Kid Rock will bring his provocative style to the stage before Trump’s speech. (2024)

Maggie, he seems to be leaning into the role of Grandpa Trump, which has been a theme of this convention.

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Hogan has absolutely electrified the crowd. I couldn’t even hear what he said as he was ripping off his shirt — the crowd was so loud.

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Why Hulk Hogan is speaking at the Republican convention.

But just last month, he said he had not yet decided whom he would support in the election.

“I just don’t know,” said the retired wrestler, whose real name is Terry G. Bollea, in an interview with NewsNation. He added, “I just want the best man to win.”

That changed after the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump last Saturday.

“When I saw him stand up with that fist in the air and the blood on his face — as a warrior, as a leader — I realized that’s what America needs,” Mr. Bollea said on Fox News on Thursday night.

He was rewarded with a prime-time spot on the final night of the Republican convention, serving as one of the last speakers before Mr. Trump takes the stage.

Mr. Trump has had close ties to wrestling entertainment for decades, and directly participated in several W.W.E. events. He was inducted into the W.W.E. Hall of Fame in 2013, eight years after Mr. Bollea entered the hall. And Mr. Trump made Linda McMahon, the former chief executive of W.W.E., the head of the Small Business Administration when he was in the White House.

Ms. McMahon also spoke on Thursday, and Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, is set to speak after Mr. Bollea.

Mr. Trump has sought to project an aura of toughness after the rally shooting, which bloodied his right ear. He has worn a bandage over his ear during his appearances at the convention this week, and his supporters have made some of the first words he said after rising from the ground — “fight! fight! fight!” — a rallying cry.

Mr. Bollea, a physically towering 70-year-old performer with a gravelly voice and a recognizable handlebar mustache, has sometimes compared pro wrestling to politics. He has also contemplated running for office.

His own politics are somewhat opaque. He has supported both former President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

But Mr. Bollea has other high-profile ties to Republican politics. Peter Thiel, the billionaire entrepreneur and Republican megadonor, was said to have bankrolled a legal fight that Mr. Bollea waged against Gawker Media after the news website published a video of him having sex with the wife of a radio host.

Mr. Bollea won the case and a Florida jury ordered Gawker to pay him $140 million. The media company filed for bankruptcy and shut down.

Mr. Thiel was one of Mr. Trump’s top donors in 2016, though their relationship later soured somewhat. But he remains influential in the Republican Party.

Mr. Thiel is said to have placed calls encouraging Mr. Trump to select J.D. Vance, who once worked at one of Mr. Thiel’s investment firms, as his running mate. Mr. Vance, a senator from Ohio whose best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” fueled his political rise, accepted the vice-presidential nomination on Wednesday.

Mr. Bollea, whose reputation was damaged in 2015 after it was reported that he had used a racial slur on videotape, has suggested that he would like to be vice president someday.

“You never know,” he said in the NewsNation interview. “Right now, I’d make a great vice president, brother, because I do have common sense. I do know right from wrong.”

Chris Cameron and Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.

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Immediately to Lankford’s right is Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, another politician who has antagonized Trump. Cox previously refused to vote for Trump and blamed the former president for inciting the violence at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He later said he supported Trump but told reporters this month that he would not vote for him. Now, he will sit close to Trump just moments away from his headlining speech.

“We’ve lost more Americans from drugs in the past four years than we lost in World War II. Yeah. Our bloodiest war. More than we lost in World War II. Does anybody care? It is pathetic. It is pathetic. And do you hear a single word from Washington about doing anything about it?”

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Several women have accused Brand of sexual assault, and he was questioned by British police about the allegations late last year. Brand has denied the “serious criminal allegations” against him, and said that all his relationships with women have been consensual.

Between speakers, the house band keeps the crowd entertained.

Ripping through covers of Steely Dan, the Eagles, AC/DC and Tom Petty, with blistering guitar solos, Sixwire has kept the energy in the arena pumping between speakers.

They’ve also been given the task of playing the entrance music for former President Donald J. Trump. On Thursday, that meant keeping the introductory riff to “Back in Black” by AC/DC while he made his way from the bowels of the arena, Fiserv Forum, to his box in the lower bowl.

Sixwire, however, is familiar with entertaining at big events. The group, out of Nashville, has played the role of house band for years for various national broadcasts and has played at sporting events, like three Super Bowls, the N.H.L. All-Star Game and the Daytona 500, according to its management company. It has been a mainstay as the musical backing band in television shows such as “Next Great American Band” on Fox and “Next Superstar” on Country Music Television.

While the band has an adoring audience in the thousands of delegates packed on the floor, it also has to appease a tough music critic: Mr. Trump.

“He’s a big music guy, and he’s got a playlist, and he’s the D.J. wherever he goes,” Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor who is a friend of Mr. Trump’s, said in remarks from the stage on Thursday night.

Sixwire’s set list does not mirror Trump rally favorites — there has been no Pavarotti, for example — but three members of the band toured with Lee Greenwood, the singer of “God Bless the U.S.A.,” which Mr. Trump uses as a walk-up song.

On Monday, when Mr. Trump made his first appearance since surviving an assassination attempt on Saturday, Mr. Greenwood joined the band for a tight version of the Trump campaign anthem.

Mr. Trump appears to approve of the performance. Every night when he climbs the stairs to his box, he turns to face the stage, and the crowd, and pumps his fist. Often to the beat.

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The speaker list snubs some Trump loyalists in Congress.

Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado was out.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was in.

Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama was out.

The House and Senate lawmakers rewarded with speaking slots this week at the Republican National Convention represented an incomplete list of longtime true believers, onetime adversaries and recent converts, all of whom have proved their Make America Great Again mettle with former President Donald J. Trump.

The list of congressional speakers was as notable for who was on it — usual suspects like Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Elise Stefanik of New York, in addition to former critics and adversaries like Ms. Mace and Mr. Cruz — as for who was not.

None of the top Senate Republicans had a speaking role at the convention, though it was unclear that any of them, not exactly the all-star bar with the MAGA base, would have wanted a slot. But even those lawmakers who are often the first to drop what they’re doing if there’s a chance to prove their loyalty to Mr. Trump were not all rewarded in return. In May, Ms. Boebert and Mr. Tuberville both reported for duty in front of a Manhattan criminal courthouse to show support for Mr. Trump during his hush money trial. Despite that show of allegiance, they were missing from the main stage.

Representative Troy Nehls of Texas, who tried to draft Mr. Trump to be the House speaker and who wore a T-shirt with the former president’s face on it to the State of the Union speech this year, was nowhere on the speaker list. Neither was Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, who was part of a group of rabble-rousing House Republicans who staged a news conference outside the Manhattan courthouse to help defend Mr. Trump during his trial.

It may have been for the best. Mr. Gaetz was more memorable for his unusual, contoured appearance on stage than for anything he said.

On the sidelines, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the third-ranking Senate Republican, made a mark on the convention by accosting the director of the Secret Service in an arena suite on Wednesday night. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, was booed by the crowd on the floor when his faced was briefly shown on the jumbo screen.

And Ms. Boebert, who recently won her primary in a new Colorado district after a difficult year following her embarrassing “Beetlejuice” episode, at least seemed to enjoy a runner-up prize. For two nights in a row, she snagged a seat in Mr. Trump’s V.I.P. box on the floor.

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Kid Rock will bring his provocative style to the stage before Trump’s speech.

The song Kid Rock plans to perform, “American Bad Ass,” says as much about his own attitude as it does the image of Mr. Trump that has been taking shape among many of his supporters since the former president survived an assassination attempt on Saturday.

“To be shot and to stand up with that kind of resolve, I just told him — I go, ‘Hey man, you’re the biggest badass I know,’” Donald Trump Jr. said at a convention event this week.

The Kid Rock song, released in 2000, was never one of his biggest hits. But it exemplifies the middle-finger-to-the-world attitude that made him a party-crashing star in the bubble-gum pop era of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over a stomping Metallica guitar sample, the Detroit rapper shouts his musical bona fides — Johnny Cash, Grandmaster Flash and AC/DC among them — and boasts of a freewheeling, hedonistic defiance against all doubters:

Chosen one, I’m the living proof
With the gift of gab from the city of truth
I jabbed and stabbed and knocked critics back
And I did not stutter when I said that

Those are some of the relatively few lines without profanities or R-rated braggadocio, like one where he says “I’m an American bad ass, watch me kick,” and rhymes it with a sexual taunt. The original music video showed Kid Rock wearing a pimp’s fur coat, leading a biker convoy and being surrounded by scantily clad female dancers. At the line, “I’m a p*rno flick,” the adult film star Ron Jeremy is shown before a flowing American flag. (Mr. Jeremy has since been accused of sexual assault and rape, and has denied those accusations.)

Kid Rock also sings that he has “never gayed away,” and among the musicians he cites as heroes is David Allan Coe, an outlaw country singer whose career was stained by a series of bluntly racist tracks.

Elements like those, however, are nothing new for Kid Rock, 53, whose real name is Robert James Ritchie. Over the years he has reveled in controversy, and sometimes performed in front of a Confederate flag.

Whether Kid Rock will adjust his lyrics for his convention appearance was unclear. In a social media post on Thursday, he said: “What’s going to happen tonight? Tune in to find out. But here’s a hint: are you scared?” referring to a line in “American Bad Ass.”

Since 2016, Kid Rock has been one of the few high-level artists to support Mr. Trump — Ye is another — and has done so unapologetically. He has also remained a right-wing media star by performing stunts like firing a gun at cases of Bud Light — while wearing a MAGA baseball cap — in protest of the beer brand’s sponsorship deal with a transgender woman. (Kid Rock later called off his boycott.)

In a recent Rolling Stone interview that detailed many of his antics and called him a “MAGA mouthpiece,” Kid Rock embraced the notoriety.

“Would you do me a favor?” he told the magazine’s reporter. “Just write the most horrific article about me. Do it. It helps me.”

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Three celebrities scheduled to take the convention stage on Thursday have made racist comments.

Hulk Hogan, the former professional wrestler who is scheduled to speak, had his contract canceled by World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. in 2015 after an investigation by The National Enquirer and RadarOnline.com found that the wrestler, whose real name is Terry Bollea, had used a racist slur for Black people and had said he was “racist, to a point” on an unauthorized sex tape.

Another scheduled speaker, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News commentator, was fired from the network last year, in part because of a text he had sent to one of his producers. In it, Mr. Carlson discussed a video he had seen of a group of men attacking what he described as an “Antifa kid,” and lamented the fact that the attackers were white.

“Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously,” he wrote. “It’s not how white men fight.”

Kid Rock, the rap-rock musician and passionate Trump fan whose real name is Robert James Ritchie, is scheduled to perform on Thursday night before former President Donald J. Trump formally accepts his party’s nomination. In May, Rolling Stone published an article on the performer. In a back and forth with the reporter, David Peisner, Mr. Ritchie complained about his tax dollars supporting “Black women having children they can’t afford.”

Mr. Peisner wrote that he could not tell if Mr. Ritchie believed what he was saying or if he was just “baiting” him.

A number of Black Trump supporters have been featured at the convention this week, including Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, and Representative Byron Donalds, Republican of Florida. Amber Rose, a rapper, model and TV personality who has said she identifies as biracial, spoke on Monday.

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