The Republican National Convention kicked off in earnest on Monday in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Donald Trump made his first public appearance since surviving an assassination attempt on Saturday — as well as announced his new running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, who is now joining the Trump ticket against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris this fall. Below is our running account of how Trump’s VP reveal, his big entrance, the prime-time speeches, and the rest of the first night of the 2024 RNC played out.
The first day of the Republican National Convention got the job done. The delegates nominated their two candidates, approved a platform, greeted their nearly assassinated hero with gusto, and sang and danced along with a steady upbeat soundtrack of popular songs. A decent number of the obligatory party stalwarts performed their speeches, many in the afternoon and early evening sessions when few were watching.
There was enough standard-brand savagery aimed at Joe Biden, his vice-president, and his party to undercut all the talk of a “national unity” convention. And there will be three more days to deplore the “American Carnage” of the Biden administration, fluff up Trump’s record and agenda, and finally hear an acceptance speech, which is likely to set the tone for the sprint to November.
But from a stagecraft point of view, old-school convention aficionados like me were a bit underwhelmed by the prime-time session that surely drew the most eyeballs. Republicans created a widespread expectation that Trump would not only appear in the convention hall but would speak, and that didn’t happen. He looked pained and unhappy to be there — totally understandable for a man who barely escaped death just two days earlier but not in line with the indestructible, indeed divinely ordained, heroism with which he was being attributed. Speakers were introduced before the crowd could even express its full adoration of the man. It was like convention organizers wanted to get the show over with so the former president could continue his recovery.
The prime-time speeches that delegates did hear in place of the Trump remarks they craved were questionable. Several “real people” spoke on the economic themes of the night but mostly regurgitated anti-Biden talking points about gas and food prices that have become stale after months of repetition. And close to 20 minutes in the heart of prime time were given to Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who did not endorse Trump and served up large helpings of corporate-bashing red meat that probably nauseated a lot of the union-hating “job creators” among the delegates.
I have no way of knowing how closely the convention messaging followed what the Trump campaign and convention managers wanted. But it could have been fresher, more consistent, and most of all Trumpier.
In one of the lengthier and more energetic speeches given at the RNC on Monday night, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien dismissed his critics on the left and praised Donald Trump as “one tough SOB.” (O’Brien goes by his initials, TeamsterSOB, on X.) He went on to speak of the need to organize Amazon workers and concluded by saying, “We must put workers first. What could be more important to the security of our nation than a long-term investment in the American worker?”
It’s unlikely that most Republicans are ready for that message.
Though Trump and his VP pick, J.D. Vance, try to sound like economic populists, they’re both firmly on the side of the nation’s oligarchs. On Monday, the Washington Post reported that allies of Elon Musk have poured millions into a pro-Trump super-PAC — and these tycoons are not friends to American labor. Bloomberg reported that Musk, a notorious union buster, has already donated to the same PAC. Trump also made the notably anti-union Eugene Scalia his secretary of Labor. And O’Brien’s characterization of the parties’ shared ambivalence on labor falls short of reality.
There’s no question the Democratic Party has room to improve its support for unions in both the private and public sectors. No union should throw its unblinking support behind Democrats just because they’re Democrats. But if O’Brien believes that a Trump administration would facilitate his priorities, like organizing Amazon, he’s mistaken.
The grand entrance of Donald Trump onto the convention floor Monday night received a rapturous response. Only two days after the former president was shot in the ear by an assassin, he arrived to the RNC with a large square bandage covering his right ear.
The cheers built to a roaring crescendo on the floor as attendees stood on chairs or in aisles trying to grab a sight of the former president as he entered a VIP box filled with MAGA luminaries like his sons, Tucker Carlson, Representative Byron Donald, and, of course, his new running mate: J.D. Vance.
The chants rose and swelled throughout the arena. First “USA, USA” as Trump waved his fist — with Vance joining the chorus. Then, as those died down, the chant “Fight, fight, fight” emerged from the upper decks of the arena, echoing what Trump said to the crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania, after the shooting on Saturday. However, that quickly bled into “Trump, Trump, Trump!”
Finally, there were chants of “We love Trump!”
Eventually, the show had to go on. The next scheduled speaker took the stage and got a polite reception, but the real show, the one that attendees were filming on their phones, wasn’t onstage.
Needless to say, Lee Greenwood’s intro — which lurched into actual preaching about God “deciding this election” — is a direct echo of how many Trump rallies have begun. Trump is standing right next to Vance in the Trump family box, wearing his bandage like stigmata.
They interrupted the applause with a speaker announcement. It will continue if and when he speaks. Crowd chanting, “Fight, fight, fight.”
The crowd erupted when they showed video of him backstage:
Trump’s first RNC appearance of the evening was by video, recycling an old speech encouraging early voting in 2024 — combined with a vow to outlaw it down the road.
Mr. National Unity attacked “Crooked Joe Biden” as “the worst president in our nation’s history” and accuse Democrats in 2020 and in 2024 of “cheating, it’s frankly the only thing they do well.”
USA, USA, USA!
Wes Nakagiri made his own T-shirt on Sunday, the day after the assassination attempt on Trump, to express his distaste for how Biden responded to the shooting. A longtime Republican elected official in exurban Detroit, he thought it was “a natural extension of the demonizing of Donald Trump.”
For Nakagiri, who was a Trump delegate in 2016 as well, this was a simple extension of the criminal prosecutions of the former president. “They are trying to use lawfare and that didn’t work, so what’s the next logical step? Take him out.”
“We don’t officially know the guy’s motive. but I’ll bet all of my retirement that it was political.”
Meanwhile at the convention, venture capitalist David Sacks takes a slightly indirect approach to Biden’s alleged senility by referring to “his demented policies that have led us to the brink of World War III” after a long attack on the president’s Ukraine policies.
For dessert, he described Biden as a “puppet controlled by his staff.”
More on the civility, “national unity” front: Asked by Hannity if anything would change if Biden was replaced by another Democrat, Vance said “Maybe they’d be someone who could meet with a foreign leader without falling asleep or forgetting who it was.” Nice.
Via a prime-time interview:
He also said he will debate Trump again — in September:
Prime time has begun with South Dakota governor — and America’s most infamous dog shooter — Kristi Noem. She opened her so-far self-congratulatory speech by championing how her state instituted zero COVID lockdowns — and later how South Dakotans are so happy they are procreating like crazy: “We have the highest birth rate in the nation. People are having babies because they’re happy, and in South Dakota we love babies.”
Eat your heart out, Elon Musk.
Watching multiple convention speakers screaming through their remarks, I am sure that in the RNC rehearsal rooms they were told exactly what we always told speakers at the six Democratic conventions where I worked: “You don’t have to shout. You have a microphone. They will hear you.”
So the “national unity” convention has taken a lurch into personal attacks on Biden on the very first night.
Alabama senator Katie Britt returned to the national political scene for the first time since her widely panned response to Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address. This time she is at a podium, not in a kitchen, and she’s sparingly referring to herself as a mom. Her voice remains overdramatic but not creepy. She was given a particularly sensitive job: making the first overt reference to Biden’s alleged cognitive decline, saying the country was “fading and in decline, just like Joe Biden.”
Then Senator Tim Scott, long revered by Beltway pundits for his “sunny” and “optimistic” attitude, followed with a snarky remark about Biden forgetting the name of a war hero and contrasted it with a reference to “America’s lion,” who rose and “roared” after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. Following Scott’s speech, the convention displayed a video showing Biden with a voice-over describing him as someone “who cannot walk up steps or put on his own coat.”
If this is a “unity message,” I’d hate to hear what was originally planned.
His newer, less antagonistic speech was lost to gremlins:
Or perhaps the teleprompter is possessed?
Right after MTG, with a brief musical interlude, the pre-prime-time schedule rolled along with one of Greene’s competitors for craziest MAGA pol, North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson. He went right into a standard-brand attack on Joe Biden’s economic policies, even mentioning that Biden voted for NAFTA (more Republicans than Democrats voted for that agreement, as it happens). His reference to Trump as “the Braveheart of our time” is something we may hear more of.
Marjorie Taylor Greene didn’t make the cut for prime-time speakers, and that may be because she isn’t about to embrace any “national unity” b.s. Her brief speech to a cheering audience was standard MAGA talk about Democrats building an economy that only benefits “illegal aliens” with a couple of shots at trans folk and a direct reference to divine intervention saving Trump from assassination.
Ben Jacobs reports on the moment J.D. Vance was officially nominated to be Donald Trump’s running mate:
There was a human crush on the floor of the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee when Donald Trump’s brand-new running mate arrived. Television cameras, reporters, random delegates all pressed together in a human swell barely held back by security to see J.D. Vance in person.
Accompanied by his wife, Usha, the freshman Ohio senator stepped toward the microphone at the front of his state’s delegation. Once there, his eyes watered as he listened to Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted’s speech nominating him from the dais, swelling with excitement and awkwardness as he heard himself praised. Bernie Moreno, the Republican running for Senate in their home state against incumbent Sherrod Brown, formally nominated Vance by reading off a note card held by his daughter Emily. The chair asked for the yaes, which were loud, and then asked if anyone was opposed.
Vance held his hand to his ear, waiting to see if anyone would say anything.
After a brief silence, followed by a quick smile, he was officially the vice-presidential nominee. Moreno and Vance first shook hands then, seemingly Vance’s instigation, hugged.
I’ve been watching major-party conventions regularly since 1964, sometimes in person, more often on the tube, and it’s interesting to watch the unblinking camera of C-Span panning the floor during a period between business sessions. There aren’t as many funny hats as usual (unless you count MAGA hats); there are more non-white people (though not that many!) than Republican conventions usually feature; and there’s sort of a sense of pent-up energy that is probably being stored for Trump’s expected appearance tonight. The people on the floor at this point are those with nothing better to do than mill around and occasionally boogie to the live and recorded classic-rock music. Movers and shakers are off doing TV, radio, and podcast interviews, or raising money, or just networking. Before long, the floor will be thronged, and whatever image the convention managers want to show the world (perhaps some highly coordinated signage) will be on display
J.D. Vance drew attention during his 2022 Senate campaign for proclaiming that he didn’t “care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”
Since then, he has continued to argue that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not of great interest to the United States and has vociferously opposed U.S. funding of Ukrainian forces. He has written op-eds and tried to make his isolationist case to some European counterparts.
Suffice it to say, Vance’s selection is more worrying news for European leaders who are bracing for a second Trump presidency. “This is a disaster for Ukraine,” one European leader said, per Politico.
The 2016 message:
In an interview to air with NBC’s Lester Holt on Monday night.
His facial hair makes him an unusual pick for a presidential ticket. But so does his religion. A recent (2019) convert to Roman Catholicism (his upbringing was in an undefined conservative Evangelical tradition), J.D. Vance is the third Catholic to win a Republican vice-presidential nominee. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 running mate, William Miller of New York, was the first, and then Mitt Romney’s 2012 running mate, Paul Ryan, was the second. If the Trump-Vance ticket wins, then Vance would be the second Catholic vice-president. The first was some guy from Delaware named Joe …
The candidate’s antipathy toward big business is part of his evolution into a true MAGA believer, and it may not last. Nevertheless, the Financial Times reports, he is not corporate America’s ideal pick:
Vance has embraced an isolationist foreign policy vision and has been among the loudest Republican voices opposing more U.S. aid to Ukraine. He has also attracted sharp criticism for embracing Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was fixed, including saying that if he had been in the U.S. Senate at the time, he would have voted against certifying the results on January 6, 2021.
But it is Vance’s brand of economic populism that has divided the business community. Vance, whose 2022 Senate campaign was bankrolled in part by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, has vocal fans in Silicon Valley. He helped organize a high-profile fundraiser for Trump in San Francisco last month hosted by tech investors David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya.
Yet his ideological approach has raised alarm bells among more traditional Republicans on Wall Street and beyond who are worried the Ohio senator will be in a position to persuade Trump and shape the party platform for years to come.
“We are very concerned about J.D. Vance playing an outsized role in a Trump administration,” said one big bank lobbyist. “Trump populism and Vance populism are not the same.”
It happened quickly, during a low-voltage afternoon session of the convention, and it was overshadowed by the news of J.D. Vance’s selection as running mate. But via a roll call of the states, Donald Trump formally won his third presidential nomination, joining a relative handful of pols with this distinction that suggests party domination. The first to win three nominations, Democrat Grover Cleveland, won the presidency in 1884, lost it in 1888, and regained it in 1892 in a rematch with Benjamin Harrison, exactly the pattern that Trump hopes to emulate. The great Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan was a three-time loser (1896, 1900, and 1908). Next, Franklin Roosevelt was a three-time, actually, a four-time–winner (1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944). Most recently, Richard M. Nixon was nominated in 1960, 1968, and 1972, losing the first race and winning the next two before becoming an eternal loser by being forced to resign his office in 1974. So Trump is just the second person to win three Republican nominations.
Jonathan Chait writes about the evolution of a man who once called Donald Trump “America’s Hitler:”
Eight years ago, J.D. Vance privately confessed his true feelings about Donald Trump. “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful),” he wrote on Facebook, “or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
Vance has claimed he was wrong about Trump, and he has no doubt altered his beliefs, as have many other observers. But what changed about his assessment of Trump was not his cynical appraisal. What changed was his premise that the two possibilities — not bad and potentially useful or dangerous fascist — were mutually exclusive. He seems to have concluded, instead, that Trump is an authoritarian demagogue who is also not bad and has proven useful.
And the person Trump has proven most useful to may be Vance himself, who has now secured Trump’s nomination for vice-president and positioned himself as the MAGA movement’s next leader.
With extreme positions on abortion, guns, government, and pretty much any other social issues, Vance makes for a convenient Democratic foil. President Biden’s campaign wasted little time pushing out widely available clips and quotes of Vance that make their argument for them.
This is Donald Trump’s third convention as presumptive Republican nominee, so by now he and his staff are thoroughly familiar with how to run an operation that is tightly disciplined in terms of both operations and message. They have been unusually secretive about the convention schedule even for tonight; we have a good idea who will speak at some point during the convention, but the precise running order remains under wraps at this point. But more important is message control, particularly since Trump has sent some mixed signals about the tone he wants to set. To put it simply, his idea of “national unity” is probably not yours or mine, particularly since his first and most important decision was to choose a controversial and divisive running mate.
Whatever Team Trump has decided on, however, will almost certainly be imposed on convention speakers via a vetting operation that controls the teleprompter where final speech texts will appear. If, for example, the Trump campaign decides it’s a bad time to talk about Biden’s age and fitness to serve as president, speeches will be scrubbed to get rid of the inevitable Biden-is-a-feeble-puppet jokes that speakers and their staff are likely to bring with them to Milwaukee.
In my experience as a speech-and-script staffer at six Democratic conventions, sometimes the word can come down abruptly from convention managers changing or managing the message. In 1992 during the convention in New York when the Clinton campaign learned that Ross Perot was about to drop out of the presidential race, all references (mostly negative) to Perot were ruthlessly eliminated or preempted. In 2004, John Kerry’s focus groups showed that swing voters were unhappy with excessive partisanship, so at the Democratic convention in Boston wordsmiths were told not to mention the word “Republican.” It will be interesting and revealing to see how powerfully Trump’s people secure message discipline.
Presumably, J.D. Vance’s spot on the presidential ticket will last longer than a head of lettuce.
But says it was all about “national unity” in an X post:
Lots of rumors going around about my meeting this morning with President Trump. Our main topic was national unity, and I hope to meet with Democratic leaders about that as well. No, I am not dropping out of the race.
Politico reports they met today:
Former President Donald Trump met this morning in Milwaukee with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to discuss the possibility of the independent candidate endorsing the Republican nominee, according to multiple people familiar with the huddle.
Asked about the meeting and a potential endorsement, Kennedy denied that he plans to drop out of the race.
The senator has infamously said some very critical things about his new running mate:
Or maybe it’s a different kind of calculus:
From the statement the campaign released following Trump’s announcement:
Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people.
Politico’s Alex Isenstadt reports on how the senator got into the former president’s good graces, in part by defending Trump on television:
Trump took notice of Vance’s support — and his polished TV appearances. The following month, when Vance helped organize a trip Trump took to the site of a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, Trump and his son watched Vance do a live interview on Fox News.
“This guy is turning out to be fucking incredible,” Trump said to his son and the group of aides on the plane with them.
Trump advisers later described the East Palestine visit as a critical moment in his presidential campaign. Trump’s launch had been rocky. His November 2022 announcement was so tepid that, rather than scare competitors off, they sensed an opening. Then, soon after, Trump dined with the rapper and Nazi sympathizer Ye and Holocaust denier Nicholas Fuentes, and he posted on social media that he supported terminating the Constitution — both of which drew intense criticism. Trump’s trip to the hardscrabble northeastern Ohio village served to remind Republicans of the populist image he had cultivated as president, helping stanch the bleeding.
Starting then, and throughout the presidential primary, Vance became a regular on Trump’s call log, and he emerged as a fierce defender of the former president. When reporters stopped Vance in a Senate hallway and questioned him about whether, in saying immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country, Trump was using Adolf Hitler–like rhetoric, Vance pushed back.
“You guys need to wake up,” Vance said. “It’s an absurd question. It’s an absurd framing.”
Earlier this year, Sarah Jones reread Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy:
When a person first confronts the realities of elite power, they have a decision to make. Play along or burn it down. Vance has always played along with whoever can offer him the most power. He was never a voice for the voiceless, as Charen once called him; with his book, he sold out the working poor for prestige. Hillbilly Elegy traded in old stereotypes about poverty and Appalachia and fed them to elites with resounding success. When Appalachians object to a 2009 ABC News segment on a supposed epidemic of “Mountain Dew mouth” in the region’s children, Vance criticizes them. Hillbillies, he argues, “tend to overstate and to understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves.” In his family’s Kentucky hometown, the people “are hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work,” he complains. After a pharmacy clerk forbade his uncle from playing with a toy, Vance’s grandparents entered the store and threw merchandise around while his grandmother screamed, “Kick his fucking ass!” He may be telling the truth about his family, but the rest of his story is a lie. Appalachia wasn’t impoverished by cultural decline or personal choices but by capitalist extraction and government austerity. He says nothing useful about the region, whose residents defy caricature if you know or care for them at all.
Read the rest of her take on the book, here.
As I write in my insta-take on Trump’s choice:
It seems clear Trump picked Vance not only to serve as vice-president but as presumptive heir to the leadership of the MAGA movement. At 39 (he turns 40 next month), Vance will be the third-youngest person ever to be nominated for vice-president by a major party (John Breckinridge was 36 when he was put on the Democratic ticket in 1856, and Richard Nixon was a few months younger than Vance is today when he became the VP nominee in 1952). Vance is half Trump’s age, which means with skill and luck he will be prominent in the national political picture for decades to come. And unlike Burgum, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, or any of the other prospects people talked about during the long months of veep speculation, Vance has no real pre-Trump, pre-MAGA political profile.
You can read the rest here.
Trump made the announcement in a Truth Social post, writing, “After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio.”
Reports NBC News:
Trump aides and convention leadership have not told those speaking at the weeklong convention in Milwaukee to alter their original speeches after the shooting at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump did not want to show signs of weakness or signal that the shooting affected the long-planned convention, according to seven people who are either set to give RNC speeches or their aides.
“It seems people are just going to talk about what they were going to talk about,” a source familiar with the speaking arrangements said. “Trump is setting the tone, and the tone is business as usual.”
The one issue that has been discussed is which specific speakers will bring up the assassination attempt. There was concern that the topic would come up in every speech, which organizers wanted to avoid.
National political correspondents are feelin’ the electricity:
And yes, there are already assassination-focused T-shirts inside the convention:
The candidates are reportedly being notified they weren’t chosen.
But hasn’t announced it yet, unsurprisingly:
More politics
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