TRUMP: ‘I KEPT MY PROMISE’
In convention speech on White House’s South Lawn, president slams ‘left’s backward view’
WASHINGTON — Facing a national moment fraught with racial turmoil and a deadly pandemic, President Donald Trump accepted his party’s renomination on a massive White House South Lawn stage Thursday night, boasting of helping African Americans and defying his own administration’s pandemic guidelines to address a tightly packed, largely maskless crowd.
As troubles churned outside the gates, Trump painted an optimistic vision of America’s future, including an eventual triumph over the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 175,000 people, left millions unemployed and rewritten the rules of society. But that brighter horizon can only be secured, Trump asserted, if he defeats Democrat Joe Biden.
Trailing Biden in opinion polls, he blistered the former vice president’s record and even questioned his love of America.
“We have spent the last four years reversing the damage Joe Biden inflicted over the last 47 years,” Trump said.
Presenting himself as the last barrier protecting an American way of life under siege from radical forces, Trump declared that “Joe Biden and his party repeatedly assailed America as a land of racial, economic, and social injustice.””
“So tonight, I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?” Trump said. “In the left’s backward view, they do not see America as the most free, just, and exceptional nation on earth. Instead, they see a wicked nation that must be punished for its sins.”
The president took aim at “Democratrun cities,” including Chicago, over what he called “violence and danger in the streets.”
“When there is police misconduct, the justice system must hold wrongdoers fully and completely accountable, and it will,” Trump said.
But, he said, “We can never allow mob rule. In the strongest possible terms, the Republican Party condemns the rioting, looting, arson and violence we have seen in Democrat-run cities all like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, and New York and many others, Democrat run.
“There is violence and danger in the streets of many Democrat-run cities throughout America. This problem could easily be fixed if they wanted to. Just call, we’re ready to go in,” he said. “We must always have law and order.”
As his speech brought the scaled-back Republican National Convention to a close, Trump’s incendiary rhetoric risked inflaming a divided nation reeling from a series of calamities, including the pandemic, a major hurricane that slammed into the Gulf Coast and nights of racial unrest and violence after Jacob Blake, a Black man, was shot by a white Wisconsin police officer.
He was introduced by his daughter Ivanka, an influential White House adviser, who portrayed the famously bombastic Trump as someone who has shaken up Washington.
“Dad, people attack you for being unconventional, but I love you for being real. And I respect you for being effective,” she said.
The president spoke from a setting that was both familiar and controversial. Despite tradition and regulation to not use the White House for purely political events, a huge stage was set up outside the executive mansion, dwarfing the trappings for some of the most important moments of past presidencies.
Both parties are watching with uncertainty the developments in Wisconsin and cities across the nation with Republicans leaning hard on support for law and order — with no words offered for Black victims of police violence — while falsely claiming that Biden has not condemned the lawlessness.
Though some of the speakers, unlike on previous nights, offered notes of sympathy to the families of Black men killed by police, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani also took aim at the Black Lives Matter movement, suggesting that it, along with ANTIFA, was part of the extremist voices pushing Biden to “execute their pro-criminal, anti-police policies” and had “hijacked the protests into vi
cious, brutal riots.”
Some demonstrations took to Washington’s streets Thursday night. New fencing set up along the White House perimeter was to keep the protesters at bay, but some of their shouts and car horns were clearly audible on the South Lawn where more than 1,500 people gathered. Soon after Trump began talking, the horns and sirens caused some people in the last row to turn around and look for the source of the disturbance.
Those chants, coming from masked faces, intruded on another illusion that the Republicans have spent a week trying to create: that the pandemic is largely a thing of the past. The rows of chairs on the lawn were tightly packed, inches apart. Protective masks were not required, and COVID-19 tests were not to be administered to everyone.
But Trump, who has defended his handling of the pandemic, touted an expansion of rapid coronavirus testing. The White House announced Thursday that it had struck a $750 million deal to acquire 150 million tests from Abbott Laboratories to be deployed in nursing homes, schools and other areas with populations at high risk.
Among the more emotional convention moments Thursday: testimony from Alice Marie Johnson, who was granted clemency from her life sentence on nonviolent drug charges, and from Carl and Marsha Mueller, whose daughter Kayla was killed while being held in Syria by Islamic State militants during the Obama administration.
“Kayla should be here,” said Carl Mueller. “If Donald Trump was president when Kayla was captured, she would be here today.”
Four years ago, Trump declared in his acceptance speech that “I alone can fix” the nation’s woes, but he has found himself asking voters for another term at the nadir of his presidency, amid a devastating pandemic, crushing unemployment and real uncertainties about schools and businesses reopening.
“I did what our political establishment never expected and could never forgive,” Trump said Thursday night. “Breaking the cardinal rule of Washington politics: I kept my promise.”