I BOARDED THE plane to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee with a hard nugget of dread in my stomach.
I was not squeamish about political antagonism. As a Legal Affairs reporter for Bay City News and a sometime political cartoonist, political battles gave me much of the raw material I worked with. I had covered the RNC in Cleveland in 2016 when Donald Trump was nominated and six months later I was in the front rows of press seating at the Capitol when he was sworn in and delivered the American Carnage speech.
I drew scores of political cartoons — more than a hundred — over his years in office. There was endless material, so much that at times it seemed like fishing in a fish ladder. But the vigil I kept watching during the Trump presidency came with the depressing feeling that I wasn’t fishing, I was swimming in a polluted river.
After Joe Biden won in 2020, I had a powerful sense of relief. Sometimes as I left a dinner party I would realize with a feeling of surprise and joy that no one said the word Trump.
Biden was not perfect but he restored normalcy and competency and the sense that the government was not a reality TV show. In the bubble of the Bay Area, many felt the same way.
One of my cartoons from that period:
As the 2024 election approached, I knew it would be close, but I felt that the arc would bend toward Biden.
And yet that feeling was not always easy to maintain, particularly as the situation in Gaza kept unravelling and as the conflicts at home got sharper and sharper.
Then three big things happened and the world changed.
Two weeks ago, Biden faded to invisibility at a debate that his team had hailed as the way for him to showcase his candidacy and regain momentum. Frail and unable to counterpunch, he looked as if he hoped someone would step in and stop the fight. I hoped that someone would step in and stop the fight.
Then in the days immediately after the debate, the Democratic party proved unable to act — either to circle the wagons around Biden or take the car keys and replace Biden with a more vigorous driver. Instead the party dithered as outrage and depression gathered steam.
And Saturday night a shooter was killed after allegedly firing a round from his AR-15 that ripped through Trump’s right ear. Flattened under a scrum of Secret Service agents, Trump rose to his feet just in time for a photographer to capture the scene: fist thrust to the sky, blood on his face, defiant.
Chilling or thrilling depending on your point of view.
The violence lying below the rhetoric had bubbled to the surface. The Internet spewed fouled water.
I packed my bags to travel to Milwaukee. My family bid me goodbye as if I were going to war.
I wondered what I would find. …
Bay City News staff writer Joe Dworetzky is in Milwaukee to report on the daily drama and curiosities he will encounter at the Republican National Convention.