Burgess Owens, the Republican nominee in a Utah congressional district that Democrats flipped in 2018, took the stage at the Republican convention on Wednesday and recalled his great-great-grandfather, Silas Burgess, who escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad and ultimately became a landowner.
He also recalled his own experience: After playing in the N.F.L., he started a business that failed, and ended up working as a chimney sweep before achieving “a rewarding career in the corporate world.”
“Career politicians, elitists and even a former bartender want us to believe that’s impossible,” Mr. Owens said, referring to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by her former job. “They want us to believe that what I did, what my great-great-grandfather did, is impossible for ordinary Americans. As patriots, we know better.”
Mr. Owens, who is also a Fox News contributor and a former N.F.L. player, is running against Representative Ben McAdams in Utah’s Fourth Congressional District. Mr. McAdams narrowly upset a Republican incumbent, Mia Love, in 2018.
On Tuesday, Mr. Owens was accused of plagiarizing parts of his book “Why I Stand: From Freedom to the Killing Fields of Socialism,” which he denied. Also this week, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that a former Utah legislator was urging the Republican National Committee to revoke his speaking slot because he appeared earlier this year on a YouTube program associated with the false QAnon conspiracy theory.
Mr. Owens has said that he didn’t know about the link and that he does not support QAnon.
Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, the only endangered Senate Republican to speak at this week’s Republican National Convention, on Wednesday night highlighted President Trump’s help for farmers and claimed that a Biden administration would harm them.
“I can’t recall an administration more hostile to farmers than Obama-Biden, unless you count the Biden-Harris ticket,” Ms. Ernst said. “The Democratic Party of Joe Biden is pushing this so-called Green New Deal. If given power, they would essentially ban animal agriculture and eliminate gas-powered cars. It would destroy the agriculture industry, not just here in Iowa, but throughout the country.”
Mr. Biden has promised no such thing. He never endorsed the Green New Deal, much to the frustration of his party’s more progressive elements. He has endorsed reinstating higher fuel efficiency standards put in place by President Barack Obama and rescinded by Mr. Trump.
Ms. Ernst, who won in the 2014 Republican wave and faces a tight challenge this year, is betting her best chance to secure re-election is by tethering herself tightly to President Trump. On Wednesday she kept her remarks narrowly focused on Iowa, praising Mr. Trump for visiting the state after a storm damaged much of the state this month.
Like many speakers during the convention, Ms. Ernst laced her remarks with heavy criticism of the national news media — and praise for the president, who she said had bent media coverage to his will.
After the storm, Ms. Ernst said, “most of the national media looked the other way. To them, Iowa is still just flyover country.” She added, “When President Trump came to Cedar Rapids, the national media finally did, too.”
There is scarce public polling in Iowa, but a poll from The Des Moines Register in June showed Ms. Ernst’s Democratic opponent, Theresa Greenfield, ahead by three percentage points. This month, a Monmouth poll showed Ms. Ernst ahead by one point; each candidate’s polling lead was within the margin of error.
The race has already set fund-raising records for an Iowa Senate contest, and is expected to result in more money spent on TV advertising than ever before in the state.
Ms. Ernst’s convention appearance could only be better for her than her 2016 speech in Cleveland, which was largely overshadowed by the debut, directly before she took the stage, of the “lock her up” chant led by Michael T. Flynn, a Trump campaign adviser at the time. Mr. Flynn spoke for far longer than his allotted time, and Ms. Ernst was given less time to speak than she had planned for.
On Wednesday night, Ms. Ernst’s remarks, which were recorded from Des Moines, followed a prerecorded veterans’ round-table discussion.
In her 2014 campaign, Ms. Ernst pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act, balance the federal budget and cut spending. “Let’s make ’em squeal,” she said in a viral ad, highlighting her history castrating hogs on her family’s farm.
But after Mr. Trump’s election in 2016 — Ms. Ernst had an interview with him when he was in search of a running mate — she backed away from her campaign promises to become one of the president’s stalwart defenders.
Her first 2020 TV ad echoes Mr. Trump’s tone on China.
“We rely on Communist China for far too much, from technology to medicine,” she said. “So I’m fighting to bring it home.”
For at least a decade, Representative Lee Zeldin of New York has been promoted as a Republican rising star.
Mr. Zeldin, 40, is a lawyer and Iraq war veteran from Long Island who first won election to the New York State Senate in 2010 by campaigning against a payroll tax that funded the New York subway and commuter railways.
Since he was elected to Congress in the 2014 Republican wave, Mr. Zeldin has become a staunch supporter of President Trump, who carried Mr. Zeldin’s eastern Long Island congressional district by 12 percentage points after Barack Obama had won it in the 2008 and 2012 elections.
Mr. Zeldin’s defense of Mr. Trump during the initial House impeachment proceedings was so thorough that no Republican spoke more than he did, according to a review of early deposition transcripts last year by NBC News.
On Wednesday night he used his four-minute Republican convention speaking slot to praise Mr. Trump — and his son-in-law Jared Kushner — for providing his district in Suffolk County and New York City with personal protective equipment for medical workers caring for coronavirus patients.
“Jared Kushner and I were on the phone late” one Saturday night, Mr. Zeldin said. “The very next day, President Trump announced he was sending us 200,000 N95 masks. He actually delivered more than 400,000.”
Mr. Zeldin’s praise for the Trump administration neglects to mention what was a nationwide shortage in medical-grade masks and other protective equipment for doctors and nurses. The Trump administration’s response was a scattershot effort that led to various governors’ begging the White House for help and offering public praise of Mr. Trump, some of which has been used in footage that has been aired during this week’s Republican National Convention.
Mr. Zeldin also stated that New York’s hospitals were able to handle all of the patients suffering from the pandemic — a claim that does not comport with how the pandemic played out in New York this spring.
Mr. Zeldin, one of just two Jewish Republicans in Congress, won re-election relatively easily in 2016 and 2018, but faces a significant challenge this year from Nancy Goroff, a chemistry professor at Stony Brook University. The Cook Political Report rates the contest as “Lean Republican,” and the House Democrats’ campaign arm on Wednesday added Ms. Goroff to its “Red to Blue” list of most competitive races.
The Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng on Wednesday praised President Trump’s handling of relations with China and said he had “shown the courage” to stand up to China’s Communist Party.
In China, “expressing beliefs or ideas not approved by the C.C.P. — religion, democracy, human rights — can lead to prison,” Mr. Chen said at the Republican convention. “The nation lives under mass surveillance and censorship.”
He added: “The U.S. must use its values of freedom, democracy and the rule of law to gather a coalition of other democracies to stop C.C.P.’s aggression. President Trump has led on this, and we need the other countries to join him in this fight.”
Mr. Chen, who was persecuted and confined to his home by the Chinese government, escaped to the United States in 2012 with the help of officials at the American Embassy in Beijing. Under a deal with the Chinese government, negotiated under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he received a fellowship to attend law school in New York.
It did not take long for him to become enmeshed in American politics. In 2013, he accepted a fellowship with the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative think tank.
Madison Cawthorn, a 25-year-old House candidate in North Carolina vying to fill the seat vacated by Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, offered himself as the future of the Republican Party on Wednesday night at its convention.
In remarks that — highly unusual at this convention — focused on himself instead of President Trump, Mr. Cawthorn placed himself in the company of twentysomething founding fathers: George Washington, who received a military commission at 21; Abraham Lincoln, who ran for office at 22; and James Madison, who Mr. Cawthorn said signed the Declaration of Independence at 25.
(Mr. Madison, who was 25 in 1776, did not sign the Declaration of Independence.)
“In times of peril, young people have stepped up and saved this country abroad and at home,” Mr. Cawthorn said. “We held the line, scaled the cliffs, crossed oceans, liberated camps and cracked codes.”
As his remarks ended, Mr. Cawthorn, who is paralyzed from the waist down, dramatically lifted himself up onto a walker as he recited the phrase “to the republic, for which I stand.”
It was a moment seemingly intended to go viral, fitting with how Mr. Cawthorn rocketed to national prominence in June, when he upset a Trump-endorsed candidate to win his primary.
He was just 24 years old, a self-described real estate investor who uses a wheelchair after being paralyzed from a car crash. The crash, he said at the time, “derailed” plans to attend the Naval Academy.
But as it turned out, Mr. Cawthorn — who has since turned 25, the legal age to serve in the House — has little real estate portfolio to speak of, had his application to the Naval Academy rejected before his car accident, and once drew scrutiny for a post on social media about Adolf Hitler.
This month, Jezebel unearthed several pictures on Mr. Cawthorn’s Instagram page from a 2017 trip he had taken to Germany. There, he visited Hitler’s vacation home.
“The vacation house of the Führer,” he wrote. “Seeing the Eagles Nest has been on my bucket list for awhile, it did not disappoint.”
He added: “Strange to hear so many laughs and share such a good time with my brother where only 79 years ago a supreme evil shared laughs and good times with his compatriots.”
Mr. Cawthorn later wrote on Facebook that he had visited the historical site to celebrate the Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany. In a subsequent video, he said political attacks suggesting he had affinity for the Nazi regime were “an attack on disabled people.”
During his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Cawthorn made no mention or allusion to his social media posts. Instead he made a call, during a convention otherwise devoted to trashing liberals as America-haters, for both sides of the political spectrum to get along.
“We are committed to building a new town square,” he said. “To liberals, I say let’s have a conversation. Be a true liberal, listen to other ideas and let the best ones prevail. And to conservatives, let’s define what we support and win the argument in areas like health care and on the environment.”
Mr. Cawthorn is almost certain to win his general election and go to Washington next year. Mr. Trump carried Mr. Cawthorn’s western North Carolina district by 17 percentage points in 2016. Mr. Cawthorn’s campaign did not make him available to be interviewed.
Our team of reporters who cover the Pentagon, Congress, health care and more is fact-checking tonight’s speeches. See the claims and how they stack up against the truth.
Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the youngest Republican woman elected to Congress, called President Trump “the only candidate who will stand up for hardworking families and protect the American dream for future generations.”
Echoing many other convention speakers this week, Ms. Stefanik framed the election as “a choice between the far-left democratic socialist agenda versus protecting and preserving the American dream.” (The Democratic nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., from the party’s center-left wing, does not advocate socialism and won the primary over candidates from the left.)
“President Trump is working to safely reopen our Main Street economy,” she said. “He understands that the engine of our country is fueled by the ingenuity and determination of American workers, entrepreneurs and small businesses. Joe Biden wants to keep them locked up in the basement and crush them with $4 trillion in new taxes.”
Ms. Stefanik, who was the youngest member of Congress from either party when she was elected in 2014, developed a moderate, bipartisan reputation in her first few years in office, and sometimes clashed with leadership over the party’s future. She called for a post-mortem analysis after the 2018 midterms and has criticized Republican leaders for not devoting more resources to electing women; she started her own political action committee to support Republican women running for Congress.
But during President Trump’s impeachment hearings, Ms. Stefanik took a much sharper tone, at one point accusing the Democratic committee leader, Representative Adam B. Schiff, of trying to silence her and her colleagues “simply because we are Republicans.” Mr. Trump tweeted his approval.
Since then, Ms. Stefanik’s Twitter feed has become more reminiscent of Mr. Trump’s, complete with a nickname for her Democratic opponent, Tedra Cobb: “Taxin’ Tedra.”
That tone also characterized her convention speech, in which she said Mr. Trump had “fought tirelessly to deliver results for all Americans, despite the Democrats’ baseless and illegal impeachment sham and the media’s endless obsession with it.”
“I was proud to lead the effort standing up for the Constitution, President Trump and, most importantly, the American people,” she said. “This attack was not just on the president. It was an attack on you, your voice and your vote.”
Ms. Stefanik said that Americans had not been swayed, and that “our support for President Trump is stronger than ever before,” though Mr. Trump’s approval rating in the RealClearPolitics average is lower now than it was the day the Senate acquitted him in February.
The head of a national organization that advocates on behalf of law enforcement hailed President Trump as a staunch defender of the police on Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention amid national upheaval over the police killing of a Black man in Kenosha, Wis.
The speaker, Michael “Mick” McHale, leads the National Association of Police Organizations, a coalition of police unions and associations from across the country. He praised Mr. Trump for his “support of aggressive federal prosecution of those who attack our police officers” and baselessly claimed that Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, had allowed his campaign to be taken over by people who are “anti-law enforcement.”
“I’m proud that the overwhelming majority of American police officers are the best of the best and put their lives on the line without hesitation,” said Mr. McHale, who met with Mr. Trump at the White House last month and whose organization has endorsed him. “Good officers need to know that their elected leaders and the department brass have their backs.”
Mr. McHale’s implicit condemnation of those who have criticized the police and their use of force comes at a time of unrest in Kenosha, after a video showed a police officer shooting Jacob Blake, a Black man, seven times in the back. Two people were killed and a third was seriously injured in the protests that followed, and a white teenager who was not affiliated with the protesters was arrested and charged with murder.
Mr. McHale’s dark language reflected the foreboding tone speakers have used throughout the Republican convention, as they have sought to paint a picture of the United States under Democratic leadership as a dystopian country plagued by violence.
Citing what he described as “chaos” in cities like Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York in recent months, where protesters have taken to the streets to condemn police violence and the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, Mr. McHale echoed the Trump campaign in asserting that when elected leaders “make the conscious decision not to support law enforcement,” shootings, “murders, looting and rioting occur unabated.”
His claim is exaggerated; violent crime has risen by about 0.4 percent compared to the same period last year across 25 large American cities, according to the latest available data.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly stressed the need for “law and order” and has embraced the notion of himself as a defender of law enforcement at a time when some progressives — fed up with the killing of Black people by the authorities — have called for defunding the police or in some way lessening their broad roles and responsibilities in communities.
This month, a union representing tens of thousands of New York City police officers endorsed Mr. Trump and became what his campaign said at the time was the sixth police association to do so.
But Mr. Trump has also frequently attacked the country’s top law enforcement officers and sharply criticized institutions like the Justice Department and F.B.I. His relentless critiques of the F.B.I. in relation to its agents’ role in the special counsel inquiry that led to his impeachment has caused both Democrats and Republicans to worry that the president has undermined public confidence in law enforcement.
Kellyanne Conway, President Trump’s homestretch campaign manager in 2016, made the case that Mr. Trump, contrary to his image, was a proponent of women’s empowerment.
“A woman in a leadership role can still seem novel,” Ms. Conway said on Wednesday, which was also Women’s Equality Day.
“Not so for President Trump. For decades, he has elevated women to senior positions in business and in government. He confides in and consults us, respects our opinions, and insists that we are on equal footing with the men. President Trump helped me shatter a barrier in the world of politics by empowering me to manage his campaign to its successful conclusion.”
Some women who worked for Mr. Trump’s development company have painted a different picture, claiming that while Mr. Trump hired and promoted women to positions of authority, he sometimes ridiculed them over their physical appearance.
Ms. Conway announced last week that she was stepping down from her post as presidential counselor to spend more time with her family after a long series of social media posts from her teenage daughter criticizing her work for Mr. Trump.
Ms. Conway’s husband, George — a conservative lawyer who has emerged as one of the president’s most pointed and prolific Twitter hecklers — announced that he was leaving his position with the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, at the same time Ms. Conway revealed her White House departure.
Ms. Conway, a longtime Republican pollster, lasted longer in Mr. Trump’s inner circle than almost anyone outside of his family, in part because she was able to pull off an unlikely balancing act — engaging with the news media as she tried to undermine its standing over negative coverage of the president.
But she is likely to be remembered for coining one of the most memorable one-liners of Mr. Trump’s presidency. When pressed about the administration’s inflated claims about the size of the inauguration crowd in 2017, she described those numbers as “alternative facts.”
Karen Pence, who reportedly expressed reservations about her husband’s acceptance of Mr. Trump’s running-mate offer, on Wednesday made one of the least overtly political speeches yet at the Republican convention, focusing on her work with veterans and military spouses.
“I have had the honor of meeting many heroes across this great country,” said Ms. Pence, an artist and educator who has supported art therapy programs geared at helping veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Many of our veteran heroes struggle as they transition back into civilian life,” Ms. Pence said. “Sometimes the stress is too difficult to manage alone.”
Ms. Pence said she had been motivated by family members who have served in the military.
“The Pences are a military family,” she said. “Our son, Michael, serves in the United States Marines, and our son-in-law, Henry, serves in the U.S. Navy.”
Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, described how President Trump offered words of support after she underwent a preventive mastectomy two years ago.
“During one of my most difficult times, I expected to have the support of my family, but I had more support than I knew,” Ms. McEnany said. “As I came out of anesthesia, one of the first calls I received was from Ivanka Trump. As I recovered, my phone rang again. It was President Trump, calling to check on me. I was blown away.”
Ms. McEnany’s testimony added another voice to the chorus of speakers at the Republican National Convention who have sought to paint Mr. Trump in a softer and more compassionate light. Ms. McEnany was a late addition to the schedule, people involved in the planning said.
Ms. McEnany became the latest woman on Mr. Trump’s staff who has defended him by pointing to her personal experience with him. Ivanka Trump, the president’s elder daughter, and Kellyanne Conway, the outgoing White House counselor, have often defended the president’s behavior by noting that he doesn’t treat them, personally, differently from men on his staff.
On Tuesday, Melania Trump, the first lady, became one of the only R.N.C. speakers to acknowledge the lives lost to the coronavirus, as she tried to cast a softer light on her husband’s presidency, which has often been filled with anger and derision.
In her own speech, Ms. McEnany told voters of the trials of raising a small child and of living with a health condition. (She had previously written about undergoing a preventive double mastectomy to lower her risk of breast cancer after testing positive for the BRCA2 mutation.)
Her remarks were part of a broader project to make Mr. Trump more palatable to women. Tuesday’s program, for instance, included a prerecorded video which praised Mr. Trump’s record of promoting women to key positions in the White House.
Ms. McEnany, who was the national press secretary for Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign before being named his fourth White House press secretary earlier this year, also told viewers about her 9-month-old daughter, framing her fight for Mr. Trump as a fight for to protect her daughter’s future.
“I choose to work for this president for her,” she said. “When I look into my baby’s eyes, I see a new life, a miracle for which I have a solemn responsibility to protect. That means protecting America’s future — a future President Trump will fight for.”
Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a retired Navy SEAL who was elected to Congress in 2018, drew on his experience fighting in Afghanistan to paint America as a “country of heroes” and shared sacrifice in a speech on Wednesday night at the Republican convention.
Mr. Crenshaw, who was deployed five times before being medically retired in 2016, spoke of a friend on the battlefield who had helped ensure his survival, but was killed just weeks later. And as he emphasized a theme of Wednesday’s programming, he sought to highlight everyday Americans as heroes, while also leveling a series of implicit critiques at those who have challenged the status quo and fought for racial justice.
“It’s the parent who will relearn algebra because there’s no way they’re letting their kid fall behind while schools are closed,” he said. “And it’s the cop that gets spit on one day and will save a child’s life the next.”
“Heroism is self-sacrifice, not moralizing and lecturing over others when they disagree,” he added. “Heroism is grace, not perpetual outrage. Heroism is rebuilding our communities, not destroying them. Heroism is renewing faith in the symbols that unite us, not tearing them down.”
Mr. Crenshaw, who represents an area surrounding Houston, won his 2018 race by more than seven percentage points in a Republican-leaning but potentially competitive state in the November general election. His Democratic opponent this year is Sima Ladjevardian, an Iranian-American lawyer and political activist who was previously an adviser to Beto O’Rourke.
Mr. Trump bested Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points in Texas in 2016, but several recent polls have shown him in a much tighter race four years later with Mr. Biden.
Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee gave a dark convention speech, claiming that Democrats wanted to “cancel” law enforcement and service members.
“Leftists try to turn them into villains, they want to cancel them, but I’m here to tell you these heroes can’t be canceled,” said Ms. Blackburn, a firebrand conservative and one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal defenders. “As hard as Democrats try, they can’t cancel our heroes. They can’t contest their bravery, and they can’t dismiss the powerful sense of service that lives deep in their souls. So they try to defund them — our military, our police, even ICE — to take away their tools to keep us safe.”
Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, does not support defunding the police or ICE. Nor does he support “defunding” the military, though he expressed openness during the primary to reducing the defense budget somewhat.
Delving deeply into the culture-war rhetoric that has dominated much of the Republican Party during the coronavirus pandemic, Ms. Blackburn criticized lockdown restrictions that, in some places, closed churches while allowing liquor stores and abortion clinics to stay open. (Churches, and other indoor spaces where large groups of people gather for extended periods of time, have been linked to much more coronavirus transmission than stores or clinics.)
In a fear-mongering message, she also suggested that Democrats wanted to control Americans.
“If the Democrats had their way, they would keep you locked in your house until you become dependent on the government for everything,” she said. “That sounds a lot like Communist China to me.”
Ms. Blackburn, who was elected to the Senate in 2018 after more than 15 years in the House, was known for much of her career for her opposition to abortion, though she turned to a broader pro-Trump message both in her most recent campaign and in her speech on Tuesday. She led a House committee that investigated allegations in 2015 and 2016 that Planned Parenthood had sold fetal tissue for profit; neither the congressional investigation nor multiple state-level inquiries substantiated those allegations.
Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota is one of Mr. Trump’s favorite admirers — so popular, in fact, that rumors have swirled from time to time that she might be called upon to replace Wednesday night’s keynote speaker, Mike Pence, on the 2020 ticket.
Ms. Noem echoed Mr. Trump’s hard-edge language against demonstrators protesting police violence in her speech, hours after a pro-Trump teenager from Illinois was arrested in connection with the killing of two protesters in Kenosha, Wis., after the police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake.
“From Seattle and Portland to Washington and New York, Democrat-run cities across this country are being overrun by violent mobs,” she said. “The violence is rampant. There’s looting, chaos, destruction, and murder. People that can afford to flee have fled. But the people that can’t — good, hard-working Americans — are left to fend for themselves.”
Ms. Noem, the first female governor of her state, has been a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump’s law-and-order campaign, and ushered through a law lifting a requirement for licenses for concealed firearms as one of her first actions after being elected in 2018.
When the president went so far as to suggest, according to the Argus Leader, that he aspired to see his own chiseled visage on Mount Rushmore someday, Ms. Noem (who has no say over such matters) seemed open to the suggestion.
She even ordered up a four-foot-tall model of the statue with a fifth face on it (his). The president returned the favor with an appearance at the national monument earlier this year, a boon to one of his most unapologetic defenders.
The arrest of a 17-year-old Illinois native in connection with the killing of two people protesting a police shooting in Kenosha, Wis., threatens to overshadow the third night of a Republican convention that has portrayed President Trump as a bulwark against chaos and unrest.
By late Wednesday, a storm of discordant news descended on the Republican convention bubble in Washington as a strengthening Hurricane Laura menaced Louisiana and Texas.
The shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by the police in Kenosha, a city of 100,000 people between Chicago and Milwaukee, has created a powerful and growing cascade of reaction that could influence the content — and certainly the context — of speeches scheduled to be delivered by Vice President Mike Pence and others.
Planners would not say if they were making any changes to address the developments.
The NBA scrapped its playoff schedule after Milwaukee Bucks players announced a boycott in protest of the shooting of Mr. Blake as Democrats condemned the inclusion on Monday night’s program of a Missouri couple who had brandished weapons at protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s killing.
President Trump sought to seize the initiative early Wednesday, announcing that he would deploy the National Guard and other law enforcement to Kenosha, Wis., to quell the unrest that has erupted since the police there shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, on Sunday.
“I will be sending federal law enforcement and the National Guard to Kenosha, WI to restore LAW and ORDER!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter.
But the focus quickly shifted back to the tenor of his campaign, when it became apparent that the suspected gunman, Kyle Rittenhouse, was a white pro-police activist, and not one of the protesters demonstrating against the police.
Late Wednesday, Buzzfeed reported that Mr. Rittenhouse appeared to be in the front row of a Trump campaign rally in January, standing not far from the president.
The shooting took place as a crowd was gathering near a gas station, where protesters encountered a group of men who were carrying guns and saying they wanted to protect the area from looting.
Mr. Blake, 29, was shot several times in the back by a police officer as he tried to get into the driver-side door of an S.U.V. His three children were in the back seat. Mr. Blake was paralyzed from the waist down, his father said.
Within hours of the shooting, graphic video of it taken by a neighbor raced across social media, and Kenosha erupted into protest, looting and fires downtown. Officers used tear gas to try to disperse protesters.
Protests continued on Monday and Tuesday, and on Tuesday night, a face-off at a gas station between protesters and armed men who promised to protect the property turned into the violent confrontation that led to Mr. Rittenhouse’s arrest. In addition to the two people shot dead, a third was left seriously injured.
As Vice President Mike Pence prepares to deliver his speech at the third night of the Republican convention this evening, he has one eye on getting his boss re-elected and the other on 2024.
Mr. Pence, who has remained deeply in President Trump’s shadow during his term, is expected to hew closely to a familiar, self-effacing strategy tonight — one devised to keep him bonded tightly to the man he hopes to succeed in four years while preserving at least a veneer of normalcy for himself.
Over the course of four years as Mr. Trump’s mild-mannered sidekick, Mr. Pence has tended to his political future largely by maneuvering around in private what the president bellows in public, something he has had to do particularly often as head of the federal coronavirus task force.
Last month, for instance, Mr. Pence spoke with governors from both parties to discuss schools and stressed that the federal government sought to help them with reopening. “You all build your plan, we’ll work with you,” he told them. The next day, Mr. Trump accused Democrats of trying to block schools from reopening for political reasons and threatened retribution: “May cut off funding if not open!” he tweeted.
If Mr. Pence, 61, does have a future beyond the vice presidency, it has not yet come into focus. His political standing is middling at best, and he is not widely seen as an heir apparent. He is less disliked than Mr. Trump but no more popular than the president, according to recent polling.
“I don’t think people are going to get out of the way for him,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist. “I don’t think he can expect to be anointed simply because he served as vice president.”
As it is, Mr. Pence’s best opportunity to stand out in the current campaign may come in his October debate with Senator Kamala Harris of California, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, whose mission of bringing more vigorous energy and diversity to her party’s ticket could scarcely differ more from Mr. Pence’s more staid political mandate.
In one of the most striking moments of the second night of the Republican convention on Tuesday — both for its content and for its blatant disregard of the separation between the White House and the campaign trail — President Trump held a naturalization ceremony for five immigrants.
It was an obvious effort by Mr. Trump’s campaign to cast him as pro-immigrant after three and a half years of anti-immigrant policies. But at least two of the five new citizens were not told it was being broadcast at the convention.
The decision by Mr. Trump’s campaign to feature the naturalization ceremony angered some senior officials with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Some asylum officers confronted senior agency officials during a virtual town hall on Wednesday about whether Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, had violated rules prohibiting political activity by presiding over the ceremony.
“It’s one of the things that shouldn’t be politicized, and you can hardly get more political than your partisan political convention,” said Barbara Strack, a former chief of the refugee affairs division at Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Bush and Obama administrations.
The Trump campaign has halted its broadcast television advertising campaign, pulling down all broadcast ads on Tuesday with no new ads scheduled to start until Sept. 8, a two-week dark period with less than 70 days to go until the election.
It is the second time over the past 30 days that the Trump campaign has gone completely dark on broadcast television, having paused advertising in late July following the shift in leadership as Bill Stepien took over as campaign manager from Brad Parscale. They are maintaining a presence on national cable.
The pause comes as the Biden campaign has been amping up its television advertising presence. In the period that the Trump campaign is slated to be dark, the Biden campaign has roughly $20 million booked in battleground states. In the immediate aftermath of the convention, the Biden campaign will have the airwaves to itself.
In a statement, the Trump campaign said the recent campaigning by President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, combined with the coverage of the convention, was enough media to carry them. The campaign also said, “we will be back up on broadcast TV well before September 8th.”
“Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence have been visibly visiting battleground states, meeting actual voters and dominating local news coverage,” said Tim Murtaugh, the communications director for the Trump campaign. “It also makes little sense to blow donor money on ads during convention weeks, when all of the national media is focused on the candidates anyway. Our continuing massive digital presence, with special emphasis on the convention weeks, should not be discounted.”
The post-convention break follows a similar pause during Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, when he stopped all television advertising for nearly a month after the conclusion of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. But that convention ended in mid July, and he was not the well-funded incumbent he is now. Even so, the 2016 Trump campaign was advertising by late August.
The campaign has kept up a notable digital advertising presence, spending nearly $4 million on Facebook alone over the past week. There is no publicly available method of tracking future reservations for digital advertising.
Federal officials on Wednesday reported no evidence of coordinated fraud in the implementation of state vote-by-mail efforts, dealing a blow to President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that voting by mail will spur a wave of rigged balloting.
Officials from the Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I., and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said their investigators had not found any cases of widespread attempts to use the Postal Service to illegally influence the election, during a background briefing with reporters in Washington.
Such efforts would be difficult to execute given the sprawling and decentralized system of voting even if someone tried, they said.
“We have yet to see any activity to prevent voting or to change votes, and we continue to think it would be extraordinarily difficult for foreign adversaries to change vote tallies,” the deputy attorney general under Mr. Barr, Jeffrey A. Rosen, said in separate remarks for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Their assessment is in line with those of state officials who have argued that vastly increasing the use of mail-in voting is the only way to ensure that people concerned about contracting coronavirus by voting in person are not disenfranchised.
Mr. Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr have cast doubt on the security of mail ballots, despite assurances from elections officials in both parties that mail-in voting poses only minimal risks.
In July, and again this month, Mr. Trump has raised the possibility, without evidence, that foreign adversaries would forge mail-in ballots and rig the election. Mr. Trump said the widespread use of mail-in and other absentee balloting is “going to be the greatest election disaster in history.”
“You guys like to talk about Russia and China and other places, they’ll be able to forge ballots, they’ll forge up, they’ll do whatever they have to do,” Mr. Trump said in July.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday condemned the “needless violence” that has unfolded in Kenosha, Wis., since the police shooting of a Black man, as he also expressed his solidarity with peaceful protesters and denounced systemic racism.
The remarks, made in a direct-to-camera video posted on social media, come as Mr. Biden, the Democratic nominee, confronts competing political pressures from both the left and right: While the Trump campaign works to cast him as radically anti-law enforcement, many Americans — particularly progressives — have been overwhelmingly supportive of protests against racial injustice.
In the message, Mr. Biden says that he has spoken with the parents and other family members of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot multiple times in Kenosha, Wis., by the police with his children nearby. After the shooting, which outraged many Americans, some protests turned destructive, leading Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, a Democrat, to call for a state of emergency. Two people were killed in a shooting related to the protests, and a white teenager who was not believed to be among the protesters was arrested and charged in connection with the shooting.
Once again, a Black man — Jacob Blake — was shot by the police. In front of his children. It makes me sick.
Is this the country we want to be?
Needless violence won’t heal us. We need to end the violence — and peacefully come together to demand justice. pic.twitter.com/WdNqrxA3PK
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 26, 2020
“I told them justice must and will be done,” Mr. Biden says of his discussion with Mr. Blake’s family, urging viewers to “put yourself in the shoes of every Black father and Black mother in this country and ask, Is this what we want America to be?”
He also issued his own sharp criticism of the chaos.
“As I said after George Floyd’s murder, protesting brutality is a right and absolutely necessary,” Mr. Biden said. “Burning down communities is not protest, it’s needless violence. Violence that endangers lives. Violence that guts businesses, and shutters businesses, that serve the community. That’s wrong.”
It was the latest example of the balancing act Mr. Biden must negotiate on matters of law enforcement as he approaches the election. Mr. Biden’s deep involvement in the 1994 crime bill and record of tough-on-crime instincts has earned him many skeptics on the left and among those focused on criminal justice reform, making his stewardship of this moment of national outrage over police brutality all the more high-stakes.
At the same time, the Trump campaign has repeatedly — and falsely — accused Mr. Biden of seeking to defund the police, a measure that he opposes, but a claim that could be damaging in some swing states if the Republicans can make the title stick, a tactic they have pursued throughout their party convention this week.
With the Republican National Convention at the midway point, the biggest contrast with the Democrats has been in how little attention the Republicans have given to the coronavirus pandemic that has upended life across America and led to over 178,000 deaths.
Democrats made the virus, as well as the Trump administration’s failure to contain it, a dominant theme of their convention last week. The Republicans have mentioned the virus far less, and when they have, it has sometimes been in the past tense.
“Then came a once-in-100-year pandemic,” Larry Kudlow, the president’s top economic adviser, said in his convention speech last night. “It was awful. Health and economic impacts were tragic. Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere. But presidential leadership came swiftly and effectively with an extraordinary rescue for health and safety to successfully fight the Covid virus.”
In fact, the nation is still averaging more than 40,000 new cases and more than 900 deaths each day.
The virus has not gone ignored. Near the end of President Trump’s nearly hourlong speech to delegates in Charlotte, N.C., on Monday afternoon, he said that “we will never forget the 175,000 people,” and added that his decision to ban travelers from China had saved lives.
That night Mr. Trump was shown meeting, maskless, with frontline workers. Several speakers praised his response, including a doctor, a nurse and Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador. Mr. Kudlow described the federal relief package as having “saved the economy.”
On Wednesday Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the federal coronavirus task force, is scheduled to speak.
While accentuating the positive is a time-honored part of any re-election campaign, it risks sounding discordant at a moment when the United States leads the world in reported virus cases and deaths; millions of workers remain unemployed; many school districts say it is still not safe to reopen; and it is now Americans who are barred from traveling to other nations that have been more successful at taming their outbreaks.
So far, the most direct acknowledgment at the convention of the pain the virus has caused came from the first lady, Melania Trump.
“My deepest sympathy goes out to everyone who has lost a loved one and my prayers are with those who are ill or suffering,” Mrs. Trump said from the White House Rose Garden. “I know many people are anxious and some feel helpless. I want you to know you are not alone.”
Halfway through the Republican convention, there have been some notable omissions: a traditional party platform, any mention of impeachment and a meaningful reckoning with the number of Americans who have died from the coronavirus.
But perhaps even more conspicuously absent were masks — whether on President Trump or on those in his immediate orbit, some of whom have been featured in segments that were pretaped at the White House.
No masks when Mr. Trump recognized frontline workers. No masks when Mr. Trump presided over a naturalization ceremony. No masks during the made-for-TV pardoning of a former inmate.
And when Melania Trump, the first lady, gave a keynote speech on Tuesday night in front of a crowd in the White House Rose Garden, very few members of the audience wore masks. The attendees, who the White House said had been tested for the virus, also did not practice social distancing.
The Republican convention has not been completely devoid of masks. On Monday in Charlotte, N.C., all of the 336 delegates who took part in nominating Mr. Trump were required to wear masks.
But the lack of face coverings during high-profile moments stood in stark contrast with the Democratic National Convention last week, when former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the party’s presidential nominee, and his wife, Jill Biden, put on masks to wave to supporters in a parking lot outside a convention center in Wilmington, Del.
Mr. Biden and Senator Kamala Harris of California, his running mate, also kept their distance after Ms. Harris accepted her nomination. Mr. Biden also said this month he believed all U.S. governors should mandate mask wearing in their states, a position Mr. Trump has resisted.
“We do not need to bring the full weight of the federal government down on law abiding Americans to accomplish this goal,” Mr. Trump said at a White House news conference. “Americans must have their freedoms.”
Mr. Trump did not advise Americans to wear masks to prevent the spread of the virus until July, four months after the health crisis had been declared a pandemic — a delay for which he was roundly criticized. He did not wear a mask in public until mid-July.
After the second day of a Republican National Convention whose proceedings trampled over long-established lines between governing and campaigning, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, scoffed at concerns that President Trump and other top officials were abusing federal offices and property for political gain.
“Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares,” Mr. Meadows said in a video interview with Politico, adding, “This is a lot of hoopla that’s being made about things.”
Mr. Meadows said in passing that “there are a couple of things that you can do to make sure that you’re in compliance with the Hatch Act,” the federal law prohibiting the use of government resources for campaign purposes. But he did not explain how the administration had avoided violating the law when Mr. Trump led a naturalization ceremony at the White House that became a featured convention event; when Vice President Mike Pence spoke from a national park; or when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on an official trip, spoke from Jerusalem and became the first top diplomat to address a convention in at least 75 years.
Americans “expect that Donald Trump is going to promote Republican values, and they would expect that Barack Obama, when he was in office, that he would do the same for Democrats,” Mr. Meadows said. It was not clear what he meant, particularly given that President Obama, during his re-election campaign in 2012, did not test the boundaries Mr. Trump repeatedly broke on Tuesday.
“You can’t break the law — you shouldn’t do it,” Mr. Meadows said. But he added that “the law, in the way that it was originally intended, never thought that we would be on Zoom talking to people live.” It was also unclear how that applied to the question of whether it is appropriate to use federal resources for political benefit.
President Trump took another page from his wildly unorthodox 2016 campaign playbook Wednesday and called for taking a pre-debate drug test with his Democratic opponent.
He did it in 2016, when he suggested without any evidence that Hillary Clinton had been on drugs during one of their debates and got attention by calling publicly for them both to be tested before their next face-off. And on Wednesday he tried it again.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Mr. Trump claimed to be suspicious about improvements in former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s performances during Democratic primary debates, particularly against Senator Bernie Sanders, and said that he thought they should both be tested for drugs before they debate next month.
“I don’t know how he could have been so incompetent in his debate performances and then all of a sudden be OK against Bernie,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. “My point is, if you go back and watch some of those numerous debates, he was so bad. He wasn’t even coherent. And against Bernie, he was. And we’re calling for a drug test.”
His baseless claim that Mr. Biden was incoherent in the primary debates had echoes of his attack on Mrs. Clinton four years ago. “We should take a drug test prior because I don’t know what’s going on with her,” he said then. “But at the beginning of her last debate — she was all pumped up at the beginning, and at the end it was like, ‘Oh, take me down.’ She could barely reach her car.”
Mr. Trump, who is known for floating outlandish ideas that he does not always follow up on, raised the prospect nearly a week after Mr. Biden delivered a widely praised address at the Democratic National Convention. Mr. Biden’s assured delivery led some political analysts to fault Mr. Trump and his campaign for having lowered expectations so much by repeatedly questioning Mr. Biden’s mental agility.
“We know it’s unbelievable to Donald Trump, but Joe Biden can speak honestly without a shot of truth serum,” Andrew Bates, a spokesman to Mr. Biden, said. “We’d like to see Trump do the same.”
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RNC Live Updates: Lara Trump, Daughter-in-Law to the President, Addresses the Convention - The New York Times
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