Friendly faces noted amidst political divide as the city hosted the GOP convention.
MILWAUKEE, Wis.—The vast spaces of the Baird Center were emptying out. The delegates, vendors, reporters, and other attendees of the 2024 Republican National Convention had vanished. The spectacle, Republicans’ first since 2016, was over, the throng long gone.
On the afternoon of July 19, men and women who had worked intensely over the past several days, sometimes at time-and-half pay, were taking down the remaining media booths.
Down the street, a team disassembled the words “Trump 2024.” They’d been spelled out in three-dimensional letters in front of the Fiserv Forum, where the former president addressed his party the previous night.
In interviews with The Epoch Times, the convention workers, employees of nearby restaurants, and others who had experienced the RNC said the Cream City’s guests were pleasant.
Andrew Rode, venue events staff at the Baird Center, said people were “very friendly, very polite [and] cordial.”
“They didn’t want to talk politics with me. They were talking about the Milwaukee Brewers and the weather here, and, ‘Where’s the Fonzie statue?’”
The statue commemorating the character from the sitcom “Happy Days” was a few blocks away, along the Milwaukee River.
A waitress at a nearby coffee shop noted that she wasn’t personally aligned with the Republican Party—she lamented having to choose between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden and couldn’t see herself voting for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Yet, despite the gap with at least some of her customers, she described the people she served as “pretty nice and understanding about the volume we were having.”
“It was a pretty pleasant experience,” she added.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Trump
While accepting the GOP nomination at the RNC, former President Trump thanked “the extraordinary people of Milwaukee and the great state of Wisconsin.”
More than a month earlier, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported that the former president had described Milwaukee as “horrible” in a June meeting with House Republicans.
But Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.) swiftly denied that the quotation was real.
