Pence previews Trump’s sales pitch to nation
President Trump is half a year into the worst national health crisis in a century and has widespread protests over racial injustice erupting on his watch. On Thursday night, he gets one of his last major opportunities to convince the country that he offers solutions rather than more problems.
His challenges when he accepts the Republican presidential nomination: Crafting positive messages and sticking to them. Convincing Americans that he grasps their pain.
Accomplishing any of those would be a surprise.
Vice President Mike Pence gave a preview in his nomination acceptance speech Wednesday night of what to expect from Trump: Continued insistence that he has done everything right in
dealing with a coronavirus pandemic that came from China, and that when it comes to unrest over policing in communities of color, the administration will default to the side of police.
Charting his second term as news events swirl around him will be an added challenge for Trump.
The president seldom sticks to a script when he speaks in public. “With him, expect the unexpected,” said G. Terry Madonna, who directs the Franklin and Marshall College Poll in Pennsylvania, a battleground state where surveys show Trump trailing Democratic nominee Joe Biden. “If he sticks to a message that lays things out for what he will do over the next four years, it could help him. But if he starts going off on a bunch of tangents, it won’t.”
Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney and member of the Republican National Committee, predicted that Trump’s speech to the party’s national convention “is going to be lit.”
“You’re going to hear something that’s more personal. He’ll campaign about his vision, he’ll talk about himself, his family,” said Dhillon, one of only six California Republican delegates to travel to Charlotte, N.C., for the first two days of the convention. “And he’s a different guy four years later. He’s America’s CEO and he’s had to deal with a very different set of issues.”
Here are some topics the president is likely to touch on:
Racial justice: The police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., on Sunday has reignited the racial justice movement. On Wednesday, a white 17yearold man was arrested in connection with the shooting deaths of two people during street protests in Kenosha. Players refused to take the court for scheduled NBA playoff games in protest of Blake’s shooting, and some baseball games were postponed for the same reason, including the GiantsDodgers game.
Trump could use his speech to offer a moment of healing. Dhillon points to his signing of the First Step Act in 2018, a bipartisan law that reduced penalties for nonviolent offenses involving crack cocaine, as evidence that he has been willing “to do things that other Republicans haven’t done” when it comes to criminal justice.
Clarence Henderson, a Black man who participated in the 1960 lunch counter sitins, cited that legislation in a convention speech Wednesday to make one of the party’s few references to the racial justice movement. He said it shows “that Donald Trump truly cares about Black lives. His policies show his heart.”
But Trump’s early reaction to the unrest in Kenosha doesn’t indicate he’s planning a healing message.
“I will be sending federal law enforcement and the National Guard to Kenosha, WI to restore LAW and ORDER!” Trump tweeted Wednesday.
Trump has spent weeks denouncing largely peaceful racial justice protesters as violent anarchists while remaining silent on rifletoting reopening protesters in Midwestern states and the killing in May of a federal security guard in Oakland, Dave Patrick Underwood.
Pence continued the pattern Wednesday, even citing Underwood as someone shot “during riots in Oakland” without saying the man charged was an Air Force sergeant and alleged member of the farright extremist “Boogaloo” movement.
Pence told a crowd at Fort McHenry in Baltimore that “the American people know we don’t have to choose between supporting law enforcement and standing with African American neighbors to improve the quality of their lives, education, jobs and safety. From the first days of this administration, we have done both.”
But he criticized Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for saying there was systemic racism in America and that police have what the vice president termed “implicit bias against minorities” — two pillars of the racial justice movement. Pence made it clear which side of the protest line he and Trump stand on.
“The hard truth is, you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” Pence said. “Under President Trump, we will stand with those who stand on the thin blue line.”
Republicans have mostly ignored the racial justice movement at their convention, except when actively opposing it as a way to warn suburban residents to think twice before they vote for Biden.
Among them was Lara Trump, wife of the president’s son Eric Trump, who said at the convention Wednesday: “We have seen weak, spineless politicians cede control of our great American cities to violent mobs . ... Joe Biden will not do what it takes to maintain order.”
Steve Phillips, a San Francisco attorney and founder of the Democracy in Color political organization, said Trump “is aggressively fanning the flames of racial resentment in a cynical and calculated play to win electoral advantage among whites fearful of the country's changing demographics.”
He believes the strategy will backfire because it “repels collegeeducated whites, who helped flip the House in 2018.” The coronavirus response: Republicans have almost entirely avoided the subject of the pandemic at their convention. But it is top of mind to voters.
Madonna, the Franklin and Marshall pollster, said the disease “is the No. 1 issue for voters here (in Pennsylvania),” a state Trump won in 2016 by less than a percentage point. “I don’t think that there is any doubt that this is a major factor why he’s losing the state.”
Madonna said Trump needs to explain how he “will quell this pandemic.”
Trump’s stance in recent weeks has been to insist the country is turning the corner and that the pandemic is the fault of China, which covered up the extent of the outbreak late last year. It’s a message that doesn’t appear to be registering with an electorate that saw cases surge in June and July.
On Wednesday, Pence previewed what the president might say when he predicted that “we’re on track to have the world’s first safe, effective coronavirus vaccine by the end of this year.”
That’s optimistic. Even if a vaccine is found, experts say it could be months before it is widely distributed.
Dhillon, the Republican official from San Franciscosaid it is unfair to blame the president for the pandemic. Critics should look instead to the nation’s governors and the variety of reactions they’ve had, she said.
“Each of these states had their own medical directors and made their own choices,” she said. “Whenever a governor has asked for something, he’s given it to them. The president doesn’t have a magic wand that he could wave and keep the Chinese virus out of here.” Secondterm plans: Over the past few weeks, Trump has been vague when asked what he intended to do if voters give him another four years in office.
On Sunday, the day before the convention started, the campaign released a brief document of “core principles” that Trump would focus on in a second term. But most were so vague — like “Build the World’s Greatest Infrastructure System” and “Return to Normal in 2021” — as to be meaningless.
“I’ve never seen a presidential campaign not say what they’re going to do in their second term,” Madonna said.
Pence offered few clues as to what Trump plans for the next four years. Instead, he cited the economic success the nation was enjoying before “the coronavirus struck from China.”
Four years ago, Trump was more definitive about his goals when he accepted his party’s nomination in Cleveland, when he boasted that “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
Omnipotence will be harder for him to sell with nearly 180,000 Americans dead of COVID19 and unemployment higher than it was during the recession that began in 2008.
Unlike four years ago, Trump won’t be able to feed off the energy of 20,000 people in an arena shouting, “Lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton, or “Build the wall!” on the U.S.Mexico border. He will have to figure out another way to reconnect with his base.
Dhillon wouldn’t be surprised to hear him talk about immigration, but in a different way.
Many of the party insiders she spoke with in Charlotte this week were ready to address the issue of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., Dhillon said. The GOP is not going to grant citizenship to all of them, she said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the president talk about what he wanted to do next.”