For a brief moment last night, Americans saw Donald Trump try something new: Stick to a script. Addressing delegates at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, the former president—and freshly anointed Republican nominee—read slowly and dramatically from a teleprompter as he recounted his near-death experience in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“I’ll tell you exactly what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time, because it’s actually too painful to tell,” he said.
Photographs by Yael MalkaFor most of his life, Mitt Romney has nursed a morbid fascination with his own death, suspecting that it might assert itself one day suddenly and violently.He controls what he can, of course. He wears his seat belt, and diligently applies sunscreen, and stays away from secondhand smoke.
The day after the 2016 election, I got a phone call from an old friend. Neither of us had slept much, and we spent most of the conversation exchanging shell-shocked comments of the Can you believe this? variety. Before we hung up, his voice took on a trace of irony. “Well,” he said, “this is going to be great for your career.”I waved the remark away, but I knew he was probably right. My contentious relationship with Donald Trump was already paying professional dividends.
President Donald Trump has spent months trying to convince Americans that universal mail-in voting would be a disaster for democracy. It is “dangerous,” he says, potentially “catastrophic”—an “embarrassment” that would “make our country the laughingstock of the world.” Just this week, in his speech kicking off the Republican National Convention, Trump called voting by mail “the greatest scam in the history of politics.