MILWAUKEE — Former President Donald Trump will accept the Republican nomination for president for the third consecutive time on Thursday in a prime-time address just days after an assassin’s bullet grazed his ear and narrowly missed taking his life.
Trump enters the final day of the Republican National Convention as the front-runner, leading in polls of Georgia and other battleground states that President Joe Biden captured in 2020. He is basking in a reversal of fortune that has remade the rematch.
The speech is expected to begin around 10 p.m. Eastern time.
In his last two quests for the White House, Trump was the single-biggest source of internal division within the Republican Party — and the greatest uniter of Democrats who forged a coalition from the far-left to the center-right to defeat him.
Now it’s Democrats who are confronting a growing rebellion to push Biden out of the race after the president’s shambling debate performance in Atlanta and the uneven attempts that followed to reassure voters and party leaders the 81-year-old is fit for the job.
Trump, by contrast, enjoys the near-lockstep support from the party’s rank-and-file and elite, with skeptical voices either driven out of the party, defeated at the ballot box or quieted in the name of party unity.
Trump’s confidence was exemplified by his selection of U.S., Sen. JD Vance as his running mate. The 39-year-old freshman from Ohio’s populist economic stances and nationalist foreign policy approach make him the embodiment of the MAGA movement.
Vance’s strength on the campaign trail isn’t drawing the suburban swing voters Trump’s allies were so desperate to woo in 2020. It’s attracting the white, working-class voters in “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that Biden carried in 2020.
Trump’s allies, meanwhile, are increasingly confident that Georgia is slipping in his direction, and some party leaders say the campaign need only drive out base turnout rather than win over swing voters to shatter the alliance that elected Biden four years ago.
But others warn, loudly, of the perils of overconfidence. During a stop in Milwaukee earlier this week, Gov. Brian Kemp said the roughly four months until the November vote is an “eternity in politics, and a lot of things can happen.”
Trump’s tone and tenor Thursday will be closely watched, particularly after he told The New York Post that he overhauled his speech following the failed assassination attempt on Saturday because he wants to “try to unite our country.”
But the Republican convention has been anything but a somber affair, with a cavalcade of GOP speakers dishing out red-meat attacks against Biden that have electrified Trump loyalists who entered the four-day gala stunned and infuriated by the attack.
“Everybody is uniting behind former President Donald Trump,” said state Rep. Mike Cheokas, one of Georgia’s contingent of delegates. “It shows how united we areas a party to face the problems the nation faces right now.”
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