5 weirdest RNC moments: Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off to Kari Lake rocking out

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic

July 19, 2024 at 9:02 PM·7 min read

I'm about to list the five weirdest things I saw while watching the Republican National Convention, held in Milwaukee from Monday, July 15, through Thursday, July 19.

Let's be clear: There was a wealth of options to choose from.

The whole thing was weird, frankly, mostly because the Republican Party seems to have turned into a cult of personality, and the personality it praises almost to the point of worship is its nominee for president (for the third time), Donald Trump. This was only heightened by Trump's not only surviving an assassination attempt on Saturday, July 13, but his defiance in the face of it. Many of the speakers at the RNC talked about divine intervention.

Trump told reporters the attempt on his life gave him a new perspective, a desire to tone down the political rhetoric — so much so that he tore up the speech he had written for Thursday night and wrote a new one.

Either speakers like Kari Lake, running for U.S. Senate in Arizona, didn't get the memo, or they just decided to ball it up, toss it in the trash and set the trash can on fire.

Like I say, it was weird. These were the weirdest moments.

Kari Lake's wackadoodle media bashing

Lake, an election denier of the first order who is still trying to get the 2022 election for governor, which she lost, overturned, was magnanimous when she began her speech on Tuesday. "Welcome everybody who’s watching at home and welcome everybody in this great arena tonight," she said. "We love you all."

And that was that.

"Actually, wait a minute," she said. "I don’t mean that. I don’t welcome everybody in this room." She pointed to the rafters. "The guys up in the fake news, frankly, you guys up there in the fake news have worn out your welcome."

This is probably as good a time as any to point out that Lake is a former local news anchor in Phoenix, something she references when it suits her. "You have spent the last eight years lying about President Donald Trump and his amazing patriotic supporters," Lake said. "Actually, guys, they lie about everything."

Speaking of lying, CNN's fact-checker extraordinaire Daniel Dale called Lake out for false claims, saying she made the "wildly false claim" that her likely Democratic opponent Ruben Gallego "voted to allow illegal immigrants to vote in this election. That's a brazen distortion of a recent House vote on recent voter registration requirements."

Sounds about right.

Did God save Donald Trump?

This is how Sen. Ted Cruz, once a bitter enemy of Trump's, but now a reliable toady, began his speech to the convention on Tuesday: "God bless Donald J. Trump. And let me start by giving thanks to God Almighty for protecting President Trump, and for turning his head on Saturday as the shot was fired."

This was in reference, of course, to the assassination attempt on Trump on Saturday at a political rally in Pennsylvania that left Trump injured and a bystander dead. And Cruz was far from alone in implying, or outright claiming, that God intervened to save Trump.

Sen. Tim Scott, who outdoes even Cruz in the sycophant department, said during his convention speech, "If you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now." Later he added, "The devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but an American lion got back up on his feet and he roared." And Scott roared himself.

Even if you believe there was some sort of divine intervention, it came off as strange — a convenient combination of the obsequiousness and the devotion that Trump requires from his supporters. On Thursday, Pastor Lorenzo Sewell said God protected Trump.

"You can't deny the power of God on this man's life," he said. "You can't deny that God protected him. You cannot deny that it was a millimeter miracle that was able to save this man's life."

As with many other speakers who said they saw God's hand in sparing Trump, Sewell sees a bigger plan.

"Could it be," he said, "that Jesus Christ preserved him for such a time as this?"

Uh, maybe? Maybe not? Seems like a stretch, but it was certainly a theme this week.

The list of speakers at the RNC

Networks cover the political conventions, but not gavel to gavel. There are four days of speakers, the majority of which are short and not particularly memorable. That's not peculiar to the RNC, that's every political convention.

But Republicans came up with some doozies.

Among the speakers, for instance, was Peter Navarro, a senior trade adviser in the Trump administration, the day he got out of prison. Seriously! He mentioned it in his speech! MSNBC had some fun with it on Thursday, airing a compilation of speakers extolling the Republican Party as the party of law and order, leading to Navarro greeting the crowd during his speech with, "This morning, I did walk out of a federal prison in Miami."

Weird, right? It gets weirder.

Thursday night, in the lead-up to Trump's acceptance speech, the speakers included Eric Trump, one of Donald Trump's sons. Fine, sure, Don Jr. spoke Wednesday night. But the lineup also included wrestler Hulk Hogan; Dana White, the CEO of UFC; Kid Rock and Tucker Carlson (whose speech CNN and MSNBC didn't air, but Fox News did, which is a little strange since they're the most recent network to fire him).

Statesmen, they ain't. It went about like you'd expect. Hogan even did some of his wrestling bit, tearing off his shirt to reveal a T-shirt that said, "Trump Vance." Although watching some of the attendees try to dance to whatever Kid Rock was doing was fabulous.

"A lot of testosterone tonight," Chris Wallace said on CNN.

"I have to say, I am pretty puzzled by the programming decisions tonight," McKay Coppins said on MSNBC.

He wasn't the only one.

CNN's conservative flank

OK, this maybe isn't so weird as it is interesting, and occasionally funny. Fox News is a conservative network. MSNBC is a liberal one.

CNN is whatever CNN is — in trouble, mostly. Conservatives think it's too liberal, liberals think it's not liberal enough, whatever. But say this for the network, while Fox News and MSNBC will trot out strawman opposition on panels, CNN has some genuine arguing going on at times, courtesy of Republicans Scott Jennings and David Urban. They clash frequently with Democrats Van Jones, David Alexrod and others.

Anchors let them get away with a lot in terms of misstatements and either blaming President Joe Biden for everything but bad weather and crediting Trump with everything positive in the world — OK that part is weird — but at least opposing views are heard.

And occasionally it yields something good, like Wednesday night, when Alexrod had the best line of the entire convention. It came after JD Vance's rather uninspiring speech accepting the vice presidential slot. Jennings, ever the apologist, said (perhaps jokingly) that maybe Vance didn't want to upstage Trump.

Axelrod's response:

"Mission accomplished."

It's not just the RNC. Everything is weird

So much news has been coming down the chute in the past few weeks — Biden and Trump's debate was June 27, not that long ago on the calendar but a million years ago in the news cycle — that the RNC was just another story.

A big story, sure. But they're all big lately. Biden's dismal debate performance. Members of the Democratic Party (including New York Times op-ed author George Clooney) wanting Biden replaced. Biden contracting COVID-19. And the biggest of all, the attempt on Trump's life.

What a wild ride. And a lot of it seemed to break Trump's way.

"Joe Biden's had the worst three weeks in presidential campaign history from the debate to today," Scott Jennings said on CNN. "Donald Trump has probably had the best three weeks."

To which Anderson Cooper replied, "By the way, it's insane that the best three weeks includes an attempted assassination."

Insane is a good word for it.

But it's also a good word for things like Navarro's speech — and the praise for it on Fox News. Afterward, Laura Ingraham hosted Sen. Ron Johnson, who not only praised the speech, but called Navarro an American hero.

Cooper got it right.

What's Lou Dobbs' media legacy?: The news anchor traded truth for Trump

Reach Goodykoontz at [email protected]. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. X: @goodyk. Subscribe to the weekly movies newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 5 weirdest RNC moments: Hulk Hogan to Lorenzo Sewell