I want to talk about the Republican Convention and Donald Trump, and, McKay, I wanted to read you something that you wrote, you, we posted last night.
For a brief moment, Americans saw Donald Trump try something new, stick to a script, addressing delegates at the Fiserv -- I don't even know how to pronounce that, Fiserv?
Is that right?
Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee.
The former president - - yes, it takes a little time -- and freshly anointed Republican nominee read slowly and dramatically from a teleprompter as he recounted his near death experience in Butler, Pennsylvania.
But what happened last night that we saw was Trump read for about 15 minutes and then started talking about the amazing amount of blood that can come out of your ear, which is a very interesting subject, but not in the script.
And then he sort of went back to Trump.
I want to play this one clip from the speech because I think this is emblematic of where Trump is, if we could just play that.
Donald Trump (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Nominee: They're coming from prisons, they're coming from jails, they're coming from mental institutions and insane asylums.
You know, the press is always on me because I say this.
Has anyone seen Silence of the Lambs?
The late, great Hannibal Lecter, he'd love to have you for dinner.
That's insane asylums.
They're emptying out their insane asylums.
Jeffrey Goldberg: He's talking about immigrants.
Obviously, this was not in the script.
There was this idea this week that Donald Trump was a changed man because of the assassination.
That's not a changed man.
That's pre-assassination attempts.
McKay Coppins: What's so bizarre about it is that all week leading up to that speech, the message coming out of the Trump campaign again and again in Milwaukee was that you were going to see a new Trump, right, that he wanted to bring the country together, he wanted to lower the temperature, he's rising to the moment.
Chris LaCivita, campaign manager, kept making this point in every interview that I saw him give.
Speaking to delegates, they kind of embraced this narrative that he had been humbled by his near death experience.
We even saw reporting that people said he had had some kind of spiritual renewal.
I mean, the idea that he was going to get up on that stage and be fundamentally different than he has been was pretty widespread in Milwaukee and it lasted about 10 or 15 minutes.
I was in the arena while he was speaking.
And more interesting than watching him on stage was watching the teleprompter that he was reading from, because right around the 15 minute mark, it just stopped scrolling and he was off riffing about, you know, Crazy Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, the worst president in history, and defaced the nation, all his favorite partisan epithets.
He can't help himself.
And I think that by the end of that speech, and talking to delegates afterward, they had already kind of abandoned the notion of a new Trump.
Trump was back to his old self.
Laura Barron-Lopez: I'm just surprised that people thought that somehow he was going to be a new Trump because of the fact that even before we got to the speech, when he posted on Truth Social after the assassination attempt, he was posting about the January 6th case hoax.
He was going after prosecutors in the judicial system.
That's the old Trump.
He still is the same Trump.
And also Republicans in the lead up to his speech weren't necessarily changing their tone at the RNC.
They were talking about mass deportations.
They were lying about non-citizens voting in hordes and going to rig the election, Democrats are going to rig the elections with non-citizens voting days before Trump took the stage.
So, this was not some changed Republican Party after this assassination -- McKay Coppins: Although I will just say, I think you're right, but I will say the most interesting thing was seeing some of the RNC speakers try to graft a unifying message on top of what they were already saying.
Kimberly Guilfoyle had a couple really weird lines of rhetoric about transcending political hatreds.
Kellyanne Conway made this point.
You could see them kind of it was almost like they were speaking in a second language that they weren't quite fluent in trying to speak the language of unity, and then falling right back into their normal MAGA rhetoric.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Go ahead.
Elisabeth Bumiller: You know, he's interesting that his campaign this time around is way more - - it's a good -- way more professional than they were in 2016.
He's got good campaign managers, but they still have the same candidate.
And so, you know, you still have to tame the candidate and worked for about 15 minutes, as you said, and then he went back to remind me of the old Trump.
It reminded me of what we used to say when he was in the White House was people would say, oh, he's going to be presidential now.
Remember that, the first year?
And we waited a long time.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, I mean, we've been promised 14 or 16 times, some sort of -- so, my question is, I mean, how the assassination attempt, this terrible moment in our history now, how this assassination attempt changes Trump's relationship to his own personality, to God?
We're not going to be able to figure out.
My question is how does it change the race or does it change the race?
Laura Barron-Lopez: I don't think it changes the race.
I mean, at least in the focus groups that I've been sitting in on all week, and some of them were with two-time Trump voters, they said that they weren't changing their vote.
And those two-time Trump voters, yes, this is just nine people in that one focus group, but they said they weren't going to vote for Trump.
They also said they weren't going to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, that they were going to either write in third party or leave it blank.
But these were two-time Trump voters that said they weren't going to vote for Trump anymore because they had already made their decision, and that was after the assassination attempt.
And then there were swing voters that also said similar things, which was that the assassination attempt did not change what their decision was at all about the race.
Jeffrey Goldberg: But, Leigh Ann, does it motivate the base to make sure that every last member of the base comes out?
I mean, does it -- Leigh Ann Caldwell: I mean, that's what this absolutely does, like the assassination attempt, absolutely.
I mean, the delegates at that convention Trump was a god-like figure there.
They were literally equating him to God being able to escape death, so, yes.
But many Republicans I talked to, elected officials I talked to, you know, Richard Hudson, chair of the NRCC, Speaker Mike Johnson, and they think that there could perhaps -- they don't have polling yet.
There could be a little bit of an empathy bump.
It's not going to be two points, three points, but it could be that, especially when you pair it with President Biden's debate performance.
And I know, you know, I have a little bit different of a take on this convention.
For the most part, yes, there were those old, you know, Trump moments and there were the mass deportation and that stuff.
But by and far, they largely avoided the most controversial components of the Republican Party.
There was no mention -- there was very little mention, just minor speakers, of pardoning January 6th rioters.
There was not really any talk about abortion, no talk about guns, really, very little talk about the stolen election in 2020.
And so it was a production that tried to appeal to the mainstream using very -- the polling -- very polling metrics that play within a Republican Party and against someone -- Laura Barron-Lopez: But election deniers were everywhere in the convention.
And they were -- fake electors were everywhere.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: But the people don't see that, like the public.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Elisabeth, let me talk about another aspect of the convention, probably the most interesting aspect, the choice of J.D.
Vance.
Does that help the ticket?
Elisabeth Bumiller: It makes it look younger, more vital.
Trump made clear that this is the political future for the Republican Party.
He got a good -- I mean, I thought his speech was lower key than I expected.
It's almost like he didn't want to upstage Trump, I thought, a little bit.
But he's not really -- Jeffrey Goldberg: That's called self-preservation in the context of -- Elisabeth Bumiller: And he worked very hard to be the nominee.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.
Elisabeth Bumiller: But I think he was well-received.
It was interesting to see how The Wall Street Journal is going after him now for not really being a true Republican, you know, once he's talking about perhaps raising taxes, all this sort of -- you know, will that matter?
I don't know.
Jeffrey Goldberg: By the way, the idea of real Republican is so interesting.
McKay, you obviously wrote the biography of Mitt Romney who wasn't there.
The other living Republican ex-president, George W. Bush, wasn't there.
The three ex-living vice presidents weren't there.
It's not -- Elisabeth Bumiller: The Republican Party.
Jeffrey Goldberg: It's not the Republican Party.
It's some sort of hybrid of Republican Party isolationist and ultimate fighting in a kind of way.
McKay Coppins: I mean, I was checking in with many of those Republicans who were not there and would have been in past Republican conventions throughout the week.
I was texting them.
And the overwhelming sentiment from them was not just, wow, I disagree with a lot of what I'm hearing, wow, I really don't like the J.D.
Vance pic, I did hear some of that.
More than anything, it was an overwhelming apathy about what was happening in Milwaukee.
The Mitt Romney's and Paul Ryan's and Dick Cheney's, George W. Bush's, they are so far removed from what the GOP has become that it's almost like watching, you know, some kind of distant spectacle.
Like they feel totally not invested in this party anymore.
And it's because of genuine, ideological transformation that has happened.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Let me ask you, in the few seconds that we have left, Laura, would that group, if it supported Joe Biden, would it make a difference, or are they sort of just castaways?
Laura Barron-Lopez: I think it potentially could.
And a lot of those Republicans, like the Adam Kinzinger's of the world, say that if it is Joe Biden, they're going to stick with him and they're going to try to get those independents and Nikki Haley voters to go to Biden.
