‘We’re not going to take it anymore’: Republicans start their convention with a show of force

Representative Carlos Gimenez of Florida is far from a firebrand. A member of the Republican Governance Group, he joined a handful of mainstream conservatives to block Jim Jordan’s bid to become speaker. In May, after Marjorie Taylor Greene’s failed attempt to boot Speaker Mike Johnson, he said, “You’re not the Republican Party” and called her “an idiot.”

But after a gunman in Butler, Pennsylvania nearly killed former president Donald Trump during a rally, Gimenez told The Independent he was angry, saying that Democrats had sowed the seeds for this by constantly attacking Trump.

“They tried to lawfare and they tried to put him in jail, all these charges that may have been nobody's ever been charged with. It's clearly inherently unfair,” he said. “We’re not going to take it anymore.”

Gimenez in fact sounded a lot like Madison Cawthorn, the disgraced former congressman from North Carolina who has now migrated to Florida. Despite no longer being in Congress, Cawthorn checked into the state GOP’s gathering at the Hyatt in downtown Milwaukee ahead of the Republican National Convention.

Republicans have repeated this sentiment ever since the shooting, with one Republican even saying that President Joe Biden should be charged for the attack on Trump’s life. Indeed, Trump’s newly minted running mate, Senator JD Vance, who he announced on Monday, spent the weekend saying pretty much the same before he was whisked away to Milwaukee.

As the Republican National Convention kicks off in Wisconsin, a must-win state, those The Independent spoke with either said they were angry or made calls for unity.

“There was honestly more anger and frustration that something like that would occur,” Representative Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania, who