(MILWAUKEE, W.I.) — As Donald Trump made his way into the Republican National Convention on Monday, his first public appearance since the attempted assassination attempt on him, the delegates greeted him with thunderous applause.
Then came booming chants of what’s become a steady rallying cry — complete with raised fists — for the thousands gathered in battleground Wisconsin this week: “Fight, fight, fight!”
They’re inspired, of course, by the iconic moment when Trump returned to his feet after the shooting and, with blood streaming down his face, pumped his own fist in the air to those at his Pennsylvania rally and mouthed those three now-famous words.
“He put himself aside and he told us, not knowing how badly he was hurt, to keep fighting. And I thought, could I love this man any more?” said Laurie Schaefer, an Illinois delegate who said she was a Democrat until Trump ran in 2016, as she sat outside waiting to enter the second day of the convention.
Trump called for unity in the wake of the shooting, a marked shift in tone from his usual blazing rhetoric against President Joe Biden and Democrats. The former president said he is rewriting his acceptance speech for Thursday to emphasize bringing the country together.
But there’s still plenty of criticism of Democrats this week from key speakers. Sen. Ron Johnson, who later said the wrong speech was loaded into the teleprompter, called Democrats’ policies “a clear and present danger to America.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, too, said conservative principles were being “trampled under foot by the radical left,” and Gov. Ron DeSantis took shots at President Joe Biden’s administration being a “Weekend at Bernies” presidency.
So, what then do the words “fight, fight, fight” mean to some of Trump’s most loyal supporters? Do they clash with Trump’s new call for unity?
“Take back our country the way we feel it should be run,” said Randy Garber, a state representative from Kansas who is an alternate delegate. Garber then added, “Without violence, though.”
Tom O’Connor, a delegate from California who is a union carpenter running for city council, said being a Republican in the blue state means “everything is a fight.”
“So, for the president to literally say now’s the time to fight, it’s more of a war cry and we need to push, we need to get more and more conservatives in office to fix the wrongs that have been done to the American people,” he said.
O’Connor, when asked about Trump’s unity appeal and how it would change his campaign rhetoric, argued it’s Democrats who are still stoking division and that he didn’t believe Trump’s messaging would ultimately change much as a result.
“Then how do we become more unified?” ABC News asked.
“That’s a good question. I don’t have the answers, but I’m looking for them,” he said.
Most attendees who spoke with ABC News insisted they didn’t view Trump’s words of “fight, fight, fight” as calling for violence.
“We can’t give up. That’s what it means,” said Anna Villa, a guest at the RNC who drove 13 hours from New York to be in Milwaukee. “So, you know that we can’t be discouraged, that we have to really keep going. You know, it’s an encouragement.”
“It doesn’t mean to me like I have to go and shoot someone,” she said. “It means that we have to like, probably try to encourage some people that want to stay in and not go vote to get them out and vote for it.”
“I think what that means to me is that go get out the vote, stay diligent to your precinct committee role to help your neighbors, make sure they vote the whole ballot, make sure they vote for good moral values, because with good morality, we have more liberty,” said Clayton Taylor, an alternate delegate from Florida. “I don’t think it should be taken out of context.”
Matt Heilman, a state representative and delegate from North Dakota, said: “What I think of when he says that it’s just to continue on and push forward no matter no matter what. The state of the environment that you’re in, just keep pushing forward and you fight on and hope for a better tomorrow.”
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