GOP tells the nation it has a stark choice
Trump again questions integrity of election
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump turned a surprise opening-day appearance at his party’s scaleddown national convention Monday into an opportunity to question the integrity of the fall election, as Republicans speaking later in the evening offered dark warnings if the president should lose in November.
Trump’s campaign had promised an inclusive and uplifting prime-time message, hoping to broaden his appeal beyond his hard-core base by featuring the next generation of party stars, including two Republicans of color, Rep. Tim Scott and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Yet any sense of opti
“It hurts my soul to hear the terrible names that people call Donald [Trump]. The worst one is ‘racist.’ I take it as a personal insult that people would think I would have a 37-year friendship with a racist.”
— Herschel Walker
timism was largely overshadowed by most speakers’ dire warnings that Democrat Joe Biden would destroy America, allowing communities to be overrun by violence.
Donald Trump Jr. painted Biden as part of a movement aimed at stripping the nation of its most basic freedoms in his speech Monday.
“In the past, both parties believed in the goodness of America,” the younger Trump said. “This time, the other party is attacking the very principles on which our nation was founded,” citing freedom of thought, speech, religion and the rule of law.
But the younger Trump offered support of his father’s campaign theme that protests for racial justice are lawless, violent mobs intent on toppling long-honored past leaders.
“It’s almost like this election is shaping up to be church, work and school versus rioting, looting and vandalism,” he said.
Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida likened the prospect of Biden’s election to a horror movie.
“They’ll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door,” Gaetz declared.
Later in the night, Haley and Scott did offer a softer tone as they highlighted their experience growing up as people of color.
“I was a brown girl in a black-and-white world,” Haley said, noting that she faced discrimination but rejecting the idea that “America is a racist country.” She also gave a nod to the Black Lives Matter movement, saying “of course we know that every single Black life is valuable.”
And Scott, the Republican Party’s only Black senator, leveled the kind of personal attack against Biden that Trump and his white allies could not.
“Joe Biden said if a Black man didn’t vote for him, he wasn’t truly Black. Joe Biden said Black people are a monolithic community,” Scott charged.
He acknowledged that African Americans have sometimes been victimized by police brutality, but later said: “The truth is, our nation’s arc always bends back toward fairness. We are not fully where we want to be … but thank God we are not where we used to be.”
Trump, who was not scheduled to deliver his keynote convention address until later in the week, made multiple public appearances throughout the first day of the four-day convention. And while the evening programming was carefully scripted, Trump was not.
“The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” Trump told hundreds of Republican delegates gathered in North Carolina, raising anew his unsupported concerns about Americans’ expected reliance on mail voting during the pandemic. Experts say mail voting has proven largely secure.
The GOP convention marks a crucial moment for Trump, a first-term Republican president tasked with reshaping a campaign he is losing by many accounts, at least for now.
Trump and his supporters Monday night touted his response to the pandemic while standing alongside front-line workers in the White House, although he glossed over the mounting death toll, the most in the world, and his administration’s struggle to control the disease.
Organizers also repeatedly sought to cast Trump as an empathetic figure, borrowing a page from the Democrats’ convention playbook a week ago that effectively highlighted Biden’s personal connection to voters.
SEEKING BROADER APPEAL
The party pointed to a somewhat more diverse convention lineup with a more inclusive message designed to expand Trump’s political coalition beyond his white, working-class base.
Haley and Scott were two of the three final speakers on the prime-time program. Another Black person on the schedule, former football star Herschel Walker, defended the president against those who call him a racist.
“It hurts my soul to hear the terrible names that people call Donald,” Walker said. “The worst one is ‘racist.’ I take it as a personal insult that people would think I would have a 37-year friendship with a racist.”
The program also featured Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple arrested after pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their home.
“Democrats no longer view the government’s job as protecting honest citizens from criminals, but rather protecting criminals from honest citizens,” the McCloskeys said in remarks that broke from the optimistic vision for America.
They added: “Make no mistake: No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”
GIVING NO GROUND ON VIRUS
Those cheering Trump’s leadership on the pandemic included a coronavirus patient, a small-business owner from Montana and a nurse practitioner from Virginia.
“As a health-care professional, I can tell you without hesitation, Donald Trump’s quick action and leadership saved thousands of lives during covid-19,” said Amy Ford, a registered nurse who was deployed to New York and Texas to fight the coronavirus.
Some of the planned remarks for the evening program were prerecorded, while others were delivered live from a Washington auditorium.
The fact that the Republicans gathered at all stood in contrast to the Democrats, who held an all-virtual convention last week. The Democratic programming included a well-received roll call video montage featuring diverse officials from across the nation. The Republicans spoke from the ballroom in Charlotte and were overwhelmingly white.
Trump said he had made the trip to North Carolina to contrast himself with his Democratic rival, who didn’t travel to Wisconsin, the state where the Democratic convention was originally supposed to be held. Vice President Mike Pence appeared with Trump.
The president has sought to minimize the toll of the pandemic and he barely addressed it Monday, but its impact was plainly evident at the Charlotte Convention Center, where just 336 delegates gathered instead of the thousands once expected to converge on the city for a weeklong extravaganza. Attendees sat at well-spaced tables at first and masks were mandatory, though many were seen flouting the regulation.
Trump also panned the state’s Democratic governor for restrictions put in place to try to prevent the spread of the virus, which has killed more than 177,000 people in the country and infected millions. The president accused Gov. Roy Cooper of “being in a total shutdown mode,” and claimed the restrictions were aimed at trying to hurt his campaign.
Republicans will spend the week trying to convince the American people that the president deserves a second term. Aides want the convention to recast the story of Trump’s presidency and present the election as a choice between his vision for America’s future and the one presented by Biden.
“Over the next four days, President Trump and Republicans are going to talk about all we have achieved the past four years, and cast an aspirational, forward-looking vision about what we can achieve in the next four,” said GOP Chair Ronna McDaniel.
Democrats were content to let Trump’s unfiltered message drive the day.
While he campaigned aggressively across the country throughout last week’s Democratic convention, Biden made no public appearance Monday.
POMPEO TO WEIGH IN
Additionally, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who will speak to the convention today while on a taxpayer-funded trip abroad, is raising new questions about how he’s mixed partisan politics with his role as America’s top diplomat.
Pompeo’s plan to speak in praise of Trump’s foreign policy appears to violate State Department guidance, which prohibits participation in political conventions and on politicking while on official travel, as well as guidance he and his team recently reaffirmed to employees in the past year as the election season approached.
It is also a departure from the behavior of past secretaries who steered clear of nominating conventions for fear of wading too deeply into partisan politics. Unlike Pompeo, they generally sought to stay above the election fray and avoided publicly criticizing the opposing party’s nominee.
“It is unprecedented in modern times for a Secretary of State to address a political convention,” Nicholas Burns, a former senior U.S. diplomat under multiple administrations, wrote on Twitter. “This is not wise at a time when our chief diplomat should be focused on restoring America’s lost global credibility.”
Pompeo announced his plan to address the convention on his personal Twitter page over the weekend. While former secretaries of state, including Madeleine Albright and John Kerry, have addressed Democratic presidential conventions in the past, they didn’t do so while still in the State Department job.