Republican National Convention 2020

While President Trump doesn’t often comment publicly on queer or transgender issues, his administration has been anything but LGBTQ-friendly. Vice President Mike Pence has a long record of anti-LGBTQ lawmaking and rhetoric, and LGBTQ advocates have already called the Republican Party platform — a holdover from 2016, as the GOP did not write one for 2020 — one of the most anti-LGBTQ in the party’s history. A second Trump term could further turn the clock back for LGBTQ people.

Trans people have been a target of the Trump administration from the get-go. Almost immediately after Trump took office in 2017, the administration rolled back an Obama-era memo directing schools to protect trans students from discrimination. That July, Trump announced his decision to ban trans people from serving in the military. In May 2018, the administration went after trans prisoners, too, deciding that, in most cases, trans people should be housed according to their assigned sex at birth. This summer, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a rule that would allow homeless shelters that receive federal funding to house trans people according to their birth-assigned sex.

The most consistent theme of Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention wasn’t that Joe Biden was a puppet for radicals. It wasn’t even that rioters and looters are coming to your home and only Trump can protect you from the radical left.

The clear theme of the RNC was a flagrant and brutal disregard for the truth.

The text of President Donald Trump’s rambling 70-minute-long RNC-closing speech wasn’t particularly impressive. Trump read laboriously and largely stayed on script. His remarks consisted of now-familiar lies about his record, overheated attacks on Democratic nominee Joe Biden, and authoritarian bluster.

But the optics of it were striking — for all the wrong reasons.

The first hour of the final evening of the 2020 Republican Convention had two clear, albeit somewhat contradictory, messages.

On the one hand, a parade of nonwhite speakers vouched for President Donald Trump both as a non-racist individual and as a policymaker who delivered criminal justice reform. On the other hand, Black Lives Matter protests are responsible for rioting and rising crime all across America and only Trump can save the suburbs from inner-city chaos. His election rival Joe Biden, by the same token, was both an avatar of the “tough on crime” excesses of the 1990s and somehow the leader of a movement to defund the police.

The central question going into Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was how he’d spin his disastrous record — which now includes more than 200,000 Americans dead of coronavirus, and an unemployment rate above 10 percent. And Trump quickly made his strategy clear: Take credit for something he didn’t do, and dodge blame for something he did do.

Let’s start with what he didn’t do. The convention was suffused with nostalgia for the economy of six months ago. “Before the China virus came in,” Trump said wistfully, the US “produced the best unemployment numbers for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans ever recorded.” And he’s right, in a way. Unemployment was low. Wages were rising. GDP was growing. The stock market was shattering records.

The Republican National Convention is normally an event to showcase what the party is: the policy platform it stands on, the values it supports. Not this year. No, this year the convention was about President Donald Trump and his own ambitions, the culmination of a five-year creep from Trump the populist to Trump the Republican.

“From the moment I left my former life behind, and a good life it was, I have done nothing but fight for you,” he said in a lengthy nomination acceptance speech that made mention of 401Ks and “record stock markets.”

The fourth and final night of the Republican National Convention on Thursday will feature President Donald Trump accepting his party’s renomination, as well as speeches by his daughter Ivanka Trump, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The Republican National Committee abandoned its plans to hold a large-scale, in-person convention in Charlotte, North Carolina — as well as its subsequent plans to relocate the convention to Jacksonville, Florida — on account of concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. The convention has consequently gone almost entirely virtual and largely taken place in Washington, DC, including speeches delivered from the White House lawn and the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, over just a few hours of condensed programming that has been broadcast nightly.

Vice President Mike Pence repeated an increasingly common Republican talking point in his speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday: “The hard truth is ... you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” he argued, after referencing progressive Democrats’ critiques of law enforcement — stances Biden himself has refused to take.

A preview of Biden’s America, Pence suggested, can be seen in cities where protests calling for an end to police brutality and racism have grown.

Republican senators are defending a lot of turf in the 2020 elections. You’d never know it from watching this year’s Republican National Convention.

On Wednesday night, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) was the lone Republican incumbent in a toss-up Senate race to address the GOP convention with a primetime speech. Six other senators who are in the fight of their political lives this year weren’t scheduled to speak: Cory Gardner (CO), Martha McSally (AZ), Steve Daines (MT), Thom Tillis (NC), and David Perdue (GA). And rather than hearing from Maine Sen. Susan Collins at the convention, viewers got a lobsterman from that state, Jason Joyce.

Sen. Joni Ernst had to walk a fine line with her Republican National Convention speech on Wednesday. While she’s likely relying on President Donald Trump’s support to turn out the Republican base in her bid for reelection in November, she also runs the risk of appearing too close to him — and losing Iowans who haven’t been satisfied with his leadership.

In her remarks, however, Ernst made clear that she’s fully aligning herself with the president in the hope that his electoral fortunes will boost hers as well.

Across all three nights of the Republican National Convention so far, speakers returned to a single theme: In American cities, at least according to these speakers, protesters hostile to the police are rioting and crime is skyrocketing — and if Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is elected, this will be the future.

As Vice President Mike Pence put it during his keynote speech on Wednesday, “in the midst of this global pandemic ... we’ve seen violence and chaos in the streets of our major cities.”

The Republican National Convention’s third night was a relatively subdued affair, with canned speeches and little star power.

Vice President Mike Pence was the headliner, and gave a generic speech defending Trump’s record that did little to set him apart from the pack of ambitious Republicans eyeing the next presidential nomination.

In theory, the president presiding over a naturalization ceremony should be a good thing: a way of signaling that our country is open to immigrants. But when President Trump did it during Tuesday’s Republican National Convention events, it felt like exploitation.

It wasn’t just the hypocrisy, the fact that Trump put on that display despite being the president most hostile to immigration, legal or otherwise, in modern history. It wasn’t even just the ethics of the thing, what appeared to be a blatant violation of the law prohibiting federal employees from engaging in electioneering.

The third night of the Republican National Convention on Tuesday will feature a speech by Vice President Mike Pence alongside former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and a number of Republican House and Senate members.

The Republican National Committee abandoned its plans to hold a large-scale, in-person convention in Charlotte, North Carolina — as well as its subsequent plans to relocate the convention to Jacksonville, Florida — on account of concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. The convention has consequently gone almost entirely virtual and will largely take place in Washington, DC, including speeches delivered from the White House lawn and the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, over just a few hours of condensed programming that will be broadcast nightly through Thursday, August 27.

As Democrats and Republicans blasted one another during their conventions this month, one of America’s most prominent institutions could end up worse off: the US military.

At both parties’ conventions, US troops appeared on camera in uniform — in possible violation of a longstanding Defense Department policy barring uniformed, active-duty service members from participating in partisan political events. The reason for the directive is pretty straightforward: Having uniformed troops at a partisan campaign event implicitly signals that the party or candidate hosting the event is backed by the nation’s armed forces.

The Republican National Convention on Tuesday spent more time on the opioid epidemic than the entirety of the Democratic National Convention.

In a touching speech, Ryan Holets, a police officer in New Mexico, told a story about how he adopted a child from a person struggling with homelessness and drug addiction. “Today, our beautiful daughter, Hope, is a thriving 2-year-old,” Holets said. “Crystal [the biological mother] is approaching three years of recovery. She is a dear friend and a constant inspiration to me and others.”

The United States prohibits most federal employees from engaging in certain political activity — especially if those employees are engaged in fundamentally nonpartisan activity such as diplomacy — in order to prevent abuse of power and corruption. On Tuesday night, however, the Trump administration flouted these limits by holding part of the Republican National Convention at the White House and broadcasting a partisan speech by the nation’s top diplomat.

The Hatch Act of 1939 imposes strict limits on most federal civilian workers who want to engage in political activity, and some Cabinet departments augment these statutory limits with additional policies intended to maintain a clear wall of separation between partisan politics and nonpartisan government functions.

In his primetime remarks on the second night of the Republican National Convention, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron epitomized the Trump campaign’s pitch to Black voters in 2020 — and all of its contradictions.

“The question is: Will we choose the path that gives us the best chance to meet those universal desires?” he said after noting Americans want jobs, opportunities, and comfortable lives for their children. “Or will we go backward, to a time when people were treated like political commodities who can’t be trusted to think for themselves?”

The first two days of the 2020 Republican National Convention have featured plenty of red meat for the party’s ultraconservative base, as well as dire warnings over what might result from a potential Joe Biden presidency. But President Donald Trump’s second son, Eric Trump, delivered an address Tuesday evening that moved beyond just appeals to the base, highlighting his father’s conservative credibility and accomplishments.

Using imagery of the Hoover Dam and Mount Rushmore, Trump’s speech painted a picture of an industrious heartland, ignored by the coastal elites. “Every day my father fights for the American people,” he said. “The forgotten men and women of this country. The ones who embody the American spirit.”

Aesthetically speaking, the first two nights of the Republican National Convention were a disaster. Where the Democratic National Convention leveraged the restrictions of the Covid-19 era to create something approaching entertaining television, the RNC hauled out an endless array of speakers, and nearly every one of them stood behind a podium and spoke in roughly the same cadence and volume as all the rest. Even worse, the camera angles and the visual framing of the programming lacked the kind of variety that might engage viewers on a level beyond, “Look at the people who are talking.”

As a case in point, watch this 15-second video clip to see a shot that recurred over and over throughout the convention’s first night:

Night two of the Republican National Convention began with an unexpected cancellation — Mary Ann Mendoza, whose son was killed in 2014 in a head-on collision with an unauthorized immigrant, was pulled from the RNC program after tweeting a bizarrely anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

But much of the rest of the evening was a tribute to swing-state voters, and to a version of Donald Trump meant to appeal to independent voters (with some red meat thrown in on abortion and “cancel culture” to keep the base involved).

More than 1,100 American deaths from Covid-19 were reported on Tuesday, but you wouldn’t know that from watching the Republican National Convention.

Speakers during Tuesday’s portion of the RNC repeatedly referred to the coronavirus pandemic in the past tense, as though it’s something the US has already overcome thanks to President Donald Trump’s leadership. In reality, the virus continues to ravage the country, and Trump hasn’t developed a plan to get things under control beyond blustering and buck-passing.

Abby Johnson came to the Republican National Convention with a very simple message: if you oppose abortion, you have to vote for Donald Trump.

“He has done more for the unborn than any other president,” the anti-abortion activist said in her speech on Tuesday night, before listing some of Trump’s actions to limit abortion, including his reinstatement of the global gag rule, which bars health care providers abroad that receive US aid from performing or discussing abortions.

First lady Melania Trump closed out night two of the Republican National Convention in a speech highlighting key themes of her husband’s reelection campaign.

She discussed the country’s opioid crisis, pleading with those struggling with addiction to seek help. She praised the nation’s military service members and first responders, who either fought in wars or handled major crises. She championed legal immigration, telling her own story of growing up in Slovenia and eventually becoming a naturalized American citizen. She criticized the media, a daily presidential target, and highlighted her Be Best initiative. And she promised that four more years of the Trump administration would focus on the plight of the American middle class.

Speaking at the 2020 Republican National Convention, the father of a 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting victim argued that the US’s gun laws weren’t to blame for his daughter’s death — but faulty school discipline policies.

“After my daughter’s murder, the media didn’t seem interested in the facts. So I found them myself,” Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed by the Parkland shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, said. “I learned that gun control laws didn’t fail my daughter. People did.”