Over three nights, the Republican Party has set out to redefine Donald J. Trump, one of the best-known and most polarizing figures on the political stage, methodically portraying him as a kindly and compassionate paterfamilias capable of uniting Americans during a tumultuous time.
It is a brazen effort after nearly a decade in which Mr. Trump’s style — abrasive and norm-breaking — has helped to redefine American politics and made him such a dominant and divisive figure. The goal seems clear: to make Mr. Trump less threatening and more palatable to moderates and women, groups that have been put off by Mr. Trump’s demeanor and actions, but are critical to his hopes of defeating President Biden in November.
The effort came in the videos shown on the convention hall screens — Mr. Trump dancing to the song “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People in one, embracing a soldier in another — and in repeated descriptions of Mr. Trump as transformed by the assassination attempt he survived on Saturday. A procession of people, including his eldest granddaughter and the man he has chosen to be his vice president, rose to present him as a different man than the one America thought it had known over the past 10 years.
“Even in his most perilous moment, we were on his mind,” said Senator J.D. Vance, Mr. Trump’s vice-presidential nominee. “His instinct was for us, for our country. To call us to something higher.”
“They said he was a tyrant,” Mr. Vance said. “They said he must be stopped at all costs. But how did he respond? He called for national unity, for national calm, literally right after an assassin nearly took his life.”
The gap between the reality of Mr. Trump and the portrait painted at his nominating convention may prove to be too vast for any Republican makeover. Mr. Trump has spent much of his campaign promising retribution against his enemies should he be returned to the White House and has cast the election as the “final battle.”
Despite what Mr. Vance said about Mr. Trump’s call for national unity in the moments after being shot, the former president’s first public words after rising from the ground were “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Again and again since he entered the political arena in 2016, there has been speculation that Mr. Trump would pivot and become a more conventional politician — speculation dashed with some new moment of outrage delivered by Mr. Trump, from the Oval Office or on social media. He was convicted of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal in New York; another jury found him liable of sexual abuse and defamation in a separate case. He was viewed unfavorably by 55 percent of all voters in the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll.
For the first three nights of the convention, this effort to effectively redefine Mr. Trump was executed with discipline and focus. A test will come on Thursday night when Mr. Trump accepts his nomination and the stage will be his alone.
The delegates began gathering two days after the attempted assassination on Mr. Trump, who has turned up every night with a bandage over his right ear. He has been, understandably, a decidedly sympathetic figure, certainly in this crowd. Speaker after speaker has recalled how Mr. Trump escaped death on Saturday in Pennsylvania, often invoking Scripture and God.
Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, cast the shooting in strikingly personal terms that stilled her audience. Ms. Trump said her family had grown accustomed to death threats and “tasteless and violent comments directed toward us on social media” over the years.
“But none of that prepares you, as a daughter-in-law, to watch, in real time, someone try to kill a person you love,” she said, looking at the former president, who was sitting in a box across the hall. “None of that prepares you, as a mother, to quickly reach for the remote and turn your young children away from the screen so that they’re not witness to something that scars the memory of their grandpa for the rest of their lives.”
The speakers have not so much sought to sugarcoat Mr. Trump’s personality, were that even possible, but to portray it as a hard shell over a soft center, and as essential to what they described as his success when he was president. Kellyanne Conway, a longtime senior adviser to Mr. Trump, acknowledged that many voters were put off by his personality. “We don’t get those policies without that personality,” she said.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas told the crowd how Mr. Trump comforted her when she came under attack in her role as press secretary in the White House.
“Our president pulled me aside, looked me in the eye and said: ‘Sarah you’re smart. You’re beautiful. You’re tough and they attack you because you’re good at your job,’” she said.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Ms. Sanders added, gazing admiringly at Mr. Trump across the hall as a wave of applause swept the room. “Thank you.”
The images of Mr. Trump over the first three nights underscored this effort: somber and looking a little shaken the first night; smiling, approving and applauding the second night and third nights.
“I’m speaking today to share the side of my grandpa that people don’t often see,” Kai Trump, 17, the former president’s eldest granddaughter, said from the stage. “To me, he’s just a normal grandpa. He gives us candy and soda when our parents aren’t looking. He always wants to know how we’re doing in school. ”
The convention has been orchestrated to help Mr. Trump on multiple levels, with its focus on immigration and crime, and the belittling of Mr. Biden as weak and feeble. Mr. Trump’s standing on those issues is certainly helping him in his contest with Mr. Biden.
Those were, in truth, fairly standard orchestrations of American political conventions.
But the work in Milwaukee has been more surgical, focusing on those segments of voters that have resisted Mr. Trump’s candidacy: moderates, women and, to some extent, Black voters. Many of these voters supported Mr. Biden in 2020, when he defeated Mr. Trump; the president cannot afford to lose many of them if he wants to win a second term.
So it was that Ms. Conway noted to the delegates that Mr. Trump had named her his campaign manager in 2016 — the first woman to have run a successful presidential campaign. “But that was a natural for Donald J. Trump,” she said.
The most powerful tribute of the first three days came from Lara Trump, whose speech was delivered during the one hour when television networks showed the convention live. She urged Americans to ignore the portrait of Mr. Trump presented by the news media and by his critics, and instead to focus on him as a father and a grandfather.
“I will never forget watching my two children run up to him with their drawings and hugs for Grandpa just moments before he took the elevator down in Trump Tower to address the media the day after his wrongful conviction,” she said. “Despite everything else he had going on, he had no other focus in the entire world, just a man relishing time with his grandchildren.”
She added: “It’s a side of Donald Trump that not enough people get to see.”
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