“Let me tell you something, brother. When I came here tonight, there was so much energy in this room. I felt maybe I was in Madison Square Garden getting ready to win another world title. The vibe was so intense, the energy was so crazy.”
Hulk Hogan is sweating. His skin is sagging off his arms. His eyes are wild. In two minutes, he’s going to rip his t-shirt off. I’m in this room too. It’s the cavernous convention hall in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Republican National Convention was held last week. And whatever energy Hulk is talking about… it wasn’t there.
The RNC began just two days after an assassin came within millimetres of blowing Trump’s head off, and pictures of some people in the crowd wearing ear bandages to mirror him went viral. Strangely enough, and contrary to expectations, the numbers that came out on the convention’s second day actually went down slightly for Trump in the first polls after the shooting.
The whole atmosphere was subdued: a collection of by-the-numbers appearances from the usual tedious MAGA wingnuts like Tucker Carlson, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Matt Gaetz and celebrities and pro-wrestlers like Kid Rock, Dana White and Hogan weren’t much more than embarrassing.
A cigar-smoking alternate delegate from Texas outside the convention hall told me he wasn’t interested in the speakers; he’d decided to skip them to sit in the sun and “check out the talent.”
Outside the perimeter, Biden signs in windows and on lawns vastly outnumbered Trump signs – I only saw one or two of the latter anywhere. Compared to previous events there were hardly any merchandise stalls; by the end of the week those there had dropped their prices to offload unsold hats and t-shirts.
The first person I saw when I passed through the metal detectors into the restricted central area of the Republican National Convention was Marjorie Taylor Greene, the swivel-eyed Qanon congresswoman whose 2020 victory party I got thrown out of for getting her press secretary wasted on Fireball cinnamon whiskey. She was on an outside stage being interviewed in front of a dozen or so people for some far right podcast – someone like Charlie Kirk or maybe Jack Posobiec – and did a direct eye-contact double-take as I walked past with an expression like “hang on, where do I recognise you from?”
I ducked, not wanting my cover blown – I was there as a guest, without press credentials, though I didn’t have any Fireball on me.
Trump’s new vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, spoke the previous night to an only about two-thirds-full arena. Now a senator for Ohio, he came to prominence when he published Hillbilly Elegy, a trite and lazy quasi-memoir portrayal of white working-class poverty in Appalachia.
Vance is undoubtedly clever, but so cynically ambitious that he essentially has no core beliefs at all. “Donald Trump represents America’s last best hope to restore what – if lost – may never be found again,” he said in his speech, about a man he once called “America’s Hitler.”
Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, started his career after Yale working for a Silicon Valley venture capital firm run by Peter Thiel, who later funded his 2022 senate campaign. Recently, he’s adopted a sort of fetishised neo-1950s women’s-place-is-in-the-kitchen ideology, supporting a national abortion ban with no exception for rape or incest.
His wife Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants and a high-flying litigator who clerked for Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts and worked on the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project while studying law at Yale, stood beside him with a fixed rictus grin as the crowd in front of her chanted “MASS DEPORTATION NOW.”
I had a guest pass with a seat up in the gods, but squatted on a spare stool in the press box with a better view for the final night. After Kid Rock played Trump on to the stage, what followed was the longest speech in American convention history – a tortuous 92 minutes, beating the previous 74-
minute record set by Trump in 2016.
From where I was sitting, I could see the teleprompter on the back of the room. I watched the text scroll, early on, through empty platitudes like: “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America” and “the discord and division in our society must be healed” and “as Americans we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny; we rise together, or we fall apart.”
But the longer the speech ground on, the less the autocue moved, and as Trump wandered off-piste I started to regret not bringing another bottle of Fireball. “Has anyone seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner,” he extemporised.
And then “Insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists are coming in at numbers we’ve never seen before. Bad things are going to happen.”
He was talking about immigration here, though it’s hard to tell except from the context that the line abuts: “The entire world is pouring into our country because of this administration. They’re coming in from everywhere. They’re coming in at levels we’ve never seen before. It is an invasion.”
You wouldn’t know it from much of the press coverage, which could have been written word for word before Trump even took the stage. In fact, a lot of it almost certainly was; you could tell which, because they’re the ones that unquestioningly echoed what the RNC briefed out beforehand.
“A changed Trump?” “Can Trump unite the US?” “Sombre Trump accepts nomination.” “Trump takes a unity tone.” “Trump: We must heal discord.” “A new Don: Trump preaches unity, vows to heal divided America.” “In a departure, Trump calls for unity, healing in America.” “Trump emphasises unity.” “Sombre Trump pledges ‘everything I have to give’.” “Trump takes a unity tone.” “A politically cunning transformation.”
“Today was the day Donald Trump finally became president” was a running joke even back in 2016, the joke being that newspapers seem never to learn that he never changes, and never will. There’s been no pivot.
But this was Trump at his lowest ebb: still insensible, but without the virality or drama of the American Carnage days. Not a pivot to unity, but not outrageous either; nothing to convince sceptical swing voters but also nothing to energise the base.
The whole week was about unity only inasmuch as it was essentially a coronation. The GOP is united because it has essentially ceased to exist. Any brief idea there might have been that it might hew back to normality after the 2020 loss was ridiculous. This isn’t a party now, it’s a cult. But the man his fans call god-emperor is cracking up.
I have been covering Trump since the beginning – I was there when he launched his primary campaign in New Hampshire way back in 2015, and have been to scores of rallies and events since then, so I can say with confidence that this really, really isn’t the same Trump he was back then, or even the one who lost to Biden in 2020.
Even before the months-long panic attack following Biden’s admittedly piss-poor debate performance – a process that led, finally, to his stepping down from the ticket on Sunday – the sense of impending doom has felt, to me, overblown. Panicky articles showing Trump and Biden neck-and-neck or even “Trump ahead in key swing states” all seemed to fail to miss the real story.
To me, the real takeaway from those was things like, wait, Georgia is a swing state now? Which in and of itself is a disaster for Republicans, however close the actual polling numbers are there.
It was clear then but it’s going to be crystal after the Democrats nominate a new candidate: Biden may have lost the debate, but Trump certainly didn’t win it either. That night, and at the RNC, he was visibly diminished, increasingly incoherent and lacking in his old star power.
His personal favourability numbers have remained dismal, and Biden’s announcement robbed him of any remaining hope for a post-convention bump. He is now the race’s ageing, rambling candidate.
Despite the last few months’ abject despair on the left, this ticket is eminently beatable, and the atmosphere in Milwaukee reflected a subconscious awareness that the whole wild trip may soon be over.
Trump’s postings on Truth Social have been getting more and more deranged. Vance brings little as running mate, and his hardcore anti-abortion stance brings nothing but problems in an election in which the overturning of Roe v Wade will likely be the most important campaign issue, especially now that Kamala Harris is the presumptive nominee.
What Trump’s speech was – what the whole convention was, in fact – was extremely low-energy; at times, even forlorn. Sleepy Donald!
And the audience agreed – by the final 30 minutes of his speech the former president had started haemorrhaging attention: 21% of viewers had switched off by the end, according to Nielsen, the American TV ratings company, who also said that 8 million fewer viewers tuned in this year than had done in 2016.
It was the same story in the room: even hardcore red-capped MAGA faithfuls and delegates started drifting out before the end to head to bars and after-parties. Sad!
Nicky Woolf is a journalist and podcaster covering the intersection of politics and internet subculture. His latest investigative series, Fur & Loathing, is out now
