The New Yorker:

As the Republicans anoint the ex-President, the Democratic panic over Joe Biden reaches a coup-like crescendo.

By Susan B. Glasser

The Republican Convention’s finale on Thursday night began, fittingly, with a clown show: Hulk Hogan, shouting in a voice that sounded like a Disney Animatronic version of a pro wrestler giving a political speech. He talked about the “real Americans” in the room, “the Trumpites who are going to be running wild the next four years,” and the “gladiators” who will lead them back to power—Donald Trump and his new running mate, the Ohio senator J. D. Vance. Then he stripped off his jacket, and ripped off his shirt, to reveal a bright-red Trump-Vance 2024 T-shirt, in honor, he said, of the near-death experience that Trump had suffered less than a week earlier. “I want the world to know that Donald Trump is a real American hero,” Hogan said. In the imperial red make america great again box, just above the convention floor, Trump stood at attention, wearing his signature navy suit and red tie. At the end of Hogan’s performance, Trump—convicted felon, front-running Presidential candidate—pumped his fist in the air, the small white bandage on his right ear a reminder of what were, perhaps, the most unbelievable few days I can ever recall in American politics.

Two hours later, the wounded showman took the stage. Behind him was a full replica of the White House, lit up in red and blue. The former President had not said a word in public since being shot at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday evening. He gave his account of the would-be assassin’s bullet coming within a quarter inch of killing him, of the blood he found on his hand, and how he knew he had survived “because I had God on my side.” In the hours leading up to Trump’s acceptance speech, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, one of a passel of ascendant Trump family members in the now fully Trumpified G.O.P., insisted that the “near-death experience” had changed the ex-President and that a “softer version” of Trump would be presented in his Thursday-evening acceptance speech. Various advisers claimed to Politico that the famously non-religious Trump had absorbed a dose of “humility, in the Biblical sense,” as one put it.

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