WASHINGTON _ President Donald Trump showcased his executive powers on the political stage Tuesday night, issuing a pardon and overseeing a naturalization ceremony during the second night of a Republican National Convention that featured a norm-busting speech by the country's top diplomat and a lineup of Trump family members.
Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo interrupted a diplomatic mission to Israel to praise Trump's foreign policy, which often has been as unorthodox as Pompeo's willingness to blur the line between partisan politics and U.S. diplomacy, a move that already has sparked a House ethics investigation.
First lady Melania Trump capped the evening with a moving and deeply personal speech from the White House Rose Garden, a rare public outing for one of the most reclusive of White House spouses. Unlike most other speakers, she acknowledged the suffering many Americans have faced in the coronavirus pandemic, offering empathy that the president rarely shows.
"I know many people are anxious and some feel helpless. I want you to know you're not alone," she said, she said, promising the administration would fight for vaccines and therapies.
She expressed sympathy for the victims and their families, and promised that her husband _ who she acknowledged was "not a traditional politician" _ will not rest "until he has done all he can to take care of everyone impacted by this terrible pandemic."
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 that 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 wrote "every word" of this year's speech herself.
The second night of the RNC mostly featured hard-edged appeals to conservative activists, pocketbook voters and a sustained rewriting of the president's record on a host of issues.
Pompeo praised Trump's success in destroying the Islamic State caliphate, and bringing home U.S. hostages. But he overstated Trump's incomplete efforts to broker a substantive trade deal with China, and his stalled efforts to negotiate a nuclear disarmament deal with North Korea.
Speaking from Jerusalem, Pompeo said America is "more secure, because President Trump has put his America First vision into action. It may not have made him popular in every foreign capital, but it has worked."
Two of the president's adult children, Eric and Tiffany Trump, echoed the rousing, grievance-laden remarks delivered a night earlier by his brother, Donald Trump Jr., and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who framed the election choice in stark terms and sought to rally the president's political base.
"In the view of the radical Democrats, America is the source of the world's problems," Eric Trump said. "The Democrats want an America where your thoughts and opinions are censored when they do not align with their own."
His passionate speech, however, was filled with false assertions: that Trump has brought peace to the Middle East and that former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, wants to "defund the police." Biden has said the opposite.
Pam Bondi, a former attorney general in Florida, repeated unproven corruption allegations against Biden's son, Hunter, for his work in Ukraine. It is an awkward issue since Trump was impeached last December for trying to pressure Ukraine's president to investigate Biden's role.
Like the RNC's opening night, Tuesday's speeches largely ignored many of the crises facing the country, including the COVID-19 pandemic that has upended American life and killed more than 178,000 Americans.
It presented instead a world in problems are caused by a media that unfairly criticizes Trump and a Democratic Party that lets American cities run amok.
The president's top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, referred to the pandemic _ which is still killing 1,000 Americans a day _ in the past tense, and said economic recovery would come quickly, even with millions still unemployed.
The only mention of Jacob Blake, the Black man shot at close range by a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer on Sunday, came in the opening prayer.
Just two prominent Republican elected officials spoke Tuesday night, including Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who lauded the president's 2017 tax bill, his efforts on criminal justice and what Paul sees as a pulling back on foreign military engagements.
"I don't always agree with him. But our occasional policy differences are far outweighed by our significant agreements," said Paul, who has sometimes clashed with the president. Trump, he added, "gets things done."
The setup for the night's headliners featured a combination of staunch conservative activists and everyday Americans, who, in a mix of live and recorded remarks, put a positive, personal gloss on Trump's policies, mainly those affecting the economy.
A lobster fisherman from Maine, dairy farmer from Minnesota and CEO of a Wisconsin steel company all touted the president's deregulation of environmental rules and actions on trade, although their speeches were sprinkled with lines to needle Democrats and satisfy the GOP base.
Jason Joyce, the fisherman, said he didn't back Trump four years ago but praised his reversal of an Obama administration order that put thousands of square miles of ocean off limits to commercial fishermen.
"Although Maine's lobstermen don't fish there, Obama's executive order offended us greatly," he said. Under Trump, he added, "fishing families like mine will have a voice. But if Biden wins, he'll be controlled by the environmental extremists."
And a small-town mayor from Minnesota's Iron Range _ a registered Democrat _ offered another voice of support for the president's stewardship of the economy, which polls indicate remains a Trump advantage over Biden.
"This is particularly hard for me to say ... because I am a lifelong Democrat," said Robert Vlaisavljevich, the mayor of Eveleth, Minn. "But for far too long, members of both parties allowed our country to be ripped off and taken advantage of, especially by China."
Tiffany Trump, the president's daughter, who graduated last year from Georgetown Law School, acknowledged the uncertainty that recent college graduates now face.
"As a recent graduate, I can relate to so many of you who might be looking for a job," she said. "My father built a thriving economy once, and believe me, he will do it again."
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, 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 Trump, published 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, retired federal Judge 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.
Eric Trump also has run into controversy this week. On Monday, 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.
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 long-standing American tradition, heretofore heeded by both parties, to not hold overtly political events at the residence of every president since John Adams in 1800.
With Pompeo's speech from Israel, the RNC also ignored another time-honored practice, one that bars administration officials from speaking at nominating conventions, in order to separate official business from politics.
The barrier around sitting 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.
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.
Monday's program mixed efforts to broaden the Trump coalition with emotional appeals to his base. Interestingly, some of the individuals selected to help sell the president's policies more broadly beyond his political base have espoused views that are far outside the mainstream.
Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director who is now an anti-abortion advocate, lambasted the organization as "racist" and said Trump has "done more for the unborn than any other president."
But her past comments _ supporting "head of household voting," which would disenfranchise women, and suggesting that police were smart to profile her son who is biracial, claiming he is "statistically" more likely to commit crimes than her other children, who are white _ have made her a lightning rod for controversy.
Another scheduled speaker, Mary Ann Mendoza, an "Angel Mom" who was scheduled to describe her son's death at the hands of a drunken driver who was undocumented and praise the president's crackdown on immigration, was cut from the lineup after she retweeted an anti-Semitic thread from a QAnon conspiracy theorist suggesting a world domination plot by Jews.
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, presented his story as one of victimization by the mainstream media and "cancel culture" after receiving settlements in two defamation lawsuits this year _ an expression of grievance aimed squarely at the president's base.
"Looking back now, how could I possibly have imagined that the simple act of putting on that red hat would unleash the hate from the left and make myself the target of network and cable news networks, nationwide?" Sandmann said in a taped video.
"I learned that what was happening to me had a name. It was called being canceled," he continued. "Canceled is what's happening to people around this country who refuse to be silenced by the far left."
