MILWAUKEE — In 2017, then Rep. Rodney Davis, an Illinois Republican, was on a field near the Capitol when a gunman with a political ax to grind attacked GOP members practicing for a congressional baseball game, seriously wounding Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise.
Everyone on Capitol Hill was horrified. Davis was shaken.
The shooting did tone down the partisan rhetoric. There was renewed goodwill. But it did not last very long.
Davis, at a panel here Tuesday hosted by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, lamented how short that pause was. He compared the days following the 2017 shooting to where we are now, on the second day of the Republican National Convention. The sharp political voices on both sides of the aisle have been a muted since the attempted assassination Saturday on former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. The bullet pierced Trump’s ear; one man died and two were wounded.
The Capitol Hill timeout lasted only a couple of weeks and “we got right back into the midterm election cycle,” Davis said.
Davis, defeated in the 2022 primary by Rep. Mary Miller, is not sure the Trump shooting is “going to be a long-term” opportunity for change.
Certainly the tone of this 2024 GOP convention is different from the 2016 gathering in Cleveland when Trump was nominated for the first time. In Cleveland, the chant “lock her up,” a reference to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, constantly rolled through the convention hall and the rallies that followed.
The speakers on Tuesday slammed President Joe Biden over the southern border and crime from, as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas put it, “illegal immigrants the Democrats release every damn day” because they wanted “votes from illegals,” which is not true.
But given everything, the speeches were not over-the-top scorchers. By that measure, the night seemed muted. Republicans here are on a high, united as some Democrats plot to throw President Joe Biden off the ticket after his catastrophic debate with Trump.
When Scalise, now the GOP House Majority Leader, spoke he referred to his 2017 shooting and last Saturday.
“I need to say something about the attempt on President Trump’s life. Many of you know I was the victim of a politically motivated shooting in 2017. Not many know that President Trump was one of the first to come console my family at the hospital.”
Indeed, when Nikki Haley came to the podium — Trump’s major 2024 primary rival — the former South Carolina governor and Trump United Nations ambassador was upbeat in finally delivering a clear, public endorsement for the man she spent months trying to take down.
“You don’t have to agree with Trump 100% of the time to vote for him,” she said, describing herself.
Davis, in Milwaukee doing analysis for the BBC, was not optimistic that the tonal change will last.
“If it’s anything like 2017, the goodwill lasted a few weeks and then too many people in politics and the media retreated to their partisan corners,” Davis said. “And I hope it doesn’t happen again but, if I had to bet, I’d take the under that it’d probably be about a couple of weeks.”
Also on Tuesday before the evening session, I caught up with Ron Gidwitz, one of the top Republican donors and fundraisers from Illinois when Trump tapped him to be the U.S. ambassador to Belgium and acting U.S. ambassador to the European Union. In the 2022 cycle, Gidwitz was the finance chair for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He was at the convention helping the NRSC fundraising efforts.
Trump has thrived politically by using inflammatory rhetoric to play to his base.
We’ll see when Trump delivers his acceptance address on Thursday night if the failed assassination attempt in any way changed him. Trump’s been sitting silently on the convention floor with his family the last two nights.
More civility could attract low-propensity voters who “frankly don’t like either candidate. I think they will take a harder look” at Trump if he “is less bombastic,” said Gidwitz.