We have seen a different version of Donald Trump this week, a man humbled by his brush with death.
Over four days of this convention, he has borne the air of a softer, more benign Donald Trump than the one we are used to, comfortable in the certainty of a “great love in the room,” as he put it.
It’s a fair assessment of the mood inside Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum. His experience has altered the dynamic with his audience.
They listened in absolute silence, between bursts of applause, to Trump’s first-hand account of the assassination attempt.
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Donald Trump spoke for the first time since his assassination attempt on Saturday. Pic: Reuters
It was a compelling tale from the protagonist who had been a quarter of an inch from death.
“It was a warm, beautiful day in the early evening in Butler Township in the great commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” he recalled, before slowly and deliberately detailing how a bullet pierced the upper part of his right ear and he dived to the floor.
Trump has always inspired a cult like devotion in his followers, but this week it has been elevated to reverence and awe.
As he detailed “blood pouring from everywhere” and Secret Service tackling him to the ground, some delegates wiped away tears and others held their arms up in prayer as if in a gospel church service.
“In a certain way, I felt very safe, because I had God on my side,” Trump said. Inside the arena, it felt almost religious.
“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” he said. “Yes, you are,” they chanted back at him. It was a support and synergy and it sounded unstoppable.
On the politics, he declared: “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.” It was a line from the Republican nominee who had spoken of unity.
It has been the theme of this four-day convention. Donald Trump said he had ripped up his original speech, which he described as a “rip-roarer,” to make way for a less angry and more conciliatory offering.
If it began that way, it evolved into the campaigning Donald Trump of old.
In a speech as long as a feature film, Trump made room to call on Democrats to stop “weaponising” the justice system and complained about a “partisan witch hunt,” against him.
He also went off script to attack “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” the former house speaker whose office was targeted during the January 6th storming of the Capitol and whose elderly husband was the victim of a politically motivated hammer attack two years ago.
The word from his campaign was that he wouldn’t mention Joe Biden by name, but he clearly couldn’t resist. “I’m only going to use the term once,” he said, before duly repeating it.
It certainly felt more divisive than unifying in tone. There was the familiar rallying cry of election fraud and talk of an “invasion,” of migrants. This was the “them versus us” Donald Trump.
Former first lady Melania Trump waves. Pic: Reuters
This speech did mark the re-emergence from obscurity of Trump’s wife Melania, dressed in Republican red.
She hasn’t been seen publicly alongside her husband for months. In fact, she has been keeping such a low profile that one of the country’s leading newspapers superimposed her face onto a “Where’s Wally?” illustration.
“Missing Melania” car bumper stickers sold online, and an aeroplane flew over a university American football game, trailing a banner that read: “Where’s Melania?”
Donald Trump pointed at Melania, sitting in the family box. “My amazing wife,” he said, as she smiled demurely.
But she provided a brief glimpse of femininity in an evening which emphasised the macho culture of the MAGA movement.
There was a speech from the veteran wrestler Hulk Hogan, fired from World Wrestling Entertainment after tapes revealed him using the N-word.
He ripped open his shirt to reveal a Trump/Vance vest, prompting ear-splitting cheers from the audience.
Trump’s warm-up act was Kid Rock, who caused controversy recently for reportedly waving a gun at a reporter, and also using the N-word during a Rolling Stone interview.
He led the crowd in a chant of “fight, fight, fight,” which has become the anthem of this convention.
Trump finished his speech with a promise to his devotees that “America’s future will be bigger, better, bolder, brighter, happier, stronger, freer, greater and more united than ever before”.
Cue the balloon drop and the Republican convention finished with a splash of red, white, blue and gold.
This convention has been a celebration for Republicans – a party united, ahead in the polls and watching their Democratic opponents in disarray.
They were in no doubt that they were watching America’s next president deliver his keynote address, even if they’d heard the notes before.
If it was a different Donald Trump at the start of the evening, it sounded similar to old Donald by night’s end. Same messenger, same message.