Donald Trump once again accepted the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday, delivering a long, falsehood-ridden speech at the White House as critics accused him of inappropriately using “the People’s House” for political gain.
Here are the key takeaways of the final night of the Republican convention:
Trump repeatedly exaggerated and misrepresented his presidential record as he accepted the nomination. Several of the president’s falsehoods focused on coronavirus, as Trump sought to downplay the ongoing pandemic. The president claimed, for example, that his administration was “delivering lifesaving therapies” and that a coronavirus vaccine would be available by the end of this year “or maybe even sooner”.
In reality, the country continues to search for effective treatments against coronavirus, and most health experts believe a vaccine will not be widely available until mid-2021 at the earliest. The rosy picture painted by the president ignored the US coronavirus death toll of 180,000, which is far higher than that of any other country. Despite Trump’s implications that the nation is past the worst of the pandemic, about 1,000 Americans are dying of the virus each day.
Trump’s White House setting for his speech obliterated the line separating the official business of governing and the partisan politics of campaigning. Large screens displaying the Trump-Pence campaign logo were planted on either side of the White House portico, and more than 1,500 supporters, including Trump’s family and cabinet members, attended the event, which did not enforce social distancing or mask-wearing.
Democrats and ethics experts decried the move. “This abomination may be the most visible misuse of official position for private gain in America’s history,” Walter Shaub, a former director of the Office of Government Ethics, wrote on Twitter. “Get off our lawn,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, tweeted.
Get off our lawn.
— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) August 28, 2020
But Trump relished the moment. Veering off script briefly during his speech, he turned and gestured to the White House.
“What’s the name of that building?” he asked, as the crowd cheered and laughed. “The fact is, we’re here and they’re not,” he said of the Democrats.
The convention continued its focus on “law and order” while largely ignoring the recent nationwide protests against racism and police brutality. The housing and urban development secretary, Ben Carson, was the only speaker on Thursday to mention Jacob Blake, an African American father of six who was repeatedly shot in the back by police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A number of other speakers, including the president, instead used their remarks to condemn the “violent anarchists” marching against racism, even though the recent protests have been mostly peaceful.
“In the strongest possible terms, the Republican party condemns the rioting, looting, arson and violence we have seen in Democrat-run cities like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago and New York,” Trump said.
However, the president’s “law and order” message was somewhat complicated by the convention speech of Alice Johnson, whose prison sentence Trump commuted in 2018. Johnson applauded Trump for overseeing “real justice reform” through the First Step Act, but her praise seemed at odds with the president’s calls to crack down on “criminals who threaten our citizens”.
Average Americans delivered some of the most emotional and effective moments of the night. Ann Dorn captured the hearts of many viewers when she described how her husband, the retired police captain David Dorn, was fatally shot amid unrest in St Louis, Missouri, earlier this year. The parents of Kayla Mueller, who was killed by Isis in 2015, delivered some of the most scathing criticism of the Obama-Biden administration. “The Obama administration hid behind policy so much that we felt hopeless when they kept us from negotiating to save Kayla’s life,” Carl Mueller said. “If Donald Trump had been president when Kayla was captured, she would be here today.”
America’s culture wars were once again front and center at the Republican national convention. In appeals that seemed aimed at suburban women and Christian conservatives, speaker after speaker warned of rising crime in cities run by Democrats. Others shared exaggerated claims about Democrats’ position on abortion and repeated the falsehood that Biden opposes school choice.
Trump also positioned himself as a warrior against “cancel culture”, which he described as a “far-left” phenomenon that means “decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated, and driven from society as we know it”. But as president, Trump has routinely called for the firing of his critics or the boycott of companies and institutions that he disapproves of. Most recently he called on his supporters to stop buying Goodyear tires after the company asked employees to refrain from expressing their political views, including wearing “Make America great again” hats.
More of the president’s advisers and family members described his behind-the-scenes compassion, but they struggled to provide examples of such behavior. “President Trump is a kind and decent man,” Dan Scavino, one of Trump’s advisers said. “I wish you could be at his side with me to see his endless kindness to everyone he meets.” But Scavino then pivoted to attacking the media without elaborating.
One of the only speakers to provide an example of the president’s compassion was Ivanka Trump, his daughter and senior adviser, who introduced him before his speech tonight. She gushed over the president bragging to foreign leaders about a Lego replica of the White House that his grandson had made for him.
However, the president’s daughter has previously told a similar story about herself, claiming she made a Lego replica of Trump Tower for him as a child. And that story, like many of the other claims that Republican speakers made on Thursday, is not true.
OMG, Ivanka is telling a story about her son Joseph building a lego model of the White House. She told the same story about herself once, building a lego Trump Tower.
— Andrea Bernstein (@AndreaWNYC) August 28, 2020
The story was made up.
AMERICAN OLIGARCHS, P 176 pic.twitter.com/hwGR2q43Q1
