The keynote capping off the RNC will be Trump’s first public address since the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania that left one Trump supporter dead and two injured. It also left the former president with a wound on his right ear. The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, also died.
Trump has said the shooting, which has loomed large over the Milwaukee gathering this week, inspired him to completely rework his planned remarks.
“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” Trump said Monday.
But the former has a tendency to go off-script, so anything is possible when he takes the stage before what is sure to be a roaring crowd.
During one of his longest speeches as president, Trump spoke for more than two hours at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2019.
“You know I’m totally off-script right now. And this is how I got elected: by being off script,” he said. “It’s true, and if we don’t go off-script, our country is in big trouble, folks.”
He also noted his fondness for going off-script at a 2019 campaign rally in Minnesota, while railing against “do-nothing Democrat con artists and scammers,” the media and other adversaries, including then-campaign rival Biden who he said, “understood how to kiss Barack Obama’s a–.”
“I gotta tell you,” Trump said. “Isn’t it much better when I go off-script? Isn’t that better? So much better.”
The Hill’s Brett Samuels has outlined five things to watch in the speech.
Something viewers are sure to notice: Trump is still wearing a large white bandage over his right ear because of the wound suffered Saturday. Some RNC attendees have been donning faux ear bandages this week in solidarity with Trump.
Little information has been released about Trump’s recovery, aside from tidbits offered up by family members and close allies.
The former president did not get stitches and is not taking medication for the injury.
Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and RNC co-chair, said in a CBS News interview that Trump will wear the bandage “until it’s probably fully healed up.”
Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), who was the White House physician during Trump’s presidency, said he examined and dressed the wound Sunday.
“The bullet took a little bit off the top of his ear in an area that, just by nature, bleeds like crazy,” he told The New York Times.
Jackson also provided some insight into the size of the eye-catching bandage.
“The dressing’s bulked up a bit because you need a bit of absorbent,” he said. “You don’t want to be walking around with bloody gauze on his ear.”
