WASHINGTON _ First lady Melania Trump will make the case for President Donald Trump's reelection from the Rose Garden at the White House on Tuesday night, headlining the second night of a Republican National Convention that increasingly has become a family affair.
Two of the president's adult children, Eric and Tiffany Trump, also will take the stage a night after the president's political heir apparent, Donald Trump Jr., and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, delivered rousing remarks that framed the election choice in stark terms and sought to rally the president's political base.
Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo also will video chat in from Israel, where he is on an official State Department visit. He thus will mix diplomacy with partisan politics, a potential violation of federal law that has sparked an ethics probe in the House.
Just two prominent Republican elected officials will speak Tuesday night: Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.
Eric Trump will speak a day after New York's attorney general asked a judge to force him to be deposed as part of a civil investigation into the Trump Organization, which he now oversees, and whether it improperly inflated its value in government filings to qualify for economic and tax benefits.
His wife, Lara Trump, will speak Wednesday and his sister Ivanka will address the convention Thursday before the president delivers his acceptance speech from the South Lawn of the White House.
Four years ago at the Republican convention in Cleveland, Melania Trump's RNC address was quickly found to have been plagiarized from Michelle Obama's 2008 DNC address, an embarrassing error she blamed _ after two days of evasions and denials _ on her speechwriter.
On Tuesday morning, an adviser to the first lady said in a television interview that Melania Trump has written "every word" of this year's speech herself.
The reliance on so many Trump family members reflects just how much the president's personal political brand has subsumed not just the convention, but the GOP as a whole, upending decades of conservative orthodoxy in some cases.
The family's support for the president may serve as a rebuttal to the Democrats' portrayal last week of the party's nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, as an embodiment of empathy and decency, as well as a counterweight to recent unflattering portrayals of Trump by other family members.
The president's niece, Mary L. Trump, authored a blistering bestseller this summer, spilling a number of family secrets to support her claim that Trump is a mendacious narcissist who doesn't care about other people.
She based much of her reporting on secretly recorded conversations with the president's older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, who harshly criticized her brother's behavior in office as cruel and unprincipled.
While the first lady has been a steely defender of her husband in public, Melania Trump's rocky marriage _ the president has paid multiple financial settlements to women in efforts to keep them quiet about his extramarital affairs _ has drawn new intrigue in advance of another tell-all book set to be published next month.
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the author and the first lady's former close friend, will reportedly reveal private conversations in which Melania Trump harshly criticized not just Trump's adult children but the president himself.
The convention's outsized focus on the Trump family is just one unusual aspect of this year's convention, which was largely forced online by the coronavirus.
Using the White House as a backdrop for convention speeches by the president and his wife flouts a longstanding American tradition, heretofore heeded by both parties, to not hold overtly political events at the residence of every president since John Adams in 1800.
The RNC is also set to ignore another time-honored practice, one that bars administration officials from speaking at nominating conventions, in order to separate official business from politics.
In addition to Pompeo, Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, will speak Tuesday night.
The barrier around serving secretaries of state is particularly sensitive because they serve as the nation's top diplomat and traditionally try to avoid any appearance of engaging in partisan politics so that the country can maintain a united front when engaging with other governments, and resist suggestions that foreign policy is tied to domestic politics.
Neither John Kerry nor Hillary Clinton spoke at Democratic conventions when they headed the State Department under President Barack Obama, even though both had previously run for president.
Pompeo is set to address the convention from Jerusalem, adding additional controversy given Israel's pivotal role in both domestic and international politics.
In a letter Tuesday to the State Department, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said the House Foreign Affairs Committee was opening an investigation into Pompeo's decision to address the RNC. Castro said it may violate the Hatch Act, which bars federal officials from taking part in political activities, as well as State Department guidelines.
Biden's campaign blasted Pompeo's participation Tuesday as "disgraceful."
"It's just the latest example of a president and an administration that puts politics ahead of everything else, even when it undercuts our alliances and when it weakens our standing abroad," said Bill Russo, a campaign spokesman.
As he did Monday, when Trump spoke to delegates in Charlotte, North Carolina, and then appeared in two taped segments that were filmed inside the White House, the president will appear "more than once" Tuesday, his campaign said.
Trump will be on hand for the first lady's live speech, which will be delivered to a small audience in the newly refurbished Rose Garden.
According to the campaign, precautionary measures to mitigate the coronavirus risk will be taken for those attending.
Although the first lady and Pompeo are the headliners, the two and a half hours of RNC programming will feature another long lineup of speakers, a mix of everyday Americans, elected officials and activists.
Monday's program mixed efforts to broaden the Trump coalition with emotional appeals to his base.
The messaging alternated between optimistic testimonials defending the president's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and his record on racism, threaded with dark renderings of a bleak American future under Democratic control.
Those incongruities are likely to continue to characterize the RNC program Tuesday, which will feature the feel-good stories of regular Americans alongside speakers who embody grievance.
A lobster fisherman from Maine, dairy farmer from Minnesota and CEO of a Wisconsin steel company are slated to tout the benefits of the president's economic policies and his actions on trade.
The lineup will also tout criminal justice reform by introducing a former inmate who runs an organization seeking to reduce recidivism and the former FBI agent who arrested him years ago.
Others will offer narrower appeals. A former Planned Parenthood clinic director who is now ardently anti-abortion and the granddaughter of Franklin Graham will both speak to evangelicals, a major element of Trump's base.
And Nicholas Sandmann, the MAGA hat-wearing Kentucky high schooler whose stare-down with a group of Native Americans on the National Mall last year went viral, will present his story as one of victimization by the mainstream media after receiving settlements in two defamation lawsuits this year.
