\On July 13, 2024, Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. While the former president walked away with a flesh wound to the ear, a local firefighter was killed, and two other audience members were critically wounded. In the immediate aftermath, Donald Trump rose triumphantly from a pile of Secret Service members for what would become an iconic photo featuring a bloody ear, a pumping fist, and a battle cry of “Fight, Fight, Fight.”
The image and the narrative of the shooting became the cornerstone of the 2024 Republican National Convention, held just a week later. Trump’s acceptance speech marked his first public appearance since the shooting. Trump offered a vivid description of the shooting and his survival, telling his supporters, “There was blood pouring everywhere, and yet in a certain way I felt very safe because I had God on my side. I felt that.”
This paper is a discourse analysis of the campaign’s rhetorical pivot following the assassination attempt, and the deployment of both religious and corporeal masculinities in Trump’s survival narrative. Much as Trump deployed Ronald Reagan’s Make America Great Again slogan in 2016, so too did he borrow his Hollywood persona in 2024 for a new generation. Considering the convention speakers, the acceptance speech, the stage set pieces, and the social media response to the shooting and the convention speech, I argue that the Trump campaign deployed what scholar Susan Jeffords might call a “hard body politics” first articulated in the Reagan-era, explicitly linking masculinity with national identity through a conflation of Hollywood tropes of manhood and public policy. This paper contributes to the wider literature on party convention analysis (Sheckles 2020) and gender and presidential rhetoric. (Katz, 2012; Stuckey, 2010).
