‘Everything I Do Is Trump’: Photos From Inside a MAGA Convention

MILWAUKEE — There is an almost-religious zeal pervading this Republican convention.

The hall convulsed when Donald Trump entered for the first time Monday. Delegates raised their hands to the heavens as if they were in worship.

“Electric,” said Stan Brady, an alternate GOP delegate from Ohio.

“A feeling I'll never forget,” said Emily Hartman. “We were all crying.”

Entering the hall Tuesday, Hartman, an alternate delegate from Wyoming, wore a custom $300 rhinestone-jeweled cowboy hat and bedazzled TRUMP and WOMEN FOR TRUMP pins.

“Everything I do is Trump,” she said.

Every party convention is a jamboree and celebration of its candidate. But as the following photographs make clear, the 2024 Republican convention is different — a Trumpian spectacle like no other.

Unlike the 2016 convention, when much of the GOP was allergic to Trump, and 2020, which was dampened by Covid, this is the first time a Republican convention is a full-on, in-person, bells-and-whistles MAGA festival.

That was always going to be the case, considering Trump’s iron hold on the party. But the intensity is ratcheted up after the assassination attempt. Now, the mood is one of a party and a movement embracing a man they see as divinely protected.

“Prayer works,” said Lee Greenwood, while playing the first bars of "God Bless the U.S.A.” and introducing Trump for the first time.

“There’s a different feeling in the air,” Hartman said. “A lot of God. A lot of love — understanding like just gratefulness that Trump is still with us. And we can all be here and be safe and celebrate America and our next president.”

She added: “It’s changed me. I haven’t figured it all out. I’m living it. There’s something different.”