The Scene
MILWAUKEE — John Miller arrived at Monday’s RNC protest in full costume: An orange jumpsuit, an oversized Donald Trump mask, and handcuffs, useful for holding onto his plastic water bottle. He stood near a rally point in Red Arrow Park, grappling with the news that Judge Aileen Cannon had dismissed the classified documents case against Trump.
“He seems to be a very slippery, teflon-type character who isn’t held responsible for his actions,” said Miller, 69. “I kind of expected it. She has a reputation of being partial to Trump. But he still has Georgia to worry about and Washington, D.C.”
Saturday’s assassination attempt on Trump had changed the tenor of the presidential campaign, with the former president’s allies demanding that Democrats stop calling their nominee a threat to democracy. It might change the RNC, with Trump telling interviewers that he was re-writing his remarks and prioritizing national unity.
Trump’s survival was also a stroke of incredible luck — a head-turn away from death. It was followed on Monday by Cannon’s embrace of a conservative legal theory that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Republicans talked about divine intervention, the hand of God being placed on their candidate; Democrats are amazed at how, like eight years ago, things keep breaking his way on an almost cosmic scale.
“Donald Trump just won the election,” Tucker Carlson said at a Heritage Foundation “policy fest” on the outskirts of the RNC. “Very few men are tested like Donald Trump was tested on Saturday, and not only did he pass, he got the highest score ever recorded.”
David’s view
Anyone who wins the presidency gets lucky. He makes it into the right school, runs for the right offices, picks the right cycle to run, and doesn’t forget which three departments of the federal government he wants to abolish.
This week, as Donald Trump takes complete control of the Republican Party, I’ve been struck by his incredible good fortune. Democrats, who have been blind-quoting themselves into conniptions, were also thinking about that. Some of them believe that a failed assassin, now dead and with no ideological motive identified, might have locked up the election for Trump already — Trump survived, then pumped his fist and shouted “fight,” an image that became iconic instantly.
But start the clock in 2015. Democrats assumed that Trump, polling far behind Hillary Clinton, would be easy to beat. Trump needed a divided GOP primary field, never consolidating behind an alternative, because most Republican voters at the time told pollsters that they ruled him out. He got that divided field, and it didn’t narrow down to two candidates until most delegates were chosen.
What came next? The Democratic primary dragged into June; that rarely happens, but it was decent luck for Trump. Hillary Clinton got pneumonia and went ahead with campaign events where she coughed uncontrollably and, later, fainted. Sickness isn’t rare in a campaign, but Clinton’s handling of it damaged her, validating a Trump campaign line that wasn’t really clicking before, that the nominee was sick and lacked stamina.
Better luck: The DNC’s email was hacked as their convention began, the first of multiple hacks into Democratic communications that benefitted Trump by putting material like Clinton’s paid speeches into the public domain. Even better: Anthony Weiner had sent sexually explicit materials to a teenager, the FBI opened an investigation, and because he’d used his wife’s laptop, it opened one into the Clinton server discussion it had closed months earlier.
Since 2016, Trumpworld has retconned that story a bit, emphasizing how many stories written about him and covered credulously by the mainstream media didn’t hold up. The premise of the “Russiagate” investigations is that FBI agents pounced on fake information to investigate and undermine Trump. But voters didn’t know about that, and pre-election stories about whether foreign actors were helping Trump reported that the FBI looked, and didn’t find anything.
Trump was less lucky, obviously, in 2020. In that race, his good fortune ran up against a media wary of jumping on damaging secrets about Joe Biden. Hunter Biden left a damaged laptop full of compromising secrets at a repair shop, then never picked it up; Ashley Biden left a diary at a friend’s home, where a tipster found it, and gave it to conservative muckrakers.
That didn’t benefit Trump in real time, because few media outlets chased the stories from those documents — a decision that Republicans have litigated ever since. Trump was lucky in other ways, bouncing back from a serious bout with COVID after an experimental treatment. He wasn’t lucky enough to win the election.
But he was charmed during his 2024 comeback, by which point he was making his own luck. When he was indicted, Republican voters rallied to him — that wouldn’t have happened without years of Trump and Republicans saying that his legal problems were anti-democratic tricks by the Democratic Party. When his attorneys argued that he had presidential immunity, they did so before a Supreme Court whose conservative majority he hand-built.
He had nothing to do with Fulton County electing Fani Willis as district attorney, and Willis hiring an attorney who she’d had an “improper relationship” with. But that was lucky, gumming up the case, and leaving Trump with one set of convictions and a sentencing delayed by the immunity decision.
Even the Cannon decision contained a mix of earned and given luck: She was a judge appointed by him in his final weeks in office. But she was also randomly selected to try his case and stuck with it over the advice of fellow judges who privately suggested she consider declining it. Does it sound ludicrous, asserting that a twice-impeached candidate with sub-50% favorable ratings who just had his life threatened is unusually lucky? Maybe, but that’s where we are. One theme of the pre-convention chatter is that Trump is so fortunate that God must want him to be here, and want him to lead.
“I think he stands for the same Divine Providence for the future of this country that guided our founding fathers,” Vivek Ramaswamy told reporters at Heritage Foundation’s summit. “They guided Abraham Lincoln 160 years ago. And I think Donald Trump, in some ways, is given the second chance now that Abraham Lincoln didn’t have to unite this country.”