MILWAUKEE — Although Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT) has come to Wisconsin as the proud Republican representing Utah's 4th Congressional District, the ordinary workers staffing the four-star Pfister Hotel recognize him as the veteran safety who won the 1980 Super Bowl with the Oakland Raiders.
While Owens's congressional colleagues are a dime a dozen in the hotel housing GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump during the Republican National Convention, the Milwaukee Fire Department staffers assisting the hotel's massively heightened security pose proudly for photos with Owens, who lets them model his iconic Super Bowl ring for the camera.
The Washington Examiner got to sit down with Owens for an exclusive interview thanks to a helping hand from the MFD. Just days after the former president narrowly survived an assassination attempt allowed by a catastrophic security oversight, all levels of law enforcement are on guard throughout Milwaukee but especially at the Pfister, where Owens blasts the Secret Service.
"It's just not acceptable," Owens says of the shooting that injured Trump's ear. "We're very fortunate. It was a miracle that President Trump was able to survive that because we could have been having a whole different conversation this week."
With congressional leadership calling for the resignation of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, Owens promises oversight is coming, if not soon, then when Democrats face destiny at the ballot box.
"We're just at a point when more Americans are saying, 'I want more, I want to feel hopeful again, and I want to have a vision, have a business I can open up and know it's going to be safe,'" Owens says of the polling demonstrating President Joe Biden's precipitous collapse. "And all the sudden, we have the last four years, what President Biden has done has really been a gift to us because everyone is going through misery."
Black men, only 12% of whom voted for Trump over Biden in 2020, have broken away from their historic allegiance to Democrats in the last four years, with an April Wall Street Journal poll of swing state voters showing that nearly one-third of black men will vote for Trump. Owens, himself a black man who used to identify as a liberal, reflected on the trend.
"We've had, unfortunately, in the last four years, what it is to feel misery," Owens said. "In the black community, we've had this for decades. We've seen what it is to not be respected, to not have high expectations, to see our families being destroyed, not to have a good name legacy."
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While Democrats are in disarray, with party elders such as Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) mobilizing to force the incumbent's ouster from his reelection ticket, the mood at the RNC is triumphant.
"What we're seeing here at the convention," Owens reflects, "is the power of unity."
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