MILWAUKEE — Donald Trump takes the stage Thursday at the Republican National Convention to accept his party’s nomination again and give his first speech since he was cut off mid-sentence by a flurry of gunfire in an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.

Trump’s address will conclude the four-day convention in Milwaukee. He appeared each of the first three days with a white bandage on his ear, covering a wound he sustained in the Saturday shooting.

His moment of survival has shaped the week, even as convention organizers insisted they would continue with their program as planned less than 48 hours after the shooting. Speakers and delegates have repeatedly chanted “Fight, fight, fight!” in homage to Trump’s words as he got to his feet and pumped his fist after Secret Service agents killed the gunman. And some of his supporters have started sporting their own makeshift bandages on the convention floor.

Speakers attributed Trump’s survival to divine intervention and paid tribute to victim Corey Comperatore, who died after shielding his wife and daughter from gunfire at the rally.

“Instead of a day of celebration, this could have been a day of heartache and mourning,” Trump’s vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, said in his speech to the convention on Wednesday.

In his first prime-time speech since becoming the nominee for vice president, Vance spoke of growing up poor in Kentucky and Ohio, his mother addicted to drugs and his father absent, and of how he later joined the military and went on to the highest levels of U.S. politics.

Donald Trump Jr. spoke movingly Wednesday about his father’s bravery, saying he showed “for all the world” that “the next American president has the heart of a lion.” But he toggled back and forth between talking about his father as a symbol of national unity and slamming his enemies.

“When he stood up with blood on his face and the flag at his back the world saw a spirit that could never be broken,” Trump Jr. said.

The convention has tried to give voice to the fear and frustration of conservatives while also trying to promote the former president as a symbol of hope for all voters.

The convention has showcased a Republican Party reshaped by Trump since he shocked the GOP establishment and won the hearts of the party’s grassroots on his way to the party’s 2016 nomination. Rivals Trump has vanquished — including Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — put aside their past criticisms and gave him their unqualified support.

Even Vance, Trump’s pick to carry his movement into the next generation, was once a fierce critic who suggested in a private message since made public that Trump could be “America’s Hitler.”

Trump has not spoken in public since the shooting, though he’s given interviews off camera. But he referenced it during a private fundraiser on Wednesday, according to a clip of his remarks recorded on a cellphone and obtained by PBS News.

“I got lucky,” he said. “God was with me.”

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Overshadowed by the wonderings about President Joe Biden’s vigor was the actual purpose of the NATO alliance’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington last week. It marked three quarters of a century since Harry Truman hosted leaders of 10 nations from Western Europe, as well as Canada, to create a new, permanent defense pact in 1949.

America had had allies before going back to the Revolutionary War, when the French came to the aid of the rebellious colonists (and to thwart their British rivals). And there were many military partnerships in the years that followed, most extensively during World War II, when the Allies fought Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan on battlefields across the planet under the banner of the United Nations, which led to the birth of the world body. But all those groupings coalesced during wartime.

The new North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was, as the National Archives put it, the “first peacetime military alliance ever concluded by the United States.” In doing so, the nation was going directly against the admonition of George Washington, who in his 1796 farewell address, wrote: “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

Washington, who relied on French assistance to beat the Redcoats, noted that to have a “respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.” But NATO was not to be temporary.

George thought that the Atlantic Ocean would insulate the U.S. from Europe’s chaos, but as Truman said when he spoke to the assembled foreign ministers, “Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression. Our peoples, to whom our governments are responsible, demand that these things shall not happen again.”

Of the treaty they were signing: “It is a simple document, but if it had existed in 1914 and in 1939, supported by the nations who are represented here today, I believe it would have prevented the acts of aggression which led to two world wars. The nations represented here have known the tragedy of those two wars.”

Truman was an artillery officer in combat in France during World War I (when it was called “The Great War”). A generation later, he was commander in chief when World War II ended.

Half of the original 12 NATO countries — France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark and Norway — had been overrun and occupied by Nazi Germany and were only liberated from the genocidal regime’s jackboot four years earlier. Britain was never conquered by Hitler and with the Americans and Canadians, brought freedom back to the Continent.

Italy had overthrown their own dictator and declared war on Germany, while the last two members, Iceland and Portugal, provided valuable bases to Atlantic convoys during the war. All 12 members pledged to protect each other if attacked.

When Soviet troops invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, NATO could not defend them. After the Iron Curtain fell, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia joined NATO, along with others from the former East Bloc. Today the membership has grown to 32, with the accession of Sweden on March 7, which followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

NATO vows an “irreversible path” to Ukraine’s membership. When that happens, Ukraine will be protected like the rest.

— The New York Daily News

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