A Historic Week for America

Much will be written about the past week in decades to come, but finding the right words to describe the events of the past few days as we’re living through them is a challenge. An election season that had already been contentious and dispiriting took a dark turn last Saturday when Donald Trump was nearly assassinated at a rally in Pennsylvania—days before his party’s nominating convention. But while the Republicans in Milwaukee rallied around Trump in a celebratory mood, President Joe Biden’s campaign was crumbling around him. 

The shocking assault sparked calls for cooling our heated rhetoric. “There is no place for violence,” President Biden said in multiple statements last weekend, and most Democrats and Trump critics extended well-wishes to the former president. Writing on Tuesday, Paul D. Miller heartily endorsed the notion of turning down the heat, and noted that, while the former president certainly warrants criticism, political violence is both unacceptable and counterproductive. “Trump is a threat to democracy and we shouldn’t stop ourselves from saying so,” he wrote. “We shouldn’t let the threat of terrorist violence have a heckler’s veto over our speech.”

Paul Matzko looked at the attempt on Trump’s life from a historical perspective, recalling Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination attempt against a presidential candidate in 1963—not JFK but Edwin Walker, a conservative independent. Based on that analogy, he’s worried that we’re in for a tumultuous era. “The failed assassination attempt on Edwin Walker was a beginning, not an end,” he wrote.

With the president miraculously uninjured except for his right ear, which was grazed by a bullet, Republicans rolled into their nominating convention in an almost joyful mood. Michael Warren covered an event featuring senior Trump adviser Chris LaCivita, noting that “the typically gruff LaCivita sounded practically sunny about the prospects for his boss, Trump, and the Republican Party.” Trump’s polling numbers are good, he’s caught some big legal breaks in recent weeks, and the Democrats are in disarray. “It all looks like the convention of a winner and for Trump, appearance is everything,” Michael wrote. 

The biggest news out of the convention, of course, was Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance to be his running mate. Vance, the 39-year-old senator from Ohio, is a onetime Trump critic who became a staunch Trump supporter. As John McCormack noted in a profile we published earlier in July, “when Vance launched his Senate campaign in 2021, he begged Trump and Republican voters for forgiveness.” 

Now Vance is the heir to the MAGA movement, and Reaganism is out, as the Dispatch Politics crew wrote from the ground in Milwaukee:

While Trump felt the need to select a classic Reaganite as his running mate in 2016, Trump in 2024 felt emboldened to pick a senator who has reinvented himself as an absolute loyalist to Trump, one who has indicated he would carry out an agenda of “post-liberalism” when he likely assumes the role of GOP presidential frontrunner in 2028.

Vance’s speech on Wednesday was a far cry from anything resembling Reaganism, reflecting the tenor of the rest of the convention. He blamed the government for abandoning the white working class, criticized free-trade agreements, and promised a more isolationist foreign policy. His speech also reflected his own journey, as we wrote in Thursday’s Dispatch Politics: 

The main sociological point Vance made in Hillbilly Elegy was that the biggest problems facing the white working class are cultural, not political, and those communities only begin to solve them when “we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” But Vance said on Wednesday night that when he now hears of drug overdoses in his hometown, he thinks: “America’s ruling class wrote the checks. Communities like mine paid the price.” While Vance wrote in 2016 that Trump was “cultural heroin,” he said in his 2024 acceptance speech: “President Trump represents America’s last best hope to restore what—if lost—may never be found again.” 

Kevin, for one, is unimpressed with our potential future vice president. As he noted in his response to Vance’s speech, “Government isn’t your mamaw.” In a separate piece, outlined why he believes Trump settled on the senator from Ohio: “Vance is whomever Trump needs him to be—the perfect would-be vice president, a quite green second banana. Vance can be anybody the day calls for.”

The final night of the convention was, of course, Donald Trump’s big moment. In the wake of Saturday’s shooting, Trump said that he had torn up his intended speech and would deliver a message of unity. And it was indeed a different Trump who took the stage on Thursday night in Milwaukee—at least at first. Trump started off calling for an end to discord and division, saying “We rise together. Or we fall apart.” 

Trump gave a very detailed description of the assassination attempt, and throughout the retelling seemed genuinely humbled, marveling that he would not be alive had he not turned his head to look at a chart displayed behind the crowd on a large screen to his right. And he spoke for a few minutes about Corey Comperatore, the 50-year-old father of two who was killed in the shooting. And then he returned to the notion of unity … kind of. “If Democrats want to unify our country, they should drop these partisan witch hunts, which I’ve been going through for approximately eight years,” he said. Well then.

Trump went on for more than 90 minutes, delving into a fairly standard stump speech from there on out. As we wrote in Dispatch Politics:

Trump proceeded to mention “Crazy Nancy Pelosi,” referring to the Democratic congresswoman from California and former speaker of the House; recalled an episode of “Deface the Nation,” his nickname for the CBS News Sunday public affairs show Face the Nation; and alluded to unfounded claims he has made, consistently, since losing to Biden in 2020, that the election was stolen.

However dramatic the Republican convention was, playing out in the wake of the assassination attempt, it paled in comparison to what was going on with President Joe Biden’s campaign. 

In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s shooting, talk about Biden withdrawing subsided. For a couple days it seemed like the Democrats had decided that sticking with the president was the best path forward.

But by Wednesday, the calls for Biden to end his campaign had begun anew. Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California called for him to “pass the torch,” and reportedly told donors that Biden staying in could cost the Democrats not only the White House, but both the House and the Senate, we reported in The Morning Dispatch.

Biden has remained defiant in face of his calls to step down, even as reports emerged that former President Barack Obama has suggested that Biden needs to reconsider his decision to stay in and that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has maneuvered behind the scenes to encourage the Democrats to find someone else. Some reports indicate she prefers an open convention.

As of Wednesday, Nick remained skeptical that the Democrats could push Biden toward the exit, and it makes him a little angry. As he wrote in Boiling Frogs:

The president, his advisers, his allies in Congress, and his friends in the media have for weeks engaged in a gaslighting campaign so ambitious in its shamelessness that even Donald Trump must be impressed by it. But it simply isn’t working. Whether because Democratic voters are made of sterner stuff than their perpetually gaslit Republican counterparts or because the evidence of infirmity is too blatant to be ignored, there will be no Biden revival.

The party seems ready to nominate him anyway. The nuclear reactor is about to melt down.

Because this weird week apparently needed to be just a little weirder, Biden tested positive for COVID on Wednesday, taking him off the campaign trail and back home to Delaware. Yet, perhaps proving Nick wrong, that didn’t quiet the push for Biden to step down. As of Friday, a total of 35 House Democrats had called upon him to do so. In his newsletter this morning, Stirewalt writes that Biden is stealing the spotlight even from the seclusion of his quarantine:

Biden is bluffing and blustering, smearing his critics, and making an implicit threat: Get back on board or I will ride this whole thing into the ground. 

But unlike Trump and the Republicans, Democrats continue to defy him. Every day, Biden dares his party to oppose him—and every day its members do.

Whew. What a week. We wrote a lot of great stuff I haven’t even mentioned here: Jonah’s G-File about Trump’s speech, Steve’s interview with Sen. Mike Lee about his conversion from Trump critic to Trump supporter, Charlotte’s reporting from Israel on the status of an Israeli proposal for a ceasefire against Hamas, and more. I look forward to returning this newsletter to its normal format … someday soon, I hope. In the meantime, thanks for reading and enjoy your weekend.