Wake up with the Washington Examiner: Assassination attempt, GOP unity, and a return to the spotlight – Washington Examiner

Max ThornberryJuly 15, 2024

Ron. ‌”I wasn’t supposed to be here. It’s a miracle.”

Wake up with the Washington Examiner: Assassination attempt, GOP unity, and a return to the spotlight

July 15, 2024 8:25 am

Assassination nation

The 2024 presidential contest turned uglier than anyone imagined on Saturday when former President Donald Trump survived what appeared to be an attempt on his life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Once ubiquitous in American politics, political violence has generally receded into the background. The domestic terrorist attacks and assassinations that plagued the country in the ’60s and ’70s has given way to incendiary rhetoric and verbal abuse.

But as the temperature has gone up, the violent tendencies boiled over when officials say Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed onto a rooftop hundreds of feet away from a stage and opened fire on Trump. The shooter didn’t kill his target, nicking the former president’s ear and sending him to the ground under a pile of Secret Service bodies. But at least one person in the crowd was killed, and two others were critically injured.

Trump was hurried off the stage under cover, but not before he asked agents to let him put on his shoe and raised a bloody fist into the air with a message for his supporters to continue to fight.

The fallout was immense. President Joe Biden spoke with Trump on Saturday night and told the world it is time to “lower the temperature in politics” in an Oval Office address Sunday. The president put his campaign on hold, stopping ads from running as the country processed the violence.

Lawmakers used the Sunday morning news shows to lament the turn “politics as normal” took on Saturday. House members and senators from both sides of the aisle condemned the shooting and called for a change in rhetoric to stop something like this from happening again, though some of them did not sound confident we could come back from the road we’ve started down.

“We can’t assume that these kind of things can’t happen again,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) said. “We just have to turn down … the temperature on this. And this election is going to be the biggest kind of election in our lifetime, and we have months ahead of us.”

Sunday concluded with two major interviews Trump gave to the Washington Examiner.

The former president told Salena Zito, in what was a world-first interview after the attempt on his life, that he had ripped up the acceptance speech he was prepared to give on Thursday at the Republican National Convention.

“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together,” he said. “The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago.”

The new speech, he said, is focused on uniting the country and inspired by the small physical action on Saturday that saved his life.

Trump also spoke with Chief Political Correspondent Byron York about his fateful decision to turn his head and look up at a screen showing immigration statistics he was referring to during his campaign speech. The move was a rare one for Trump, who said he rarely looks away from the crowd. But the minimal move has lingered in Trump’s mind.

“The most incredible thing was that I happened to not only turn but to turn at the exact right time and in just the right amount,” Trump told Byron Sunday afternoon in a talk aboard his Boeing 757 as he flew to Milwaukee for the start of the RNC. “If I only half-turn, it hits the back of the brain. The other way goes right through [the skull]. And because the sign was high, I’m looking up. The chances of my making a perfect turn are probably one-tenth of 1%, so I’m not supposed to be here.”

There was a flood of information about the shooting, the response, the fallout, and the future of the country as people consider what it could mean for the 2024 contest, in particular, and the character of the nation beyond November.

Click here to read up on the four biggest takeaways from this weekend’s events. And keep tabs on the Washington Examiner for the latest news and updates.

RNC returns to spotlight

Republicans have been operating in the background of the country’s consciousness for two weeks. Democrats have dominated headlines and news cycles as the family rifts about whether it is time to move on from Biden spilled out into public.

A disastrous debate performance followed by incredible discipline by Trump to keep himself out of the spotlight turned up the pressure on Democrats to balance governing with campaigning.

But that all changed on Saturday. And with the RNC opening its doors this morning, the attention is going to shift back to Trump and the GOP.

Trump might have changed the speech he plans to give at the conclusion of the convention, but the rest of the show is going on as planned. Each day of the RNC will be themed — beginning with Monday’s “Make America Wealthy Once Again.”

White House Reporter Haisten Willis has a scene-setter to get everyone up to speed on the biggest event of the year for the GOP.

“The nearly 2,500 delegates from across the country will hit the Fiserv Forum, home of the Milwaukee Bucks, and other nearby venues for the festivities and the formal launch of a campaign that they hope will unseat President Joe Biden — or whoever runs this fall for the Democrats,” Haisten writes.

Trump is also expected to make his announcement about whom he is picking to be his running mate today.

Click here to catch up on everything you need to know about the RNC.

Republicans reunited

Republicans have been more united in recent weeks than Democrats as the party in charge of two of the three arms of government eats itself alive over whom to keep at the top of the ticket in November. But the unity, until now, wasn’t guaranteed to be the headline item at the RNC.

Trump made a controversial move when he dipped his toe in the policy waters. He took on an outsize role in influencing the party’s 2024 platform, moving the process behind closed doors and frustrating staunch anti-abortion members by softening the party’s position on the procedure in line with the Supreme Court’s ruling that the states should be the arbiters of when and where an abortion should be legal.

Congress and Campaigns Editor David Sivak peeled back the curtain on the simmering fights that appear to have been put on ice in the wake of Trump’s shooting.

“The gravity of the shooting, which immediately drew parallels to the failed attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981, will tower over the confab, energizing a base of supporters who already believed Trump to be the martyr for the conservative cause before Saturday’s events,” David writes.

“I’ve never seen the Republican Party more unified in my Generation Z life,” Brandon Maly, the chairman of the Dane County Republicans in Wisconsin and a delegate to the convention, told him.

“For Maly, too young to remember the events of 9/11 clearly, the assassination attempt represents the greatest moment of national unity in his lifetime. Political leaders from both parties, including Trump’s rival, President Joe Biden, condemned the violence while calling on Americans to lower the temperature of political rhetoric.”

Click here to read more about the Republicans finding a common thread as the spotlight returns to them.