Magamania: inside the glitziest Trump show yet

Ageing wrestlers, kisses with his wife and controversial celebrities the Republican convention was electric for the former Potus who just escaped death

- Anne McElvoy

THE lines of delegates snaking their way through security checks in the baking Milwaukee sun began hours before Donald Trump’s speech to the Republican convention. A rallying event following an attempted assassination has this week become a springboard to a November presidential victory for Trump which looks more nailed on by the day.

Heather Sprague, a delegate from Maine, was wearing a stretch dress emblazoned with Trump: Make America Great Again logos. A few steps away a small boy was dressed in a red Maga hat and tribute navy Trump suit. Glitzy ladies in pointed stilettos with bouncy blow-dried hairdos fought for space.

The keynote speech by a leader who had escaped death by millimetres and whose injured ear has become a hardy image of survival didn’t need much revving up. But then the Republican Party under Trump operates under the unofficial motto of More is More.

Against a backwash of intense infighting in the Democratic party about whether to ditch Joe Biden — now looking like a “when, not if” question — this has been a convention with the highest levels of political self-confidence we have witnessed in a pre-election rally since Barack Obama’s surge to power for the Democrats in 2008.

It got going with Hulk Hogan, an ageing wrestler and actor with a chequered personal history and one of several celebrity attendees including comic Russell Brand and singer Kid Rock, growling a threat-promise that we should get ready: “Trumpomania will run wild again.”

The chairman of the Bill Graham evangelical movement thanked God for Trump’s escape from death — a claim echoed routinely from the platform as the campaign targets religious voters and amplifies a message that Trump was saved by divine providence — in order to recapture the White House.