Rising stars, dark warnings
Positive messages follow dire predictions if Trump not elected as Republicans convene
WASHINGTON – Two of the Republican Party’s rising stars, both people of color, offered an optimistic view of President Donald Trump’s leadership on Monday night, closing the opening night of the GOP’s scaled-back convention with a positive message at odds with the dark warnings that dominated much of the night.
While other Republicans predicted a national “horror movie” should Trump lose in November, Sen. Tim Scott and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley tried to welcome new voters to the party to help broaden Trump’s appeal beyond his hard-core base.
“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.”
Scrambling to find a message that sticks, Trump’s team tried out multiple themes and tactics over the course of the night: There were humanizing stories about the president along with the optimistic message about America’s future with him at the helm – and plenty of dire talk about the threat posed by a Joe Biden presidency.
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.”
Yet efforts to strike an optimistic tone were frequently overshadowed by warnings that Biden would destroy America, allowing communities to be overrun by violence.
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.
The GOP convention marks a crucial moment for Trump, a first-term Republican president tasked with reshaping a campaign he is losing by all accounts, at least for now.
A deep sense of pessimism has settled over the electorate 10 weeks before Election Day. Just 23% of Americans think the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new poll from The Associated PressNORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Trump and Vice President Mike Pence both were renominated early in the day. Then Trump, who was not scheduled to deliver his main address until later in the week, made multiple public appearances throughout the first day of the four-day convention.
Trump and a parade of fellow Republicans distorted Trump rival Joe Biden’s agenda through the evening, falsely accusing the Democrat of proposing to defund police, ban oil fracking, take over health care, open borders and raise taxes on most Americans.
They tried to assign positions of the Democratic left to a middleof-the-road candidate who explicitly rejected many of the party’s most liberal positions through the primaries. Trump set the tone with unsupported claims about voting fraud and falsehoods about his own record in office.