The words poured out, instinctively, each one punctuated by former President Donald Trump’s fist pumps and grimaces from his bloodied face, in response to the staccato gunshots that had been fired almost a minute earlier.
“Fight! war! War!”
The image of Trump at that moment — the American flag behind him, the Secret Service around him, the blue sky above him — has become an indelible piece of political iconography, on the front pages today and in the history books forever. But some of those words, delivered to the thousands of spectators at the rally in Butler, Pa., and to the millions more watching the scene unfold on screens, are less clear, no less important to understanding Trump’s meaning and message.
With a brief and impolite refrain, Trump accomplished many things at once. He assures her that he remains safe and alone; he issued directives on how his supporters should react to those who attacked him; and capture the emotional state of the nation that is on the edge as well as before the horror of attempted murder. Trump’s social media posts and interviews since the shooting have emphasized the need for national unity, but unity has not been his first impulse.
“Fight! war! War!” it’s the sound of Trump returning fire.
In the canon of Trump’s books and speeches, “war” is a recurring word, but it means very different things in different contexts. In a time written to convey the sensibility of a suitable president, Trump is fighting for someone else – whether it is the American people or a nation that has forgotten. In moments of political or legal crisis, when Trump feels under siege, the call for “war” becomes personal. It’s not a war for others, it’s a war for themselves, it’s a war for them in Trump’s war, convinced that it’s their own cause. In the end, the cause is lost, and the leader becomes all he has to fight for.
“When people treat me badly or unfairly or try to take advantage of me, my general attitude, my whole life, is to fight hard,” Trump wrote in “The Art of the Deal,” published in 1987 and still the foundational document of Trump studies. He also complained that lawyers were too quick to settle disputes. “I’d rather fight than participate,” he says in the book. Join it once, he argues, and you’ll know.
The early fights in “The Art of the Deal” focused on winning tax breaks and fending off lawsuits. But in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” Trump called for more confrontation. The American dream is dying because of excessive regulation, heavy taxes, racism and discrimination, Trump wrote, and while the United States sends troops around the world, it cannot take care of children at home. “What about the American dream?” he asked. He’s considering running for president, he explained, because “when you disrupt the American dream, you’re on Trump’s side of the war.”
That sentiment echoed in 2016 when he received the Republican presidential nomination. “To every parent who dreams for their child, and every child who dreams for the future,” Trump said in Cleveland, “I say this to you tonight: I am with you, and I will fight for you, and I will win for you.”
However, early in his presidency, many of Trump’s fights became more overt, not about fighting for the people but about brawling for himself, often in narrow or petty terms.
After news emerged in 2017 that Trump had asked the FBI director to hand over the investigation to his first national security adviser, the president complained in his commencement speech at the Coast Guard Academy that no politician had been “treated worse or more unfairly” than he had been. Sometimes the only answer, Trump said, is to “put your head down and fight, fight, fight.” And when the president published some strange Twitter posts criticizing MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough in insulting terms, Sarah Sanders, then the White House press secretary, defended Trump’s fighting spirit.
“When they are attacked, they will come back,” he said. “I think the American people voted for someone who is smart, who is tough, who is a fighter, and that’s Donald Trump. And I don’t surprise anyone that he fights fire with fire.
And it’s no surprise that Trump judges those around him on their ability to fight as well. When Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was threatened by allegations of sexual misconduct, Trump called his nominee. They want to know if Kavanaugh is “ready to fight,” Peter Baker and Susan Glasser wrote in “The Divider,” a history of Trump’s presidency. “Indeed,” he replied. Only when the nominee attacked the Senate Judiciary Committee with a display of “raw fury and Trumpian-style fury,” the authors wrote, did Kavanaugh save the nomination.
Trump’s choice of Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate carries a similar rationale. “He’s a fearless MAGA fighter, he fights like crazy,” Trump said at a 2022 rally for Vance’s Senate campaign. Donald Trump Jr., who is close friends with Vance and played a key role in his selection, explained why the senator made sense for the ticket, despite being an early critic of Trump. “He’s just been a tremendous fighter since he saw that (Trump) was real,” Trump Jr. told CBS News.
Vance’s friendly position with Trump on trade, immigration, Ukraine and the culture war, as well as his skills on television, could make the senator an interesting fighter for the 2024 campaign – but he also does not care about the former president’s efforts to cancel the 2020 presidential election. Vance is not only a soldier dedicated to the cause of economic and working-class populism, but also willing to serve Trump’s own interests.
This is how Trump’s war is blurring together. The war on behalf of the people and the one on behalf of the candidate is a single war, inseparable.
“They’re after me because I’m fighting for you,” Trump told a crowd gathered at the March for Life in January 2020, as the first impeachment trial against him got under way. He repeated the idea when he received the party’s nomination for president that year. “From the moment I left my life, and it was a good life, I did nothing but fight for you,” Trump said. “Always remember: They will follow me, because I fight for you.”
His enemy is not only his own; they belong to everyone. When he was attacked, everyone had to join the fight.
Trump’s “battle”, as Larry Kudlow, host of Fox Business and a former economic official in the Trump White House, called it an attribute of Trumpism and important to the former president’s appeal. “Even those who don’t know him or seem to know him are fighters,” Kudlow said in 2023. “Nobody has a fight like Donald Trump.”
In contrast, anyone who wants to limit Trump’s ambitions or question his fight is derided as weak and not dedicated enough. When the election denial cadre suggested at the December 2020 Oval Office meeting that Trump could use the military to dictate votes in key states, Pat Cipollone, White House counsel, argued that the president did not have the authority to do so. “You know, Pat, at least they want to fight me,” Trump said, according to Baker and Glasser. “You didn’t even fight for me. You just told me everything I can’t do.
Here, fighting for Trump means allowing him to do what he wants, even undermining the most important and minimal definition of democracy – respecting the will of the voters.
On January 6, 2021, Trump called on his followers to fight for the same goal. In a speech that morning outside the White House, Trump mocked Republicans for “fighting like boxers with their hands tied behind their backs.” (It was one of 20 times Trump used some version of the word “war” in a speech, though it appeared only twice in prepared remarks, according to the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack.) And Trump also used the word to blur the distinction between war for his country and for himself: “If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore.”
With that, Trump made it clear that he is more than a fighter in a war about politics or policy; he presents himself as the sole reason for our fight. If only one person can channel the people and realize the nation, then without a person in power, the people and the nation are lost. Why are his supporters unwilling to fight?
“Fight for Trump!” the crowd cheered in the morning, as Trump nodded in agreement, before they marched to the Capitol and acted out the spine. Now, at the convention in Milwaukee, the song is cut to a rhythmic, clenched-fist pantomime of Trump’s response to the violence in Butler, Pa.
“Fight! war! War!”
I think Trump crouched on stage last week, bleeding and weighed down by Secret Service agents, and can imagine the old grievances rushing through his mind. Russia and Mueller. Investigations and impeachments. Trials and convictions. Defeat 2020, the insult is not accepted. And now this – try in life, not only fighting words but violent actions, in the campaign rally of all places, the most Trumpian setting, where the bond with the followers must be confirmed, not threatened. With Trump, there is no other possible reaction: war!
What are supporters fighting for when they pick up the chant today? What do you have? What is the fight for the American dream, or people, or a chance to power again? A war against the progressive left or the cultural elite? A war against a sitting president whose weakness is only exacerbated by the strength of his opponent?
I’m not sure it matters. At a convention that celebrates the unity of the party and its leadership, it is a major tribute to Donald Trump that the call to war has become more than an impulsive retort for a moment of national and personal danger. Trump’s words of war are an encompassing worldview, not a political means but an end, not the last resort of a party but the default posture of a man and his movement.
