Sandwiched right in the middle of an assassination attempt on July 13 and the leading opposition candidate’s withdrawal on July 21, the Republican National Convention saw thousands of delegates from across the country gather in Milwaukee to select their party’s nominee for president and vice president. What the nation saw proved to be unexpectedly historic, in a number of ways.

The show must go on

On Saturday, July 13, shortly after former President Donald Trump began to speak in Butler County, Pennsylvania, Michele Woodhouse was strolling around outside the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, admiring the preparations the city had taken in advance of the Republican National Convention slated to begin that Monday.

“I started to receive messages from people who had been watching the rally,” said Woodhouse, a North Carolina delegate and party chair of the 11th Congressional District. “I was googling and checking news apps and I wasn’t seeing anything, so I started making phone calls and walking back to the North Carolina delegation’s hotel.”

Two miles west, attorney and at-large delegate Leo Phillips, a Cherokee County attorney, was taking in a Brewers game at American Family Field. It was a close contest, and like most fans Phillips was focused on the action on the field until he too began to receive a series of troubling messages.

“You could see the crowd’s reaction changing. They got quieter and people were just looking at their phones, scrolling, talking to one another in quiet tones,” he said. “Everyone just checked out of the game.”

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Woodhouse, meanwhile, had arrived back at the hotel, where she finally saw for herself what had happened.

“We were in the lobby watching the replay of the assassination attempt, just standing there,” she said. “Time stood still.” 

It stood still for Phillips, too — ushers at the ballpark finally had to ask him to leave, because the game had ended and he hadn’t noticed.

“We just stayed and looked at our phones. When we walked out, the crowd was rather subdued. I mean, you heard people saying, ‘Oh my God, they shot Trump,’” Philips recalls. “It was just a very solemn moment, a very reflective moment.”

Solemn, reflective, unanticipated and unprecedented — a former president and leading candidate had come within an inch of losing his life, just days before he was to accept his party’s presidential nomination.

The attempt on Trump’s life didn’t stop the democratic process from bestowing that nomination upon him, but it did make for a very different convention than had been originally planned. 

Come together

Law enforcement agencies have sought to understand the motives of the 20-year-old shooter. His lack of criminal history, lack of mental health diagnoses, lack of a digital footprint and lack of explicit political ideology leaves little insight into him as a person and shifts the speculation, for now, to larger questions about society.

Western North Carolina Rep. Mike Clampitt (R-Swain) resurrected a line that emerged after the mass shootings at Columbine, blaming violent video games, but others marched to the familiar drumbeat of a dependable old boogeyman, violent rhetoric.

Politicians talk of targeted districts, of battleground states and of bullseyes — as President Joe Biden recently did — without a second thought.   

Leo Phillips. File photo

“That was something less presidential than what is expected or should be expected and was expected from my generation, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s,” Phillips said. “That was totally over the top for President Biden to say such a thing. That’s a code to the extreme left, and there’s codes for the extreme right, to take physical, violent actions against someone.” 

Violent rhetoric may be one of the very few bi-partisan political initiatives Americans willingly engage in nowadays, so if it does sometimes result in violent acts, there’s plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the aisle.

In 2009, protestors carried a sign at an anti-Obama rally that read, “We came unarmed (this time).” A year later, Sarah Palin’s PAC put out a map with crosshairs over congressional districts that supported Obamacare. Trump himself said back in 2015 that a man who disrupted a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, maybe should have been “roughed up.” He also theorized back in 2016 that the only thing that would stop Hillary Clinton from appointing liberal federal justices might be “Second Amendment people.” That same year, Trump told a crowd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that if they saw anyone trying to disrupt the rally to “knock the crap” out of them and that he would pick up the legal fees. During his infamous speech at the ellipse just prior to a violent mob storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump told the crowd to “fight like hell.” Reportedly, the first word he uttered after the assassination attempt was, “fight.”

From the left, actor Robert DeNiro said in 2016 that he’d like to punch Trump in the face. Comedian Kathy Griffin participated in a 2017 photo shoot featuring her holding up a bloody mask resembling then-President Trump’s severed head. Actor Johnny Depp joked about an actor assassinating a president in 2017. In 2018, longtime California Congresswoman Maxine Waters urged people to “ create a crowd” around members of Trump’s cabinet in public, to “push back on them” and “tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in 2020 that Republican lawmakers are “enemies of the state.” Biden himself said during the 2016 campaign that he wished he were still in high school so he could take Trump out “behind the gym.” Two years later and still reminiscing over his high school days, Biden said he would “beat the hell out of [Trump]” if they were students. Biden’s July 8 comment that it was “time to put Trump in a bullseye” could have been explained away as a metaphor, like all the rest‚ until that 20-year-old actually did it three days later.

Trump’s initial response to the assassination attempt was measured, perhaps not what the left thought would come from a man who periodically engages in all-night social media rants and had just cheated death by the slimmest of margins. A day after the shooting, Trump told the Washington Examiner that he’d rewritten the script of his convention speech to focus on unity, not on Biden.

“I think you’ve seen a very, very different side of President Trump since [July 13],” Woodhouse said. “You’ve seen a different side of the of the Republican Party. Every speaker that was on the stage this week at the RNC was positive and focused on unity. You heard heart-wrenching, devastating stories, but I think you saw positivity and unity and messages of hope and prosperity.” 

Bittersweet elegy

With Trump’s nomination all but assured after former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley ended her campaign in March, the focus quickly shifted to Trump’s vice presidential pick. Trump soured on his former Veep, Mike Pence, since he said Pence didn’t have the “courage” to violate the law on Jan. 6. Insurrectionists subsequently threatened to hang Pence.

Into that role steps JD Vance, just 39 years old. Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 2022, but may be best known for his bestselling 2016 tome, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” which is both lauded and loathed on each end of the political spectrum, especially here in rural Appalachia.

On one hand, the book presents a classic bootstrap story of a child born into an environment of poverty, addiction and abuse who grew up in strong public schools, joined the Marine Corps, earned his bachelor’s degree on the G.I. Bill and got a full ride to Yale Law School.

On the other hand, critics argue, Vance’s book places much of the blame for rural Appalachia’s poverty on stereotypes and the purported character flaws of the diverse groups of people that live there rather than systemic exploitation by an extractive economy that made them poor in the first place.

“He blames the poor for their poverty, saying that they don’t work hard,” Meredith McCarroll told The Smoky Mountain News July 21.  “Growing up in Waynesville, I saw hard-working people all around me and so I took issue with his representation of the region as filled with lazy people who deserve to be poor.”

McCarroll  is an Appalachian State alum who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee and teaches writing. Her 2019 book with Western Kentucky professor Anthony Harkins, “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy,” was perhaps the most thorough and vocal collection of complaints about Vance’s work. It featured more than 40 essays and poems and won the American Book Award in 2020.

Vance wasn’t Woodhouse’s first pick, but she’s happy with Trump’s decision.

Michele Woodhouse. File photo

“I really liked the idea of [Virginia Governor] Glen Youngkin because I thought it put Virginia on the table. Youngkin did incredibly well in a statewide race by winning over unaffiliated, moderate and even Democratic women,” Woodhouse said. “I think JD Vance is an excellent choice. He won me over completely here at the RNC. I’ve always thought highly of him. His story restores hope in Americans that the American dream is possible.”

Constitutionally speaking, Trump can only be elected once more, making his elevation of Vance that much more intriguing. In theory — but not always in practice, as per Pence — vice presidents often presume themselves at the front of a long line of potential successors.

“As a Republican, I love this part of it as well,” said Woodhouse. “This is a 12-year strategy. This is four years of Donald Trump in the White House, followed by eight years of JD Vance. And I love that strategy, because Republicans don’t always think that way. Oftentimes, decisions are made that are about the short-term. But this is a long-term, America-first, prosperity-for-all-Americans vision that’s been put forth by the Republican Party.”

Phillips said he didn’t know much about Vance, but now plans to read his book. Phillips’ first choice was Sen. Marco Rubio, although he acknowledged it was far-fetched because both Trump and Rubio live in Florida. Confusing language  in the Twelfth Amendment makes it difficult — but not impossible — for two residents of the same state to be elected as president and vice president.

Youngkin was also on Phillips’ list, as was former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson, whom Phillips called intelligent, articulate, insightful and morally connected but most importantly, able to step in if something happens to the president.

As to the 12-year strategy mentioned by Woodhouse, Phillips disagrees.

“I think the MAGA movement is particularly attuned and attributable to Donald J. Trump, period,” Phillips said. “I don’t think he can pass that mantle. That’s going to have to be earned by whoever wants to get it and I think what JD Vance does is open the possibility for an open convention [in 2028] or an open primary season at the very least. I don’t think just the fact that he’s vice president means he’s going to be propelled to the White House.”

Should I stay or should I go 

Delegates and dignitaries in Milwaukee spent four days digging at a man who dropped out of the presidential race three days after the convention had concluded. Pundits pondered whether the whole thing was a great big waste of time, but it’s not a far leap to tie Biden’s policies to Harris, and, it did energize Republicans ready to get out there and work hard for another Trump term.

Biden’s July 21 exit from the race surprised some, but others not so much; starting with his disastrous performance at a June 27 debate with Trump, Biden endured a month-long period of constant humiliation. Nearly every time he tried to project strength and competence, he failed. Lifelong allies called for him to step aside and political donations dried up as national media — until recently, strangely silent on Biden’s apparent ailments — circled like vultures.

Perhaps that’s why some Republicans wanted him to stick around a bit longer.

“One-hundred percent I want Joe to stay,” Woodhouse said July 19. “And I think you hear that from Republicans if you ask them straight up who they want at the top of the ticket. Joe Biden is who I want at the top of the ticket, because I think that’s the easiest path to victory for Republicans.” 

Reached on July 22, after Biden dropped out, Woodhouse said she wouldn’t grade the new race as “harder” or “easier,” but instead demonstrated the pivot Republicans had begun to make.  

“Right now, the Democratic Party is rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic,” she said.  “Kamala Harris has to own the policies of this administration. She supported all of his policies and lied to the people about his cognitive state.”

Now, Republicans are lashing out with misinformation about Harris’ role as so-called “border czar,” a position that does not exist. She was, however, tasked by Biden with investigating the conditions that cause some South Americans to flee their countries, often to the United States.

Harris even supported a bipartisan border security bill, negotiated over months, that Trump proudly tanked back in February so Biden couldn’t take credit for it. In June, Biden accused congressional Republicans of playing politics with national security and took executive action to prevent migrants who cross the southern border illegally from seeking asylum.

Again differing with Woodhouse slightly, Phillips said Biden isn’t, wasn’t and won’t be up to the job and should step down from both his campaign and the presidency, immediately.

“Honestly, I think he should go,” Phillips said about 24 hours before Biden did, in fact, go. “I think it’s a disservice to our country at this point. We have to be Americans, and if the President is having some health difficulties, the president is having some issues related to his age — I mean, there’s people in our community that are older than President Biden that, I hate to say it, are more cognitively enabled, mentally and physically, to do their everyday jobs. I just I think the man needs to put his pride aside in all honesty and resign as president. I think it’s dangerous.”

Although Phillips wasn’t the first to raise the issue, his comments call into question Biden’s ability to serve the American people until the next president is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2025. Woodhouse, too, thinks that if Biden can’t run, he can’t and shouldn’t serve.

“That bad night at the debate, that was not a ‘bad night,’” Woodhouse said. “What we are seeing and what we have seen play out over the course of the last few days shows to me that Joe Biden right now is the biggest national security risk to our country. He does not seem to have the cognitive nor physical strength to be serving as the president.”

The end

Now that the RNC is in the rear-view mirror, all of the historic events that led up to it — overshadowed it, some would say — are coming into sharper focus.

Trump is not the first former president to receive his party’s nomination in the subsequent election. Trump is not the first former president to be shot while campaigning for his party’s nomination.

Trump is, however, the first major party candidate in American history to receive his party’s nomination after being held responsible by a court for sexual assault. Trump is also the first major party candidate in American history to receive his party’s nomination while a convicted felon.

While Trump has appealed the sexual assault ruling and all 34 felony convictions, it won’t take away from the fact that the former is a crime of character and the latter is a crime of trust based on business fraud connected to his sexual affair with a porn star in July, 2006, as his wife of 18 months ostensibly sat at home caring for their newborn son.

The Republican Party has always claimed to be better in touch with the moral fabric of Americans than the Democratic Party, even before Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill” that was, according to Reagan’s farewell speech in 1989, “built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.”

Questioning Biden’s physical fitness to serve has been fair game for some time, but questioning Trump’s moral fitness to serve somehow has not.

“I can’t speak for the American people,” Phillips said. “I can just speak for myself, and I don’t want to question the intent of the jury; however, when you’re picking a jury, you go through specific questions and you try to determine whether or not they can be fair and impartial, which means they put aside their beliefs. Now, you’re dealing with juries in in New York, in a very liberal or most liberal part of the state. So how I deal with it is, I don’t think the man had a fair shot at it.”

Woodhouse perhaps summed up the feelings of many voters on how — policy disagreements aside — Trump retains a strong chance to win, even as a convicted criminal.

“Are those going to be overturned on appeal? I think there’s a very high probability that that happens,” Woodhouse said. “I think for most voters, the Donald Trump they knew in 2016 was an imperfect man. And unless the Republicans or the Democrats are going to run Jesus — the only perfect person to ever walk the earth — every candidate you put forth has imperfections, shortcomings, sins, decisions that they’ve made in their life that they wish they hadn’t.”