The many speakers for the duration of
the night hammered those themes as they attempted to change voters' perceptions
about Trump's haphazard handling of the pandemic and his failure to advance any
sort of intelligible national strategy for slowing the virus as he railed
against governors and insisted it would magically disappear.
In spite of the fact that the night was
aimed at starting up Trump's base with attacks on what was framed as Biden's
socialist agenda and dark portrayals of Democratic protesters as a left wing
horde, the GOP also sent two of its most convincing speakers - previous US
Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott
- to argue that Trump's policies have lifted up a diverse array of American families
and that Democrats have gone too far with their claims of systematic racism in
the US.
RELATED: Four takeaways from the RNC's
first night
Scott, who spearheaded the GOP version
of police change legislation after George Floyd was executed by a Minneapolis
cop, conveyed the closing speech where he conjured Floyd's name and that of
Breonna Taylor, who was fatally shot by police in a raid in Louisville,
Kentucky.
He touched on his own roots as the son
of mother who "worked 16 hours a day to keep food on the table" and a
"roof over our heads" as they shared a two-room house with his
grandparents, arguing that Trump has attempted to stay consistent with
America's promise of chance for all.
He argued that Biden has taken Black
voters for granted - making searing references to Biden's leadership on the
1994 wrongdoing charge that "put millions of Black Americans in a
correctional facility" and the previous VP's abundantly criticized
argument in one interview that "in the event that you have a difficult making
sense of whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't Black." Biden
later said he "shouldn't have been such a wise person."
"We face a daily reality such that
only wants you to have faith in the bad news, racially, economically and
culturally polarizing news," Scott said. "Actually, our nation's arc
always bends back towards fairness. We are not completely where we want to be,
yet thank God we are not where we used to be. We are always striving to be
better."
Scott said the GOP is working "on strategy
- while Joe Biden's radical Democrats are attempting to permanently transform
what it means to be an American."
"Make no mistake: Joe Biden and
Kamala Harris want a cultural revolution, a fundamentally unique America,"
Scott said. "On the off chance that we let them, they will transform our
nation into a socialist utopia and history has taught us that path only leads
to pain and misery, especially for hard-working individuals wanting to
rise."
Haley also attempted to burnish Trump's
image on the world stage despite the fact that Trump's strongman tactics have
been generally criticized across the globe. She argued that not at all like
previous President Barack Obama and Biden, Trump has anticipated strength to
other countries while Biden would be "useful for Iran and ISIS" and
"great for Communist China."
"He's a godsend to everyone who
wants America to apologize, abstain and abandon our values," said Haley,
the previous governor of South Carolina. "Donald Trump takes an alternate
approach. He's tough on China, and he took on ISIS and won, and he tells the
world what it needs to hear."
Haley made that argument despite the
fact that Trump is viewed unfavorably around the world. Earlier this year, the
Pew Research Center found that across 32 countries, a median of 64% said they
don't have confidence in Trump to make the best choice in world affairs, while
only 29% expressed confidence in the President.
Speaking as an Indian-American woman who
was the first person of shading and first woman chose as governor in South
Carolina, Haley called out Democrats for denouncing systematic racism in
America.
"In a great part of the Democratic
Party, it's presently fashionable to say that America is racist. That is an
untruth. America is not a racist nation," she said.
"This is personal for me. I am the
glad daughter of Indian immigrants," she said, taking note of that her
father wore a turban and her mother wore a sari. "America is a story
that's a work in progress. Right now is an ideal opportunity to expand on that
progress, and make America much more liberated, fairer, and better for
everyone. That's the reason it's tragic to see so a significant part of the
Democratic Party choose not to see toward riots and rage."
Attempting to close the empathy gap
Seven days after Biden's party spent
days featuring his empathy with personal stories about the previous VP, Trump
and his party attempted to do likewise in roundtables with front-line workers
responding to the coronavirus pandemic and individuals who his administration
liberated from captivity abroad.
In Trump's first appearance of the
night, a Louisiana surgeon, Dr G.E. Ghali said that Trump had torn down
regulatory barriers to advance the improvement of vaccines and therapies. It is
right that the drive for a vaccine, in the US and elsewhere is moving at
unusual speed - however not as fast as the President says it is. Be that as it
may, neither the video nor the speech explained why the United States has
failed to set up a national test and tracing system or why it has only 4% of
the total populace however has a quarter of its coronavirus infections.
Ghali said Trump "moved mountains
to save lives."
In his second appearance of the night,
the President was featured in a video from the White House with American
hostages liberated by unfamiliar countries during his administration. "We
got you back," Trump told Sam Goodwin, who was held in Syria in 2019.
Other featured Americans had been held
abroad in countries that included Turkey, Iran and Venezuela.
While Trump mostly allowed the previous
hostages to recount to their stories, he at one point told Pastor Andrew
Brunson - imprisoned by Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan - that the
strongman leader "was awesome. ... He ultimately, after we had a couple of
conversations, he agreed."
Trump has been more successful in
liberating hostages than most other late presidents.
He has kept in place revisions adopted
by the Obama administration that make it easier for families of those held to
talk to their captors. His government has also heaped pressure on unfamiliar
governments to free Americans yet officially sticks to the rule that there can
be no negotiating with hostage takers.
Be that as it may, some experts stress
that events like Monday's, which showed the President personally and
politically profoundly invested in claiming credit for liberating hostages,
could put a greater prize on the heads of Americans who are in vulnerable
situations abroad.
Republicans gloss over Trump’s
coronavirus failures on first night of their convention
Republicans pitched Trump's response to
the coronavirus pandemic as a massive success on Monday, despite the view of
large majorities of Americans that the President and his administration have
fumbled the crisis.
In his first surprise appearance of the
night, Trump met with health care, law implementation and other workers who
have been on the front lines during the pandemic. All through the night, other
average Americans shared stories of how Trump's actions have helped them
survive the pandemic and the economic downturn, which prompted tens of millions
of Americans losing their jobs.
During a back-and-forward with
front-line workers, Trump portrayed the federal government as having acted the
hero of governors, who were scrambling for personal defensive hardware during
the early months of the pandemic.
"I appreciate what you said because
we have conveyed billions of dollars of gear that governors were supposed to
get, and much of the time they didn't get," Trump said. "So the
federal government had to support them, and all of the individuals that accomplished
this mind boggling work - they never got credit for it. Be that as it may, you
understand where it came from. Thank you without a doubt."
The party wanted to take that issue
"head on," according to occasion organizers. In a video, the
Republican National Convention misrepresented Trump's handling of the
coronavirus, repeating a whirlwind of falsehoods about Trump's attitude towards
a pandemic that has now executed nearly 180,000 Americans and that he initially
denied would be an issue, then dismissed and disregarded.
Despite attempts by Trump and
Republicans to portray his response to the coronavirus as a success, the US is
still the world's leader in total cases and deaths.
While Trump has focused on his January
31 announcement that banned unfamiliar nationals from China from entering the
US, many medical experts say that he lost valuable time in February when he
resisted making major moves to contain the virus, insisting that it would just
disappear.
He refused to ask the federal government
to take the lead on Covid-19 testing or in any event, for devising a plan to
battle the pandemic, insisting that governors were responsible for ramping up
testing and deciding their own protocols — which prompted wide variation in the
response across the nation.
He didn't announce the coronavirus
shutdown until mid-March and then berated governors who he accepted were
returning their economies too slowly, despite the fact that many of them didn't
meet the criteria that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had
set. Experts say that is one of the factors that prompted a deadly summer surge
in cases.
And it was not until July when Trump
finally wore a mask openly during a visit to injured service members at Walter
Reed National Military Medical Center.
This past end of the week, the seven-day
average of coronavirus deaths dipped under 1,000 a day just because since July.
GOP casts a dark view of America
As always in events designed by Trump,
the message focused in on messages that would resonate with his base. Donald
Trump Jr., one of the night's keynote speakers, launched a searing assault
against "Beijing Biden" who he described as "the Loch Ness
Monster" of the swamp.
"Biden's radical left wing policies
would stop our economic recovery cool, he's already talking about shutting
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