The Decibel - What’s next for Republicans after the attack on Trump

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on Saturday has thrown an already tense election campaign into further chaos. Despite being injured in the shooting, Trump vowed to maintain his schedule at this week’s Republican National Convention, where the former president has named his running mate.The Globe’s U.S. correspondent Adrian Morrow joins the podcast from the convention to talk about the fallout from the historic attack on Trump and what lies ahead for Republicans this week at the convention.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

On Monday, Donald Trump officially became his party's nominee for president at the Republican National Convention. This comes after the attempted assassination on Saturday. If you want to really see something that said, take a look at what happened. In the crowd at the rally was a woman named Renee. You know, at first I was like, what the heck was that? And then, I don't know if it was a smoke or whatever whizzing past. Like, I definitely seen something. And then right away I turned and I looked at Trump. And then I seen him drop to the ground.

I seen the Secret Service just like, I mean, do their thing, right? And they're up on top of him. They got him down. Are we good? Shooters down. Are we good to move? Are we clear? We're clear. You know, when he left the stage, you know, I'm sitting there looking at his shoe, you know, and I'm like, his shoe's sitting there, you know, and I thought, what a terrible thing, you know, like he got off of there and here's his shoe sitting there, you know. Hours after the attack, Trump wrote on social media that a bullet pierced the upper part of his right ear.

Behind him, a rally attendee named Corey Comparatore was killed. Two other men were injured. As Trump was rushed offstage with blood on his face, he raised his fist to the crowd. The screams turned to cheers. This was the first time a sitting or former U.S. president has been shot at since Ronald Reagan was nearly killed in 1981. The gunman shot at Trump from atop a warehouse roof, 150 meters from the stage. He's been identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks.

He was killed by law enforcement. Globe reporters in Pennsylvania have been talking to people who knew him, and they painted a picture of a quiet, smart student who enjoyed video games and was drawn to websites that celebrated gun culture. The FBI has said the gun used in the assassination attempt was legally bought by his father. But the motivation for the attack remains unknown. The FBI continues to investigate. And now, the campaign continues, but with a different edge. So today, we're talking to Globe U.S. correspondent Adrian Morrow. He's in Milwaukee to cover the

Republican National Convention, and he'll tell us about what's expected to happen this week at the RNC and the political fallout from the attempted assassination. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Adrian, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. We're talking to you on Monday afternoon, and you're actually in the media room at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Adrian, what has been your first impression of the mood there? A lot of people here feel determined to basically just go ahead with the convention as planned, you know, despite Donald Trump having survived an assassination attempt, you know, not even 48 hours ago, they basically made this decision almost immediately to proceed as planned with the

convention. Donald Trump in some ways actually set the tone himself as he was coming off the stage surrounded by the Secret Service after the assassination attempt. He's pumping his fist in the air and shouting fight. I think he seemed to have always been very determined that this was going to happen. You know, the RNC itself said the other day that they're not changing any security measures here. The security is already quite tight here,

but that they basically feel they can go ahead and have the convention. So even though it opens under a cloud and people a little bit on edge here, there is this real determination to sort of go ahead as planned. Yeah. And you mentioned security there. Can you describe, I guess, what the city looks like right now? Yeah. So, the central part of Milwaukee is all fenced off with security fencing. And then there's some additional security for getting into some of the individual venues within the convention campus. So, we've got a number of buildings that are kind of part of all of this. Everybody who's inside, who's allowed through the perimeter has been vetted by the Secret Service,

as well as having credentialing and accreditation for the convention itself. So consequently, because of that, this is a pretty secure area. It's a fairly large campus. It's 10 or 20 city blocks, something like that, that's been sort of shut down. Yeah, and because of the vetting for people. So it's not just that people have to pass through metal detectors to get into the perimeter of the convention site, but they've also been vetted by the Secret Service ahead of time. So they have a fair amount of security here that the Secret Service really seems to feel is enough to keep Donald Trump and the other dignitaries safe. Yeah. And from what I understand, right, this is a place where only delegates and party officials can really be, right? It's not like a rally where literally anyone can show up. There's a very clear set of people who can be inside that building.

Yeah, that's correct. It's, you know, delegates, people working to put the convention on, members of the media, obviously. It's a sort of closed group of people who've had to apply and be vetted by the Secret Service in advance. So I think they're hoping that that's going to be enough to kind of keep everybody safe. So Adrian, can you just kind of, I guess, set the scene for us a little bit with this convention? Like looking at the bigger picture, how significant will this convention this week actually be for U.S. politics? There's always going to be the official kickoff to the general election campaign for the Republicans. You know, Donald Trump will be formally nominated. He'll give a convention speech on Thursday night, which will be the culmination of it.

And he'll basically have to both prosecute his case against Joe Biden and make the affirmative case for himself on why he should be elected president. It's taken on added significance after the assassination attempt 48 hours ago. There will be more attention on him, I think, than there even would have been otherwise, if that's possible to believe. This will be his first major public appearance since surviving the assassination attempt, and people are really going to want to hear what he has to say. And so he really has the opportunity here to basically affirmatively make his case to people. You know, there's a small number of undecided voters. I don't think that's a large group of people, but, you know, that's enough to tip an election potentially. So he'll want to be reaching out to those people to say, here's why you should choose me over Joe Biden.

So the stakes are really high for Trump. You know, this is his opportunity to set the tone and get people motivated. Yeah. And so from what you're saying, it sounds like we are definitely expecting to hear from him at this convention this week. Do we know, though, exactly when we might see him on stage, Adrian? So we know for certain that we will hear from him on Thursday night. That's when he'll give his formal convention speech, accepting the nomination. That'll be the biggest moment of the convention. It's possible that he will appear before that.

We are expected to see him in the convention hall tonight. It's possible that he will appear before that. We are expected to see him in the convention hall tonight. That's Monday night. So far, my understanding, though, is that there aren't plans for him to speak on Monday night. We will see Donald Trump being Donald Trump. He may change his mind at the last minute and decide that he does want to come out and say something. He may decide not to save it all for his big Thursday night speech. Often with political conventions like this, Adrian, we see protests alongside them. Do we know if there are any plans for protests in Milwaukee this week? Yeah, there's at least one protest plan for today.

Apparently, sort of a range of different groups and people taking part in it, focusing on Israel-Palestine to LGBTQ rights, to the war in Ukraine. It's expected to march on the RNC. Certainly from inside the convention, it hasn't actually been particularly visible. I know that it's happening within downtown Milwaukee, but from where I am, my vantage point, the city around the convention site has been actually relatively quiet, or at least from what we can see, most of the activity seems to be happening here within the convention space. So let's actually look at what will happen at this convention then. So other than Trump being formally confirmed as the party's nominee,

what else can we expect? Yeah, it's basically a pep rally. I mean, you know, Donald Trump essentially locked down the nomination in the primaries when he decisively defeated all of his primary challengers by enormous margins. And so the nomination itself is primaries when he decisively defeated all of his primary challengers by enormous margins. And so the nomination itself is sort of more of a formality, but it's an opportunity for Trump and for the Republicans to try to motivate one another to go out and do everything they can to win the election. It's also an attempt to sort of create a TV spectacle and to try to communicate directly with American voters, often in very unfiltered ways, what your message is and why they should vote for you. So Monday night, for example, the entire theme of the evening is all about the economy

and accusing Joe Biden of having made everyday life unaffordable. In addition to a bunch of politicians, they're going to bring up some regular working people who are going to talk about how difficult it's been to afford groceries and afford gasoline in the last few years with the inflation in the U.S. and accused Joe Biden of having caused that. They also make news Donald Trump's vice presidential pick is set to be announced this afternoon right after Trump is formally nominated. The convention will formally nominate the VP. So by the time this airs Tuesday morning, we should know who that person is then. You will know who that is. Yeah, we do. We currently do not. But that will happen. That will happen on Monday afternoon. And you touched on this a little bit,

Adrienne, about the people we're expecting to hear from. You mentioned some ordinary Americans that are supposed to get up on stage there. But are there any big names that are also expected to speak? Tim Scott is set to speak tonight as a senator from South Carolina. He sort of plays Mr. Nice Guy in the Republican Party. And there aren't a lot of people who have the kind of that sort of image that he does. So he is the sort of person who could potentially reach out to swing voters or try to convince more moderate Republicans to stay within the fold. Nikki Haley, who, you know, initially, it wasn't even clear that she was going to bother, you know, even attending the convention.

She's slotted to speak apparently on Tuesday now. She represents basically everything that was the Republican establishment before there was Donald Trump, where she's much more interventionist on foreign policy. She's a small government conservative. So there was, of course, the huge rivalry between Haley and Trump during the primaries. Right. So this is, I guess, part of where this is coming from. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So Haley was the one who lasted the longest in the primaries against Trump.

And she essentially did it by running the most in opposition to Donald Trump and certainly in opposition to his vision, his sort of more nationalistic vision for the Republican Party. So I think she'll be important to them to sort of convince people who are maybe Reaganite type conservatives that Donald Trump still has their backing. We'll be right back. So, Adrian, we've talked about the convention, but let's change gears a little bit now and talk about the political fallout of really what happened over this past weekend. I'm wondering, are there any historical parallels that I guess we can look to in order to understand the potential responses really to Trump's assassination attempt?

Yeah, I mean, the U.S. has had a number of assassinations and attempted assassinations of presidents. Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 was a former president at the time, was running unsuccessfully, as it turned out, to try to reclaim the presidency and was actually shot in Milwaukee before a campaign speech. Famously went ahead and gave the speech anyway because the bullet was stopped by his glasses case and a copy of his speech that were in his chest pocket. He declared himself as fit as a bull moose afterwards, which was the nickname for his third party, his splinter group that he'd formed at the time. And then the other one, of course, Ronald Reagan in 1981 was shot a little more than two months into his first term.

And he nearly died, was shot in the chest. And only because of emergency surgery, doctors were able to save his life. So Donald Trump here, he has a sort of moment where he could potentially sort of use the reflection that the U.S. is going through right now over the political violence and over the overcharged rhetoric. I think he does have a moment where he could sort of

cast himself as more of a unifier. We have seen a couple of recent appearances where Trump was more careful in his rhetoric and toned things down a little bit. Trump did say in some comments yesterday to the Washington Examiner that his original convention speech, the way he'd originally written it, it was a humdinger and was meant to take square aim at Joe Biden and have a lot of attack lines, but that he had decided to completely rewrite it after the assassination attempt.

But then today on Truth Social, we saw Donald Trump sort of go back to what he's more typically like, where he was in response to Eileen Cannon, a Trump-appointed judge in Florida, throwing out one of the federal criminal cases against him. Trump basically said, you know, to unite the country, all of these criminal cases should be thrown out. These are the criminal cases against Trump we're talking about here. Yeah, that's correct. He basically said all the criminal cases against him should be thrown out. He said these are the criminal cases against Trump we're talking about here. Yeah, that's correct. He basically said all the criminal cases against him should be thrown out. You know, he said that they were all political attacks coordinated by the Democrat Justice Department. He said that these prosecutions of him are an election interference conspiracy against him

because he's Biden's political opponent. You know, he referred to one of the cases as witch hunts, you know, hoax, scam. So it remains to be seen, you know, we'll see if his speech on Thursday, to what extent it's like that true social post, or to what extent he actually does try to bridge the divides in the country and present a more unifying message. Yeah, and this is really interesting to think about here, Adrian, these responses, because it really illustrates how we are in this hyper-partisan environment in the states, at least. And I guess I wonder, because since the assassination attempt, we've seen many politicians calling for calm and calling to tone down the rhetoric, right? House Speaker Mike Johnson was saying this, and so was President Joe Biden in an address from the Oval Office on Sunday night. I want to speak to you tonight about the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics and to remember, while we may disagree, we are not enemies.

But Adrian, how do you actually do that when you have such a partisan environment, when emotions are running so high? How is that possible? Yeah, I think that's a very good question. I think the issue is that American politicians, at least since the 90s, and I think it's been supercharged in the last few years, have tended to discover that it's easier to motivate people or at least to motivate their people to come out by utterly demonizing the other side and trying to sort of obstruct anything they do. And so a lot of this is pretty ingrained in the way that politics are handled here, as well as in the way that a lot of voters engage with politics. The fact that Mike Johnson was sort of pilloried by

part of his own party for making a deal with Joe Biden that allowed military aid for Ukraine to pass through Congress. And this is Johnson, who's a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. He's not some sort of middle-of-the-road compromiser. Even he sort of took it on the chin for that. So I think the difficulty is going to be for a lot of politicians, maybe selling it to their own base that it's necessary to strike the sort of conciliatory tone. And we saw in Johnson's comments on Sunday that even as he called for calm, he then suggested that Joe Biden's rhetoric might be partly to blame for the assassination attempt on Trump, essentially saying that Joe Biden casting Trump as a dangerous authoritarian is the sort of rhetoric that motivates people to engage in political violence.

So even there, they're sort of having a tough time, I think, setting aside some of that rhetoric. There's been some indication that the Democrats decided to pull back on advertising and on attacking Donald Trump during the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt. But again, we'll sort of see how long that lasts. You know, it really remains to be seen how long people can exercise restraint, because restraint has not been the name of the game in the last few years in U.S. politics. Before I let you go, Adrian, I just want to ask you, you've been covering US politics for us since the start of Trump's first term in office. How does this election season compare to the others that you've covered? In the primaries, it was very different because both in

2016 and in 2020, there were highly competitive primaries. In 2016, it was both parties. In 2020, it was the Democrats. You really had these open-ended discussions in both parties over what the future of the party should be. And this time around, with an incumbent president on the Democratic side and a guy who's previously been president on the Republican side, you really had very little competition within the primaries. The other thing I think that's been notable is that a dominant thread in US politics in the last eight years is people repeatedly failing

to take Donald Trump seriously and then learning to their surprise somehow that Donald Trump really is serious. You know, I remember in 2016, people thought he was a novelty candidate or was running, you know, as a joke. And the very first story that I wrote about Donald Trump in January 2016

said, you know, this is real, that, you know, people who support Donald Trump really support him. They really think he's a great candidate. They want him to be president. And they like his message and they agree with all the things that he's saying. It's not just sort of a lark. And I think this time around, to the extent that in previous elections, the narrative around Trump was often that he was unfocused and chaotic and had no ideas of what he's doing. But not to say that that isn't true in a lot of instances. This time around, I don't think there's any doubt that he's serious about what he wants to do. You know, he's the policies that he's putting

forward, he does actually want to implement. One example of a major policy that Trump is vowing to implement that would have significant implications for Canada would be a 10% tariff on all goods coming into the United States. That's something that he's talked about doing. He's already pushed a trade agenda extensively in his first term, and he signaled that he wants to go even further if he gets back in. And he seems to have learned the lessons of his first term in office, where he relied heavily on a lot of very establishment Republicans who fundamentally disagreed with him on a whole bunch of major policies, and then got very frustrated when they wouldn't do the things that he wanted to. Trump has made very clear that he's not going to do that again. And on top of that, you know,

he's put out an extensive amount of policy. You know, the Heritage Foundation has also been working on policy papers. This is Project 2025? Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation version. And it's all sort of geared towards him getting in and on day one, being able to actually implement all the things he wants to do in terms of rounding up undocumented immigrants and deporting them, making most of the civil service fireable by the president

so that he can, if he wants to, replace them with political appointees. The Heritage Foundation has also been putting together a database of people that he can draw on who've been vetted for their MAGA bona fides to put into office. So I think if there's one thing that ought to be really different in how people sort of think about this election compared to the last two, it's that the amount of control he has over the Republican Party now compared to previous election cycles means that if he gets elected, I think he is actually going to be able to do a lot of the things that he wants to do. And I would imagine this time, or hope this time, that nobody thinks

that he shouldn't be taken seriously. Adrian, I know it's been a busy few days for you. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Thank you, Manika. After Adrian and I spoke, Trump announced Senator J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate. Vance is a senator from Ohio, and he's also known for his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. That's it for today. I'm Manika Raman-Wilms. Thanks to Robin Doolittle for reporting files on this episode, and to Kevin Sexton for production help. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy-McLaughlin and Michal Stein. David Crosby edits the show.

Adrienne Chung is our senior producer and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon.