Trump touts unity, but lashes out at foes as he accepts Republican presidential nomination

Donald Trump, still bandaged after his recent brush with death, accepted the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday with a lengthy speech that opened on a sombre note with talk of "unity" before veering into his more usual and brash style as he lashed out against his foes and their policies.

"I'm not supposed to be here tonight," Trump told the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, recounting the attempted assassination as thousands of attendees listened in silence. "There was blood pouring everywhere, yet, in a certain way I felt very safe because I had God on my side."

The former president, known best for his bombastic and aggressive rhetoric, started with a deeply personal message that drew directly from last weekend's shooting at a Pennsylvania rally. But he later returned to a tone closer to his typical campaign message, outlining his priorities on immigration and the economy and also referencing false theories of election fraud and the indictments against him.

"The discord and division in our society must be healed. We just heal it quickly. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart," Trump said, wearing a large white bandage on his right ear, as he has all week, to cover the wound he sustained.

"I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America."

Trump went on to falsely suggest Democrats had cheated during the 2020 election he lost — despite a raft of federal and state investigations proving there was no systemic fraud — and told the crowd "we must not criminalize dissent or demonize political disagreement," even though he has long called for prosecutions of his opponents.

He also returned to other subjects that have long been central to his speeches — railing against crime while linking it to immigration, renewing his vow to build a wall along the border with Mexico, and suggesting that his first term was all but solely responsible for holding aggressive rival nations in check. 

Trump promised he would enact the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, repeatedly accusing people crossing the southern border illegally of staging an "invasion."

"Our opponents inherited a world at peace and turned it into a planet of war," he said. 

A second Trump administration, he said, will end those wars and replenish the U.S. military, including the construction of an "Iron Dome" missile defence system, similar to that of Israel. 

The speech stretched out to some 90 minutes as Trump diverted, with increasing frequency, from his prepared remarks. And while there weren't many specifics on policy, he did promise to roll back the current administration's efforts to combat climate change, and to direct all infrastructure spending to "roads and bridges." 

He said he'd "drill, baby, drill" and cut taxes, falsely suggesting that Democrats want to raise taxes "by four times" what they are now.

He also said he would to roll back current electric car and other green initiatives — vowing to end "meaningless green new scam ideas" — while returning jobs and economic prosperity to the U.S. by "the proper use of taxes and tariffs."

He also made sweeping promises to end inflation and said "Republicans have a plan" to bring down energy prices "very, very rapidly," though he did not offer specifics.