On Monday, the oldest Trump child, Donald Trump Jr., painted a dystopian picture of an America in mortal danger of being overrun by a radical mob of church-hating, vandalism-loving socialists — i.e., the Democrats.
On Tuesday, it was the turn of Tiffany Trump, the youngest of the president’s four adult children, and she offered a gentler argument for why voters should re-elect her father in November: because, she said, he is a selfless person, willing to put the country’s needs above his own.
“Fighting for America is something he will sacrifice anything for,” she said. “He dreams big dreams for our country — and he is relentless at achieving them.”
She also delivered an unexpected criticism of media bias and what she said was manipulation of information.
“Rather than allowing Americans the right to form our own beliefs, this misinformation system keeps people mentally enslaved to the ideas they deem correct,” she said. “This has fostered unnecessary fear and divisiveness amongst us.”
President Trump has never made a secret of wanting to surround himself — in business as well as in the White House — with members of his family, and three of them were speaking on Tuesday: Tiffany, 26; Eric, his second son and an executive vice president of the Trump Organization; and Melania, his wife.
Tiffany Trump, who graduated (remotely) from Georgetown Law School this spring, is often overshadowed by her glossier, more powerful sister, Ivanka, 12 years her senior. The only child produced in the short-lived marriage between the president and the model and television personality Marla Maples, Tiffany Trump grew up in California, far from the gold-plated Manhattan luxury of her half-siblings.
But on Tuesday night, she was all smiles, relentlessly on-message, even if her message was a softer one than that of many of the speakers. She spoke after a prerecorded video extolled her father’s record in promoting women to important positions in the White House.
“This election, I urge each and every one of you to transcend political boundaries,” Ms. Trump said. “I urge you to make judgment based on results and not rhetoric.”
Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general and a longtime Trump ally, appeared on Tuesday at the Republican National Convention and was the first speaker of the week to launch a prolonged attack on Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., the Democratic nominee.
“Joe Biden flew to China on Air Force Two with Hunter along for the ride,” she said. “In Beijing, Hunter didn’t just go sightseeing, he had meetings with his Chinese bank partners.”
That 2013 trip has come under scrutiny because Hunter Biden was working at the time to form a Chinese private equity fund.
The attempt to portray Mr. Biden as corrupt was part of a scattershot approach to impugning the Democratic nominee: the Trump campaign has also tried to paint him as senile, and someone who has been in power for decades with no accomplishments to show for it.
Her chosen path of attack also glossed over President Trump’s own scandals, including an allegation by John Bolton, the former national security advisor, that Mr. Trump had tried to get China involved to help him win the 2020 election.
Ms. Bondi described the president as “a tough no-nonsense outsider who can’t be bought or intimidated,” and contrasted him with Mr. Biden, who she said had a long career in politics that had benefited “his family members, not the American people.”
But she was followed in the lineup by Tiffany Trump, the president’s younger daughter, and Eric Trump, who has continued to run the Trump Organization, a company the president did not divest from when he took office, was set to speak later in the night. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, spoke on Monday night, and Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and a senior adviser in the White House, was set to introduce Mr. Trump on Thursday night.
Ms. Bondi has played a variety of roles in Mr. Trump’s universe, stretching back to 2013, when she agreed not to join a multistate case against Trump University despite complaints in her state.
The decision not to pursue legal action came directly after Mr. Trump’s foundation had written a $25,000 check to her political action committee to support her re-election. She has denied the money was connected to her decision not to pursue legal action against Trump University.
She has been loyal to Mr. Trump ever since. Ms. Bondi has the distinction of being the only statewide elected official in Florida who endorsed Mr. Trump in 2016 before the state’s primary, which earned her a speaking spot on the Republican convention stage four years ago.
She went on to serve on the president’s transition team, and over the years has been a frequent phone friend for a president who often relies as much on advice from outside kibitzers and people he sees on Fox News as he does from his own staff in the White House.
At one point, Ms. Bondi was briefly under consideration for a position as head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. But the appointment did not work out, according to a person familiar with the process, in part because she said she would hved to report directly to the president.
Most important, for Mr. Trump, she is a telegenic and loyal defender of his actions on Fox News.
During the impeachment proceedings last year, Ms. Bondi temporarily joined the White House as part of the president’s legal team, mostly serving as a television surrogate.
Since then, she has headlined “Women for Trump” campaign events, and now earned herself a speaking role for the second straight convention.
“Nov. 8 is a day of reckoning,” she said at the Republican convention four years ago, “for all those who have abused their power.”
Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa praised President Trump on Tuesday at the Republican National Convention, saying that he had taken decisive action to help the state after a powerful storm ripped through Cedar Rapids and other cities this month.
Ms. Reynolds, a Republican who was elected by less than three percentage points in 2019, said Mr. Trump had leveraged the “full force” of the federal government to aid relief efforts after the winds of a destructive derecho storm wiped out millions of acres of crops, demolished homes and left thousands of Iowans without power.
“Iowans did what you expect Iowans to do: They helped each other,” she said in a video. “But someone else also had our back: Our president.”
Ms. Reynolds said that the day after the storm, the president had “called to assure me that we had the full backing of the federal government.” She said the president had also “cut through the bureaucracy” and helped ensure the state received a major disaster declaration. And she noted that “when the winds had finished raging and the cleanup had only begun, he showed up.”
“We have a president and a vice president who get things done,” she said. “And because of President Trump and his leadership, our country is able to bounce back from setbacks, and see opportunity grow and thrive.”
Nicholas Sandmann, the teenager whose interactions with a Native American activist near the Lincoln Memorial while wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat went viral last year, lashed the news media in a speech on Tuesday at the Republican National Convention.
Mr. Sandmann was part of a group of Catholic high school students who came to Washington D.C. from Kentucky for the March for Life rally last year. While on the memorial steps, he was approached by Nathan Phillips, a Native American man, who was beating a drum.
Their face-to-face encounter quickly went viral — without the full context of how it had come to be.
“My life changed forever in that one moment. The full war machine of the mainstream media revved up into attack mode,” Mr. Sandmann said Tuesday, accusing the media of an “anti-Christian, anti-conservative, anti-Donald Trump” bias.
“I learned that what was happening to me had a name,” Mr. Sandmann said Tuesday. “It was called being canceled. As in annulled. As in revoked. As in made void.”
Before the events shown in the viral clip, there had been a third group on the steps: Black men who identified themselves as Hebrew Israelites who shouted at the students, including “hateful things,” according to Mr. Sandmann’s account at the time. Mr. Philips said then that he had approached the students to intervene in a “boiling point” moment — but his seeming showdown with Mr. Sandmann became a flash point.
“How could I possibly have imagined that the simple act of putting on that red hat would unleash hate from the left and make myself the target of network and cable news networks nationwide?” Mr. Sandmann said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Sandmann said he had been “defamed” by the national media; his family has sued multiple news outlets. The Washington Post and CNN both settled separate suits with the Sandmanns. A lawsuit against The New York Times is still pending.
President Trump quickly embraced Mr. Sandmann last year after the episode and the legal action. “Go get them Nick. Fake News!” he wrote on Twitter.
The anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson delivered a graphic and at times misleading speech Tuesday night — describing in detail the procedure that she says led her to quit her job as a Planned Parenthood clinic director and turn against abortion — after a day of criticism surrounding her past comments on racial profiling and women’s right to vote.
Ms. Johnson recounted her participation in what she said was an ultrasound-guided abortion of a fetus at 13 weeks’ gestation. “Nothing prepared me for what I saw on the screen: an unborn baby fighting back, desperate to move away from the suction,” she said. “The last thing I saw was a spine twirling around in the mother’s womb before succumbing to the force of the suction.”
Medical experts say that a fetus at that stage of gestation could respond reflexively to a foreign object, consistent with what Ms. Johnson described, but that it would not be able to feel pain until much later in the pregnancy.
Ms. Johnson, who opposes abortion in all circumstances and also opposes hormonal contraception, has spoken about this experience many times. Reporters have cast doubt on the story — citing, among other things, documents that do not show an ultrasound-guided abortion at the clinic where she worked on the day she says it happened — but she has stood by it. She now runs And Then There Were None, a group that urges employees at abortion clinics to leave them.
In her speech, she also said that “almost 80 percent of Planned Parenthood abortion facilities are strategically located in minority neighborhoods”; Planned Parenthood says that fewer than 4 percent of its clinics are in communities where more than a third of the population is Black.
“For most people who consider themselves pro-life, abortion is abstract — they can’t even conceive of the barbarity,” she said in her speech. “See, for me, abortion is real. I know what it sounds like; I know what abortion smells like. Did you know that abortion even had a smell?”
As her speech approached on Tuesday, news outlets began unearthing some of Ms. Johnson’s past remarks.
“I would support bringing back household voting,” she tweeted in May, referring to policies under which one person in a household — usually a man — would vote on behalf of the whole family. “How anti-feminist of me.”
She defended that view — reported by The 19th News — in several responses to critical tweets on Tuesday, and argued that people publicizing her comments were trying to distract from her anti-abortion message.
Pro-aborts are SO scared of my speech tonight that will pull back the curtain of the barbaric reality of abortion, they are scrambling to try to find anything to detract people from my message. Well, guess what?? You can dredge up whatever old tweets you want. I’m still speaking.
— Abby Johnson (@AbbyJohnson) August 25, 2020
Separately, in a video that she posted after the police killing of George Floyd, Ms. Johnson said it would be “smart” for a police officer to be more suspicious of her biracial son than her white children, as long as the officer did not behave more violently as a result.
“I look at our prison population and I see that there is a disproportionately high number of African-American males in our prison population for crimes, particularly for violent crimes,” Ms. Johnson said in the video, which was reported by Vice News. “So statistically, when a police officer sees a brown man like my Jude walking down the road — as opposed to my white nerdy kids, my white nerdy men walking down the road — because of the statistics that he knows in his head, that these police officers know in their head, they’re going to know that statistically my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”
The disproportionately high number of Black men in prison is not evidence that they commit more crimes; research shows that Black people are arrested and incarcerated far out of proportion to the percentage of crimes they commit.
Asked for comment, Ms. Johnson said: “If you would like to discuss my talk tonight, I’m happy to do so. However, I’m not going to discuss something that isn’t germane to the event this evening.”
Larry Kudlow, the president’s top economic adviser, in a speech at the Republican convention on Tuesday boasted that President Trump had led an “extraordinary rescue” to “successfully fight the Covid virus” and save the U.S. economy — failing to mention that the virus was still raging, and glossing over the immense unemployment and economic pain that the coronavirus crisis has created.
A former Wall Street banker who served in the Reagan administration, Mr. Kudlow painted a picture of a Rocky-like American comeback, noting that “stocks are in record territory” and celebrating a “V-shaped recovery” that he said would be derailed if former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is elected.
“Coming out of the pandemic, who in their right mind would pick the pockets of taxpayers and drain money from their wallets and purses?” he asked.
An acolyte of the conservative economic theory that lower taxes lead to growth and broad prosperity, Mr. Kudlow promised that a Trump second term would feature further tax relief.
“Looking ahead, more tax cuts and regulatory rollback will be in store,” he said. “Payroll tax cuts for higher wages, income tax cuts for the middle class, capital gains tax cuts for investment.”
Like other speakers at the convention, Mr. Kudlow appeared to refer to the pandemic in the past tense. “It was awful. Health and economic impacts were tragic. Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere,” he said, before adding that “presidential leadership came swiftly and effectively.”
While Mr. Trump did institute a limited ban on travel from China early on during the crisis, it was essentially his final policy on the coronavirus for a month. In that time, he declined to warn Americans, played down the virus, failed to expand testing and refused to publicly wear a mask, even as some members of his own party were calling on Americans to wear masks to help slow the spread of the virus.
Mr. Kudlow’s own track record on the virus and the economy is open to question. As the coronavirus first emerged in the United States, Mr. Kudlow initially downplayed its impact, saying that it had been “contained very well,” adding “I don’t think it’s going to be an economic tragedy at all.”
A week after Rhode Island calamari became an unlikely highlight of the Democratic Party’s roll call, Maine lobster got its star turn on Tuesday at the Republican National Convention as an eighth-generation Maine lobsterman heaped praise on President Trump for his trade and fisheries policies.
The lobsterman, Jason Joyce, said he had not voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, in part because he was unsure whether the Republican candidate “shared my conservative views.”
“I expected him to flip-flop on his campaign promises, but he has followed through,” Mr. Joyce said, noting a trade agreement that American and European trade officials reached last week that eliminated tariffs on imports of American lobsters in the European Union.
“As long as Trump is president, fishing families like mine will have a voice,” he added. “I strongly support President Trump’s re-election. When he sees something isn’t right, he’s fearless in fixing it. He listens to working people.”
By contrast, Mr. Joyce said he feared that Democrats would impose changes to environmental rules that would hurt coastal communities.
“I live on an island with 370 residents, and lobstering is how we provide for our families,” he said. “Maine’s lobstermen are true environmentalists. We practice conservation every day. If we didn’t, we’d be putting ourselves out of business.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Trump had foreshadowed Mr. Joyce’s remarks, writing on Twitter that “Beautiful Maine Lobsters will now move tariff-free to Europe!” in reference to the trade agreement cited by Mr. Joyce.
But Maine’s lobster landings decreased during the first three years of the Trump presidency — in part because of natural fluctuations but also because of tariffs that China imposed in 2018 as part of Mr. Trump’s ongoing trade war with the country.
This summer, the coronavirus had slowed tourism, leaving Maine lobstermen with boatloads of lobsters that few people are buying.
The region’s warming waters, spurred by climate change, have slowly shifted the areas conducive to lobster reproduction away from the coast.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky delivered a defense of Mr. Trump’s opposition to “endless wars,” saying that the president had made good on his promise to scale back American entanglements overseas, particularly in the Middle East.
“I’m supporting President Trump because he believes as I do that a strong America cannot fight endless wars,” Mr. Paul said.
“We must not continue to leave our blood and treasure in Middle East quagmires.”
After Mr. Trump, Mr. Paul may be his party’s most prominent advocate of a diminished U.S. presence abroad, a sentiment once largely relegated to the margins of conservative discourse. A fierce critic of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he repeatedly criticizes American military deployments and efforts to topple hostile foreign regimes.
In his prepared remarks, Mr. Paul said that Mr. Trump, who has so far avoided new military campaigns, would “end war rather than start one.”
He also noted that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, had supported the Iraq war and other recent U.S. interventions, and he claimed that Mr. Biden was “likely to start war again.”
Although Mr. Trump ordered a pair of missile strikes against Syria to punish the use of chemical weapons, and has threatened Iran and North Korea with devastation, he has largely avoided new foreign conflicts while withdrawing American combat forces in Syria an Afghanistan, as well as thousands of troops based in Germany. But Mr. Trump’s authorization of a drone strike in Baghdad early this year that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s top security and intelligence commander, briefly appeared to bring the U.S. and Iran to the brink of war.
Mr. Paul has emerged as a vigorous supporter and frequent foreign policy adviser to the president, although he is a converted critic: In 2016, Mr. Paul said that “a speck of dirt would make a better president.”
And although Mr. Trump has publicly shared Mr. Paul’s contempt for past U.S. “regime change” efforts in the Middle East, he has squeezed Iran with a punishing “maximum pressure” campaign of economic sanctions widely seen as a threat to the regime’s survival. Mr. Trump has also sought to oust Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolás Maduro.
Mr. Paul has publicly questioned both approaches, and urged a swifter U.S. exit from Afghanistan than Mr. Trump has executed. But he assured that Mr. Trump “intends to end the war in Afghanistan.”
Myron Lizer, vice president of the Navajo Nation, said President Trump had “made it a priority to repair the relationship” between the Navajo and the federal government.
“Our people have never been invited into the American dream,” Mr. Lizer said. “We’ve for years fought congressional battles with past congressmen and senators that were part of a broken system that ignored us. That is, until President Trump took office.”
Mr. Lizer, who is also a pastor and longtime businessman, said Mr. Trump had helped his community by signing a presidential proclamation that recognized missing and murdered Native Americans; by reactivating the White House Council on Native American Affairs; and by signing the CARES Act, which included $8 billion in funding for Indian Country.
He also praised Mr. Trump for nominating “strong conservative judges like Neil Gorsuch, who supports Native American rights.”
Justice Gorsuch, whom Mr. Trump appointed to the Supreme Court in 2017, has sided with tribes in several cases, and he wrote the majority opinion last month in a landmark ruling that much of eastern Oklahoma is a Native American reservation. He was joined by the court’s four liberal members, while the other four conservatives — including Mr. Trump’s second appointee, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh — dissented.
The second night of the Republican National Convention included a pardon from President Trump for a man who robbed a bank in Nevada.
The man, Jon Ponder, who received a separate state pardon this year, was pardoned by Mr. Trump for his crimes, and a video of the pardon was part of the formal convention program on Tuesday night.
Mr. Ponder, who has since founded a nonprofit organization to help former inmates, was arrested for the bank robbery in 2004 by Richard Beasley, now a retired F.B.I. agent.
In the video, Mr. Trump said Mr. Ponder’s story was “a beautiful testament to the power of redemption” and said he would “continue to give all Americans, including former inmates, the best chance to build a new life and achieve their own American dream.”
Mr. Ponder expressed his gratitude in the video for what he said was a “second chance.” And standing with Mr. Beasley, he repeatedly praised law enforcement, saying he hoped the authorities and the people they serve “can come together.”
For his part, Mr. Beasley thanked Mr. Trump for what he said was his support of criminal justice reform and for his continued backing of law enforcement. “There’s nothing worse than knowing you’re being second-guessed when you’re doing your job,” Mr. Beasley said in the video.
The video ended by showing Mr. Trump signing the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Ponder. None of the people featured were wearing masks, though they were at times speaking to one another at a close distance.
Mr. Ponder has three convictions; the other two are state charges related to domestic battery crimes in the 1990s and early 2000s. He was granted clemency for the domestic violence incidents this year.
Throughout his tenure as president, Mr. Trump has wielded his executive power to grant clemency in erratic ways, often pardoning or commuting the sentences of people who have connections to him or who have demonstrated their support for him in some way.
In July, he commuted the sentence of Roger J. Stone Jr., his longtime friend and former campaign adviser. Earlier in the year, he commuted the sentence of Rod R. Blagojevich, who was convicted of trying when he was governor of Illinois to essentially sell the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama when he became president.
And as recently as this month, Mr. Trump issued a posthumous pardon for Susan B. Anthony, the women’s suffragist who was arrested after voting illegally in 1872.
Republicans dropped a scheduled speaker from their convention lineup shortly before her planned remarks were to air on Tuesday, after she endorsed an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory on Twitter that was first posted by a supporter of the QAnon movement.
Earlier in the day, the Trump campaign had announced that the speaker, Mary Ann Mendoza, the mother of a police officer killed by an undocumented immigrant who was driving drunk, would share her family’s tragic story and explain how “President Trump is fighting every day to secure the border and honor her son’s legacy.”
Ms. Mendoza deleted her tweet, which urged her followers to do themselves “a favor” and read a Twitter thread asserting, among many other wild falsehoods, that the infamous anti-Jewish “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was not a fabricated document. The tweet was first reported on by The Daily Beast.
The thread also asserted dark conspiracies involving the sinking of the Titanic and the Hindenburg disaster, and referred to “Satanic High Priestess Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton.”
Ms. Mendoza later sought to downplay her decision to boost the tweets, saying that she had not read “every post within the thread,” and apologizing “for not paying attention to the intent of the whole message.”
“That does not reflect my feelings or personal thoughts whatsoever,” she added.
The thread at issue included dozens of tweets, but begins on a highly conspiratorial note, asserting right off the bat that “In 1773, A Wealthy Goldsmith And Coin Dealer Named Mayer Amschel Bauer Summoned Twelve Wealthy And Influential Men To His Place Of Business In Frankfurt, Germany,” and hatched a plot to pool resources and “Gain Control Of The Wealth, Natural Resources, And Manpower Of The Entire World.”
In a statement, a Trump campaign’s spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, said that Ms. Mendoza’s pre-taped remarks would not air at the convention.
“We have removed the scheduled video from the convention lineup and it will no longer run this week,” Mr. Murtaugh said.
Mr. Trump has long highlighted the stories of “angel moms” like Ms. Mendoza, whose children were killed by undocumented immigrants, as a way of building popular support for his crackdown on immigration and border security.
Aaron Keyak, the Jewish engagement director for Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign, said: “We offer comfort to any parent who ever has had to go through their loss of a child, especially under such circumstances. She has our full condolences and prayers.”
But he added: “This was sadly not a surprising choice for the Trump convention,” continuing, “Time after time, Donald Trump has warmly embraced fringe movements, even as they incite hatred and further divide our country, including his shameful endorsement of a congressional candidate who has spread unhinged and dangerous conspiracy theories. He even has refused to denounce the QAnon movement, which has been identified by the F.B.I. as a domestic terror threat.”
Melania Trump will speak from the Rose Garden of the White House tonight. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will endorse the president from a rooftop in Jerusalem. And President Trump appeared from the White House twice on the opening night of the Republican National Convention on Monday and plans to deliver his acceptance speech from the South Lawn.
Their appearances amount to a radical break from tradition even for an administration that has repeatedly shattered longstanding norms. Never in recent times has a president used the majesty of the White House to stage a nominating convention, nor has a sitting secretary of state participated in such a partisan event, much less from overseas where he is ostensibly on a diplomatic mission.
According to State Department guidance from December 2019, department employees are not allowed to “speak for or against a partisan candidate, political party or partisan political group at a convention, rally or similar gathering sponsored by such entities.”
On Tuesday, a House foreign affairs subcommittee opened an investigation into Mr. Pompeo’s political activities during the diplomatic trip to Israel.
The chairman of the subcommittee, Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas, wrote in a letter to Stephen E. Biegun, the deputy secretary of state, that Mr. Pompeo’s speech could violate the Hatch Act, a Depression-era law that bars federal employees from engaging in political activities while they are on the job.
“It is highly unusual, and likely unprecedented, for a sitting Secretary of State to speak at a partisan convention for either of the political parties,” Mr. Castro wrote in the letter. “It appears that it may also be illegal.”
Mr. Castro asked the State Department to provide documents on the legal advice it received on the propriety of Mr. Pompeo’s speech, as well as an accounting of expenses from the trip.
A State Department official had previously said that Mr. Pompeo would “address the convention in his personal capacity” and added: “No State Department resources will be used. Staff are not involved in preparing the remarks or in the arrangements for Secretary Pompeo’s appearance. The State Department will not bear any costs in conjunction with this appearance.”
But the official guidelines, and a cable Mr. Pompeo himself recently sent to employees, state clearly that such partisan activities are prohibited even on employees’ personal time. In his letter, Mr. Castro said that based on guidance from the State Department and the Hatch Act, Mr. Pompeo was barred from participating in the convention.
“It appears incontrovertible that the Secretary’s speech to the R.N.C. violates this prohibition,” Mr. Castro wrote.
Mike Pompeo is betting that he has more to gain, politically, than he will lose by breaking with diplomatic tradition on Tuesday night to become the first sitting secretary of state in at least 75 years to address a national party convention.
The setting of the speech, with the lights of the Old City of Jerusalem expected to be visible over his shoulder, provides Mr. Pompeo with an opportunity to praise one of President Trump’s few foreign policy achievements that has received wide and bipartisan support: the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
It also gives him a national platform with Mr. Trump’s core supporters — a political base that Mr. Pompeo is courting as he weighs a future presidential campaign.
“If he has any interest in running for president in the future, this is a way of inserting himself into presidential politics, but at the cost of breaking an important tradition in American history,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian.
Mr. Pompeo has been under criticism since it became clear that he would be giving the speech while on an official diplomatic trip to the Middle East and North Africa. For nearly a year, Democrats in Congress have accused Mr. Pompeo of violating the federal Hatch Act by using taxpayer-funded government aircraft and hosting receptions at the State Department to further his political ambitions.
Stuart Stevens, a Republican political consultant and former top strategist to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, said party loyalists “won’t care” whether Mr. Pompeo violated bans on engaging in partisan activities while traveling overseas on official business.
The bigger problem for Mr. Pompeo, he said, is the prospect of a Republican Party so fractured after November that those who follow Mr. Trump will be unable to draw the widespread support needed to win the 2024 presidential election.
On Tuesday morning, as he was flying across the Middle East, Mr. Pompeo offered a preview of his address. “President Trump has ensured the safety of America — and SECURED our many FREEDOMS, which is the cornerstone of this great nation,” Mr. Pompeo wrote from his personal Twitter account.
“Her words.”
That’s the message that aides to the first lady, Melania Trump, have underscored ahead of her headlining speech Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention. Mrs. Trump’s address, which will be delivered live from the newly renovated Rose Garden, will be “authentic,” written without the hidden hand of professional speechwriters. “Every word” of the address, Mrs. Trump’s chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham said, “is from her.”
It’s a necessary rebuttal to Mrs. Trump’s disastrous appearance at the R.N.C. four years ago in Cleveland, where she had discarded a speech prepared for her by two prominent conservative speechwriters and instead ended up borrowing word-for-word phrases and themes from Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention eight years earlier.
But for a first lady who for the past four years has chosen to be seen more than heard, sometimes letting her clothes (a jacket, most infamously) do the talking, a major speech in which she shares her own thoughts about her husband’s presidency is more than just an opportunity for a do-over.
“We don’t hear from her often, so that means every time we do hear her speak, people are intently listening to what she has to say,” said Anita McBride, who served as chief of staff to the former first lady, Laura Bush.
Mrs. Trump deserves credit, Mrs. McBride noted, for over the years subtly “getting her point across without poking the president in the eye.” While her husband was still promoting an anti-mask message from the White House, for instance, Mrs. Trump posted a portrait of herself wearing a face mask on Twitter, and encouraged Americans to wear face coverings and practice social distancing.
Major television networks lodged a protest with Republican officials on Tuesday after the Trump campaign agreed to provide Fox News with additional access to major speeches at this week’s Republican National Convention.
Representatives from rival networks — including ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN — cried foul in a conference call with Trump officials on Tuesday that grew heated at times, according to four people briefed on the discussion who were not authorized to speak about it publicly.
The dispute emerged after the Fox News host Sean Hannity — a major ally of President Trump — revealed that he had received exclusive entry to key convention sites.
“We’ll be broadcasting live from the Rose Garden in the lead-up for Melania Trump’s speech,” Mr. Hannity told viewers on Monday. “Wednesday, we’ll be at Fort McHenry where Vice President Pence will be, and on Thursday, we will be live on the South Lawn where President Trump will give his speech.”
The other networks said it was unfair of the Trump campaign to grant Mr. Hannity and Fox News the additional access, which was expected to include a dedicated press riser and camera, and requested parity.
Following the call, Trump campaign officials agreed to allow reporters from other networks into the Rose Garden for Mrs. Trump’s address, two of the people said, but the extent of that access was still being worked out.
Because of safety restrictions relating to the coronavirus, the major TV broadcasters are reliant this week on a single, so-called pool feed of live video and audio from the Republicans’ events. (The same format was in place at last week’s Democratic National Convention.)
In a typical year, the major networks would have built multimillion-dollar sets at the convention sites and arranged multiple anchor booths and camera stations throughout the arena floor. And it is not unusual for TV producers to lobby convention officials for unique access to significant events.
But Mr. Hannity’s announcement caught rival networks off guard, given Mr. Hannity’s closeness with Mr. Trump and what other executives deemed overly favorable treatment for his network.
The lead convention anchors for Fox News, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, will host their Tuesday broadcast from the network’s regular setup for both of this year’s political conventions, at the United States Chamber of Commerce building in Washington.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Taking on one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s political action committee endorsed Alex Morse, the small-city mayor who is challenging Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, a veteran lawmaker and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
The endorsement from Courage to Change, announced by Mr. Morse in a statement on Tuesday, is a significant boost to his campaign a week before the primary election. Mr. Morse, a 31-year-old rising progressive star from Holyoke, had considered dropping out of the race earlier this month after accusations of “numerous incidents” of unwanted and inappropriate advances toward students at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst while he was a guest lecturer there.
But Mr. Morse, who acknowledged some consensual relationships with students — though none he taught or supervised — and apologized to anyone he made uncomfortable with his behavior, remained in the race after The Intercept published messages from some of the students who had lodged accusations, revealing that they had discussed how they might damage Mr. Morse’s campaign. One suggested the effort might help his own career prospects with Mr. Neal. Mr. Neal has denied any involvement.
Because Mr. Neal has been in Congress for more than three decades, the race is seen as another test of the strength of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing and its ability to oust mainstream incumbents.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, became emblematic of that power in 2018, when she upset Representative Joseph Crowley, a 20-year veteran who was a member of the party leadership.
“When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took on her own entrenched incumbent in 2018, she changed public service for the better, further inspiring me and so many others to fight for our districts and empower those who have long been forgotten,” Mr. Morse said in a statement. “I am honored to have the congresswoman’s Courage to Change in our corner, and it will be the honor of my life to bring the people alongside me to Washington.”
Although Ms. Ocasio-Cortez initially suggested she would support a wide range of progressives taking on entrenched incumbents, she has been careful about which lawmakers she has chosen to focus on. Her political action committee, introduced earlier this year, has endorsed fewer than a dozen candidates, most of them women. One of those candidates, Jamaal Bowman, last month defeated Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, has a stark warning for her successor. In a close election where there may be efforts to challenge absentee voting, she suggested, Joseph R. Biden Jr. should not concede.
“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances, because I think this is going to drag out,” Mrs. Clinton told Jennifer Palmieri, her former communications director and a contributor to Showtime’s “The Circus,” according to a video clip the show shared. “And eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is.”
Mrs. Clinton’s remark came as she and Ms. Palmieri discussed the challenges of a close election, and Mrs. Clinton suggested Republicans might move to interfere with absentee and other kinds of voting.
President Trump has made false attacks on the practice of mail-in voting, and Democrats including Mr. Biden have predicted that the president may seek to disrupt the election.
Mr. Trump has also openly cast doubts on the credibility of the election outcome, though his allies have previously dismissed the idea that he would seek to move Election Day — and the president does not have the authority to make such a move.
“Republicans will be ready to make sure the polls are being run correctly, securely, and transparently as we work to deliver the free and fair election Americans deserve,” said Matthew Morgan, general counsel to Mr. Trump’s campaign. He also said that Mrs. Clinton was “trying to lay the groundwork for Joe Biden to deny the election results when President Trump wins.”
But both Democrats and Republicans have said that Mr. Trump’s repeated and often baseless efforts to question the integrity of the election process appear to amount to an attempt to dismiss a potential outcome he finds unfavorable.
Every four years since 1856, the Republican Party has produced a platform articulating its priorities for the next president.
But like so much else disrupted by President Trump, the Republican National Committee has dispensed with producing a 2020 platform, instead passing a resolution renewing what delegates enacted in 2016, bashing the news media and offering wholehearted support for Mr. Trump.
“The Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda,” reads the resolution, adopted this past weekend in Charlotte, N.C., just before the start of the Republican National Convention.
Most of what is on that agenda also remains a mystery — and is subject to change. Several times this summer, Mr. Trump has been asked by friendly Fox News hosts to articulate his second-term priorities, and he has regularly failed to reveal his plans.
So while the G.O.P. platform of 1856 called for abolishing “those twin relics of barbarism — polygamy and slavery” and building a transcontinental railroad, the party’s official stance in 2020 is that it is for whatever Mr. Trump says.
In June, the Republican National Committee announced it would not write a 2020 platform. It has instead carried over its 2016 version, word for word, including more than three dozen outdated condemnations of the “current” president — which was, when the document was written, Barack Obama.
Though in practice, a party’s platform often has little correlation with how a candidate campaigns or would govern as president, it has for more than a century served as guidance for what political parties believe.
Republicans this week found themselves maintaining that keeping the 2016 platform indicated that their party’s principles and priorities have not shifted during the Trump era.
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August 26, 2020 at 09:03AM
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RNC Live Updates: Mike Pence Addresses the Convention - The New York Times
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