The speaker list at the GOP convention promises a week of far-right rhetoric as well as a celebration of former President Donald Trump’s survival.
This year’s Republican National Convention, where Donald Trump will be formally nominated for the presidential campaign, was originally going to be overshadowed by the former president’s conviction on 34 criminal charges.
Instead, it is taking place just days after a very public attempt on his life that very nearly succeeded.
Trump has struck a defiant tone since the assassination attempt and insists the convention will be going ahead as normal, despite outrage at the failure of the security services to keep the ex-president safe from an armed assailant.
The US Secret Service has said security plans for the convention — in the works for more than a year — remain the same after the Saturday shooting, in which Trump’s right ear was pierced by a bullet. A nearby audience member was fatally shot, and two others were critically injured in the assault, which has prompted widespread calls to evaluate security measures.
Nonetheless, Trump arrived in the host city of Milwaukee on Sunday. City leaders reiterated their confidence in security plans as delegates, activists, and journalists started arriving in town.
“We take this matter very, very seriously. We take public safety very, very seriously,” Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said Sunday. “And I have been so pleased to work in collaboration not just with the US Secret Service but also with local law enforcement and public safety on the ground here.”
Police Chief Jeffrey Norman said law enforcement was “working around the clock” to prepare for an estimated 30,000 people to descend on the city for the week’s events.
How it works
US presidential conventions were once crucial parts of elections, but their role today is mainly ceremonial, positioning the parties for the final stretch of what has effectively become a two-year-long campaign cycle.
As far as formal proceedings go, the core event will be Trump’s nomination for the election by party delegates. The roll call vote will have no suspense whatever as Trump has already been the presumptive nominee for months, having clinched a majority of convention delegates on 12 March, but he doesn’t officially become the party’s standard-bearer until after the roll call, when delegates vote on the nominee.
A vast majority of those delegates are already bound to support Trump, who only needs a majority to win the Republican nomination. However, due to state party rules, at least a handful are still compelled to vote for former candidate Nikki Haley, even after she released her delegates.
Haley ran a surprisingly long primary campaign against Trump, though she was never seriously expected to defeat him. While she criticised him heavily by Republican standards, she held back from fully condemning him as unfit for office even as he faced civil and criminal proceedings in multiple courts. She eventually went on to endorse him.
After Saturday’s shooting, she was unexpectedly offered her own speaking slot at the convention, and will appear on Tuesday in a show of party unity.
Haley will be just one of many Republican luminaries taking the stage, along with members of the Trump family, various staffers from his administration, and right-wing celebrities and activists.
Among those to feature are some of the most hardline members of the Republican Party, as well as controversial figures like Charlie Kirk, a far-right activist whose group Turning Point USA is one of the loudest and most incendiary pro-Trump organisations operating nationally.
Also overshadowing the convention is growing public awareness of Project 2025, a long-brewing and highly developed agenda for a second Trump administration assembled by former Trump staffers and longtime conservative thinkers and activists under the auspices of the extreme Heritage Foundation, one of the most powerful right-wing think tanks in the US.
Among its many proposals are dramatic rollbacks of various rights and protections, particularly for women; the mass firing of career civil servants in favour of political appointees, allowing Trump or another president unprecedented control of government; and the gutting or dismantling of multiple government departments and agencies in what Trump confidante Steve Bannon once described as “the deconstruction of the administrative state”.
So extreme is Project 2025 that, since it came to mass public attention in recent weeks, Trump has denied knowledge of it despite the open involvement of many close allies in its creation.
The leadership of the Heritage Foundation, meanwhile, has been unambiguous about its ambitions. In a recent interview, its president, Kevin Roberts, put it thus: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
The main event
The former president himself will give his own keynote speech on Thursday evening. Aside from that appearance, the most-watched speaker will appear on Wednesday night in the form of Trump’s as-yet-unannounced running mate.
It is not yet clear when Trump will unveil his choice. Several of those considered likely picks, such as South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem and Ohio Senator JD Vance, have been given speaking slots in their own right, but there is no technical reason they cannot be bumped up to running mate status between now and Wednesday.
The galvanising effect of the assassination attempt notwithstanding, the running mate slot is especially coveted this year given Trump’s advancing age and apparent cognitive decline — to say nothing of the slim but still real possibility he could be sentenced to jail between now and the election.
But even those speakers not be chosen to run alongside Trump stand to benefit from the platform a convention speech offers them.
After all, it was in 2004 that a young Barack Obama, then a mere Illinois state senator, electrified the Democratic convention with a speech that immediately put him on the radar as a future presidential candidate.
As for Trump’s main-event speech, in which he will formally accept the nomination, the former president could not ask for a more sympathetic audience or a bigger platform. The lengthy address will be broadcast live nationally in a primetime slot on Thursday evening, guaranteeing Trump the longest stretch of uninterrupted solo airtime he has enjoyed since his presidency ended.
Whether he will use the opportunity to call for a more peaceful political discourse, as others in both parties have done since he was almost killed at the weekend, is another matter.
