In ‘eerie’ Milwaukee, the Trump shooting isn’t bringing America any closer together

MILWAUKEE — Jamie Miller, former Florida state GOP chairman, came to Wisconsin a couple of days ahead of thousands of his fellow conservatives to get a head start on the great American political tradition of mixing business with pleasure. So he and some friends were at Miller Park watching baseball’s Milwaukee Brewers Saturday night when a shocking image on a nearby TV screen changed everything about this week and the national vibe.

Donald Trump had been shot at and grazed with a bullet in a deadly assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Western Pennsylvania.

Over the next few minutes and then hours, Miller recalled a roller-coaster ride of emotions that echoed what other Republicans told me on the eve of a Republican National Convention already like no other: feeling a flash of anxiety, followed by what he described as renewed purpose to carry forward Trump’s radical agenda. But that sense was tinged with growing anger toward the GOP candidate’s enemies — real or perceived — on the political left.

“It enhanced my resolve,” Miller told me when I met him downtown Sunday on a half-empty strip of Milwaukee’s bratwurst-and-cheese-curd emporiums, where gaggles of cops and roving bands of journalists seemed to outnumber actual Republicans by at least 5-1. “It made me want to be dedicated to doing everything possible” to get Trump elected in November.

Before Saturday’s assassination attempt, critics said the RNC would look less like a party nomination and more like a coronation of Trump. This, fittingly, as allies like the Heritage Foundation and the U.S. Supreme Court are seeking to bestow monarchical powers on the White House. On Sunday, Trump’s near-brush with death only deepened a near-religious fervor among some of his faithful.

Stephanie McNamara of Williamsburg, Va., in town with a family of convention exhibitors, insisted that divine intervention caused the gunman’s bullet to miss the 45th president. “I just believe God is with President Trump,” she told me in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency. “My prayers have been answered because I pray for him every day. I do believe God is watching over him and what he’s doing for this country ... What he went through his first four years in office, he was treated with no respect. They make up horrible lies, so it was no surprise that somebody tried to take him out.”

The steady stream of delegates checking into Milwaukee hotels was in many ways no different than the rest of America — full of questions about how and why the first POTUS-level assassination attempt in more than four decades could have happened. What was known about the 20-year-old shooter, or the gun he used, or how he was able to get a clear shot from a nearby rooftop? What was different was their sense — even after it was reported the gunman was a registered Republican — that somehow Democrats and their criticisms of Trump are to blame for this.

» READ MORE: There’s only one right response to the Trump shooting | Helen Ubiñas

Miller, the former Florida Republican chair, echoed to me what national Republicans like Ohio Sen. JD Vance, considered by many the front-runner to be Trump’s veep pick this week, said Saturday night before Trump barely had time to wipe the blood from his grazed ear. Vance said President Joe Biden’s escalating criticisms, including a remark that “the bull’s-eye” should be on Trump’s radical authoritarian agenda, was the real cause of Saturday’s violence.

There are two big problems with the blame game that insists all the violent rhetoric is coming from the left. For starters, it ignores years of arguably worse language from Trump himself — peaking with summoning his supporters to Washington for the deadly attack of Jan. 6, 2021 — and even more disturbing comments from allies like North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, who recently called for killing liberals.

What’s more, the national conversation after the Trump shooting, which also killed a bystander and seriously wounded two others, showed the instant takes by many pundits that maybe this would spark a moment of national unity was another West Wing-inspired flight of fantasy. Americans aren’t any closer after Trump’s near-death experience. They aren’t further apart, either.

No, the nation is simply digging in, making the trenches a little deeper like a Belgian front-line village in 1915.

That sense of a divided and deeply depressed America feels palpable on Milwaukee’s largely desolate downtown streets. There are few symbols of red, white, and blue festivity. As we’ve seen with other political conventions in the post-9/11 era, much of the street grid is a dizzying array of concrete barriers, roadblocks, and high metal fencing. You’d almost think Milwaukee was hosting a Grand Prix instead of the RNC until you see not a Formula 1 race car but another gaggle of black-clad bicycle cops racing by, under buzzing helicopters like a scene from Boyz n the Hood.

“It’s a little eerie,” said my Uber driver after struggling to navigate the expanding list of street closures. “It’s not normal Milwaukee, that’s for sure.”

I’d actually wanted to see a sliver of the normal Milwaukee — progressive and reliably Democratic — which is why I was headed to the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee campus. There, an interfaith and multiracial alliance of local civil rights leaders, pastors, and activists was holding an afternoon-long rally and teach-in on combating the kind of Christian nationalism some speakers will promote at the RNC this week.

Anita Johnson of the group Souls to the Polls and Brenda Jackson, a Black women voting advocate, worked several hundred attendees into a frenzy by urging techniques like the “voting triplex,” promising to vote along with three other close friends. The crowd rose when they concluded by shouting in unison: “They ain’t no stopping us now.”

The sad part is that, in some alternative universe, a presidential candidate who survived an assassination attempt would suddenly see America’s problems in a whole new light. Just as the political killings of 1968 motivated Congress to pass a gun control law, one could imagine a candidate admitting that it’s wrong for a 20-year-old to own a high-powered killing machine like the one that was aimed at Trump’s head on Saturday.

In the Aaron Sorkin rewrite of Trump’s Thursday acceptance speech, he admits that maybe refugees crossing the southern border deserve a chance at a new life — just like the opportunity God apparently granted him in Butler County. Or maybe the bipartisan agreement that political violence is destroying the national soul might get him to abandon his promise to pardon Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

It’s way too late for any of that. Trump already delivered this RNC’s one-word keynote address with a Secret Service-enabled fist pump on Saturday.

“Fight!”