to the special counsel in that case.
The classified documents investigation was first referred to prosecutors in 2022 after the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration tried for more than a year to retrieve presidential records from Trump.
Following the judge’s decision on Monday dismissing the documents case, Trump said his other outstanding prosecutions should also be thrown out. He is still awaiting trial on two cases — a federal prosecution in Washington and a Georgia state prosecution — for his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
Trump is also 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.
“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 his Truth Social site on Monday, also referencing the prosecutions of hundreds of his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Former U.S. president Donald Trump left for the Republican National Convention a day after an assassination attempt at a campaign rally killed a bystander. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden called for unity as investigators searched for the shooter’s motive.
Congress approval needed, Trump lawyers argued
Trump’s lawyers challenged the legal authority for Attorney General Merrick Garland’s 2022 decision to appoint Smith to lead investigations into Trump. They argued the appointment violated the U.S. Constitution because his office was not created by Congress and he was not confirmed by the Senate.
Lawyers in Smith’s office disputed Trump’s claims, arguing there was a well-settled practice of using special counsel to manage politically sensitive investigations.
The ruling is the latest and most consequential in a series of decisions from Cannon favouring Trump’s defence and expressing skepticism about the conduct of prosecutors. The judge previously delayed a trial indefinitely while considering a flurry of Trump’s legal challenges.
In an unusual move, she allowed three outside lawyers, including two who sided with Trump, to argue during a court hearing focused on Trump’s challenge to Smith’s appointment.
Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas also provided a boost to Trump’s challenge to the special counsel. In an opinion agreeing with the court’s decision to grant Trump broad immunity in the election case, Thomas questioned whether Smith’s appointment was lawful using similar arguments to those made by Trump’s lawyers.
Garland appointed Smith, a public corruption and international war crimes prosecutor, to give investigations into Trump a degree of independence from the Justice Department under President Joe Biden’s administration.
Two others — Trump personal aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira — were also charged with obstructing the investigation.
The search of Trump’s property in the summer of 2022 angered Republicans, and one Trump supporter was shot dead three days later after trying to enter an FBI office in Cincinnati.
The case also inspired searches among other high-profile politicians. Biden and former vice-president Mike Pence each returned documents that were located on properties they owned or managed as a result, with no criminal changes resulting.
Published at Mon, 15 Jul 2024 14:15:05 +0000
