It’s Trump’s Race to Lose

An hour after Donald Trump was shot at a Pennsylvania rally, he called his son Eric from his room at Butler Memorial Hospital and asked him to conference in other family members. When they all got on the phone, Trump was lighthearted about his brush with death, and the mood shifted from collective shock to hopeful levity. Eric and Don Jr. joked that their father, now missing a chunk of his ear thanks to one of the would-be assassin’s bullets, would have something in common with Evander Holyfield, the heavyweight boxing champion who lost part of his when Mike Tyson bit it off. “You always wanna be like the great ones,” the elder Trump quipped. Then he got down to business. He would fly back to his home in Bedminster, N.J., that night, but he wouldn’t be there for long. “We’re not changing anything about Milwaukee,” Trump told them. “We’re going to the convention. Not a single thing changes.”

In fact, much had. The shooting on July 13 capped an extraordinary run of luck for the former President. Despite multiple lost elections for the GOP under his leadership, two impeachments, and the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol, the Republican Party had fallen into total obeisance behind him. Beset by an unprecedented 88 state and federal criminal charges, Trump had watched as one case seized up after a prosecutor’s indiscretion, another was dismissed by a conservative judge, and a third was postponed. The convictions on 34 felony counts that he received in a fourth ended up boosting his poll numbers rather than tanking them. The hot streak gained pace in late June and early July as the ­Supreme Court first weakened the prosecutions of the Jan. 6 rioters, and then granted Trump and all other Presidents immunity from some crimes. Trump’s opponent, President Joe Biden, imploded in their debate, prompting a Democratic effort to push Biden out of the race. His feeble performance put new states into play at the top of the ticket and increased the chances of total Republican control of government in 2025.

For all that, Trump’s luck on July 13 was of another order, the kind of confluence of events and political circumstance that can change the world. A slight turn of Trump’s head as the sniper pulled the trigger meant the bullet cut his ear instead of killing him. “Holy sh-t, I got lucky,” Trump told his family. “If I turned my head one more second later, it would have gone straight through my head.” After he ducked to the ground, he emerged amid a wall of Secret Service agents, blood on his cheek, pumping his fist and ­exhorting the cheering crowd, “Fight!” It was among the most powerful scenes in recent American history, and it resonated with the central messages of Trump’s campaign: victimhood, strength, defiance.

Riding that breathtaking moment, Trump arrived in Milwaukee holding history in his hands, in a stronger political position than he had ever been in. The question was what he would do with it. For the first time, he may be able to break beyond his hardcore base of supporters and build a political coalition that could not only carry him into a second term but also give him a broad mandate to govern. As the curtain went up in Milwaukee, there were signs he might actually do it. Trump handed speaking roles to former rivals, invited a union leader to deliver a prime-time address, and embraced onetime enemies in the tech world who were calling in with well-wishes. “Everyone’s reaching out to him,” says one person close to Trump. “He’s letting them back in, which is not his nature, which is usually full of revenge.”

Being Trump, that remains the other possibility. Despite his recent show of discipline, he contains the same vindictive streak that has often led him to scupper his own successes with self-­destructive and petty behavior. People close to him call it “the bad Donald Trump.” Trump’s combative instincts are often the enemy of his interests. The burst of momentum he enjoys now could be the prelude to hubristic overreach. “It’s very critical for Trump, in the wake of this, not to revert to that side of himself,” says GOP Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas, who sat with Trump at the convention.

The near future of the nation may depend on how Trump seizes the moment. For his opponents, who have argued that Trump is a power-­hungry potential dictator, the attempted assassination and Trump’s gathering strength sent an already desperate effort to stop him into an accelerating panic. They saw a brand of strongman populism that could long outlast Trump in his choice for his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, who has said he would have followed through on the scheme to reinstall Trump as President after he lost the 2020 ­election. For Trump’s supporters, the possibility of an unbridled leader with maximum power was a thrilling vision coming into view.

Only five minutes into his speech in Butler on Saturday, Trump called an audible. Abandoning the teleprompter, he asked technicians to post on two giant screens his favorite chart, which tracks border crossings over the past 12 years. It wasn’t new to the “front-row Joes” and MAGA faithful familiar with Trump’s routine. But it usually comes later on during Trump’s rallies. This time, on a spontaneous whim, he moved it up to the beginning. It was, he recalled to family after he landed in Bedminster that evening, the reason he turned his head just as the shooter pulled the trigger on his AR-15 and sent the bullet toward him.

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Family who spoke to him after the near-death experience said Trump was upbeat and grateful to be alive. Former critics called to show goodwill. So did President Biden. The outreach has apparently had a positive effect on Trump. “What’s happening now is more and more people are treating him with respect,” says the person close to Trump. “What you’re seeing is, instead of people treating him bad and then getting the bad Donald Trump, people are ­treating him nice and we’re getting the nice Donald.”

How long that lasts, given Trump’s record, is an open question. Aides say Trump is focused on one thing only—winning—and his current mood had been building before the Pennsylvania rally, as Biden sputtered through a miserable post­-debate stretch that saw his polls sag and ­Democrats openly question whether he should remain the party’s standard bearer. In planning his coronation in Milwaukee, Trump had already demonstrated an unusual willingness to heed his campaign advisers’ admonitions to build as broad a tent as possible.

Trump had signed off on inviting former primary rivals Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to give speeches at the convention. He’d also helped choreograph a speech by Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, a striking pro-­labor play that would have been unthinkable in past GOP conventions. “Trump has his hand in everything,” says his daughter-in-law and handpicked RNC co-chair Lara Trump. “Some of our big, exciting speakers, he’s been very involved in talks about that.”

Trump’s rewrite of the official GOP policy document, making it shorter and less detailed, revealed his efforts to extend the party’s appeal as well as his own. The week before the shooting, according to three sources, Trump spent hours with his top campaign brass in Bedminster to craft the RNC’s 2024 platform, a list of 20 priorities for a second term. Among the long-­standing GOP planks removed: the party no longer says life ­begins at ­conception or expresses any opposition to same-sex marriage. Trump’s heavy involvement also stemmed from his frustration over media speculation that outside groups like the Heritage Foundation—which, along with over 100 conservative organizations, crafted a 900-page policy prescription called Project 2025—were preparing to be the policy puppet masters of a future Trump Administration. “People point to this Project 2025 and all this other nonsense,” the official tells TIME. “The American people can look at the Trump-RNC platform. That is the agenda for the next term.”

The biggest decision still in front of Trump after the shooting was his running mate. To many, the vice-­presidential selection represented a proxy war on the right. On one side, many Republicans pushed for a conventional pick: perhaps Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a Reaganite neo­conservative who might aid the party’s push for Hispanic voters, or North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, a wealthy former entrepreneur and a favorite of the Chamber of Commerce crowd. On the other were MAGA true believers, who wanted Trump to choose an avatar of America First populist nationalism. Trump fielded calls on the Monday morning after the shooting from Republican mainstays, including Rupert Murdoch and Kelly­anne Conway, pushing Burgum or Rubio. Several of Trump’s confidants rushed to convince him otherwise; Don Jr., the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and the right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk were all pushing Vance.

Read More: Why Trump Chose J.D. Vance

Trump was already leaning toward Vance, then 39, his advisers say. He was impressed with the Senator’s trajectory: growing up poor in Ohio, joining the military, graduating from Yale Law School, serving a stint in Silicon Valley, becoming a U.S. Senator. Trump had gotten over Vance’s initial harsh criticisms of him in 2016—Vance once called him “America’s Hitler”—and the two had forged a relationship over the past two years. Trump also liked Vance’s vigorous defense of him during hostile interviews on network television. The clincher, those close to Trump say, came after the Butler shooting, when Trump began to think of Vance’s youth as an asset. “One of the discussions after the assassination attempt was a real reflection on the future,” says a source close to Trump, and “the idea that one day, the movement will go on.”

The choice is also a play to win over voters in the so-called Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which are all but must-wins for Biden. Because of Vance’s roots and story of self-invention, the thinking goes, working-­class voters and some Democrats may respond to a youthful Senator who is skilled at articulating the ideological pillars of Trumpism: an aversion to foreign entanglements and American adventurism overseas; a deep skepticism of free-trade agreements; and a hostility to immigration. “He’s somebody who will be very, very, very effective in the Rust Belt,” says senior campaign official Brian Hughes.

Trump’s final move ahead of the convention was rewriting his speech to tone down his attacks on Biden and craft a message that could expand his realm of support. “It’d be awfully easy for him to take a middle road, or even low road and not be nice,” says Eric Trump. By all accounts, the speech Trump had prepared before the shooting was not. Says the younger Trump of the rewritten version, “the tone is different, the cadence is different.”

Read More: America Met a New, Kinder Trump—Then Came the Rest of the Speech

If the question hanging over America after the assassination attempt was which Trump would emerge, the answer, judging from the speech he ended up delivering, seemed to be both. He started with some 15 minutes recounting his near miss days earlier, speaking in an uncharacteristically quiet, almost reflective tone. But soon enough he reverted to his defensive, angry default, ­attacking Biden and “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” pushing the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen, and describing gruesome killings allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants. Some of the red-meat riffing was Trump going off script, but plenty of it had been written into the speech as well. The former President seemed to feel the stakes, even as the rambling speech ticked toward a record 90 minutes. “I better finish strong,” he said. “Otherwise we’ll blow it and I can’t let it happen.”

Trump’s ability to win new voters remains in question, but he is coming out of the convention with momentum. For months, some polls have suggested that he was eating away at some of the pillars of Biden’s political coalition, including young voters and Black and Hispanic ­voters, ­especially men. Now his team began to detect a softening in the social stigma that had long kept Trump from gathering support in certain circles. “In the 2016 campaign, it started becoming socially very hard for people to say publicly they were for Trump,” says the source close to Trump, who speaks with him frequently. “Privately, in places like Hollywood and Silicon Valley and New York,” the person says, “people are reaching out and trying to restart the relationship with him because they see an inevitability of his winning.”

The campaign believes that the boost Trump got from his reaction to the shooting and Biden’s struggles has opened up the electoral map. Advisers think all seven battleground states—Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina—are theirs for the taking. Meanwhile, the list of states the campaign hopes to flip red has expanded to include Virginia—which Biden won by 10 points in 2020—as well as Minnesota, Maine, New Mexico, and New Hampshire. “We’re in a position to be expanding the map,” says a top campaign lieutenant.

The former President can now run up the score, agrees Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and a vocal Trump critic. “It’s almost impossible for me to imagine Trump getting a majority of the popular vote, though given all the factors, it’s a lot more possible than it ever has been. But the Electoral College right now, and maybe for the foreseeable future, isn’t going to be particularly close,” Sabato says. Trump is likely to get “way over 300 electoral votes,” he says. “Which swing state isn’t going for Trump now? I can’t think of one.”

In recent weeks, the Biden campaign has sought to reverse its losing streak by sounding the alarm about Project 2025. The document, and the people behind it, calls for sweeping abortion restrictions and massive deportations of people living in the U.S. Trump has distanced himself from the group, and Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, tells TIME that he understands why Trump doesn’t want to embrace the project. “He exists in a lane right now that’s political,” Roberts says. “When we get to the season of policy­making and President Trump deciding who his key personnel are, we will stand ready to be of service.”

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If it’s now Trump’s race to lose, he’s still perfectly capable of doing so. Polling shows that a significant section of America is dug in on their dislike for Trump. An AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research analysis found that 6 in 10 Americans have a very or somewhat unfavorable opinion of him, a proportion that has remained steady since 2021. Fresh examples of his disregard for the law, recklessness on the foreign stage, or elevation of personal interests above all else could rapidly undermine any progress he is making with those voters willing to give him a second look. Despite Trump’s highs and Biden’s lows, most surveys show it still to be a close race.

How long will the beneficent, big-tent-­building Trump last? The person close to Trump says he’s in a good place: “A happy Trump is a winning Trump.” But his family says he is unlikely to abandon his pugilistic impulses. Says Eric Trump: “It’s very hard to take the right hook out of the boxer.” —With reporting by Leslie Dickstein, Simmone Shah, and Julia Zorthian