There’s an important and largely overlooked subplot to the Republican National Convention — call it the Republican Battleground States Convention.
The GOP has gone all-out to elevate the voices of Cuban Americans in Florida, small-business owners in Wisconsin and farmers in Iowa during the convention’s first three nights.
All three states are competitive in November and Florida, the largest battleground of all, is close to a must-win for President Trump. Continue reading.
The third night of the Republican National Convention yet again offered a cascade of false claims, especially in Vice President Pence’s speech. Here are 20 claims that caught our attention. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios for a roundup of statements made during convention events.
“Before the first case of coronavirus spread within the United States, President Trump took the unprecedented step of suspending all travel from China. That action saved an untold number of American lives.”
— Vice President Pence
Pence greatly overstates the impact of Trump’s action, which did not halt all travel from China and was not much different from what other countries did. Continue reading.
In accepting the Republican Party nomination on Aug. 27, Vice President Mike Pence accurately recounted the history of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, and how a failed British bombardment in 1814 helped inspire Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Pence’s attacks on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, on the other hand, were sometimes misleading, incomplete or wrong.
“Joe Biden wants to end school choice.”
This is Mostly False. (Trump made the same claim in July.) Continue reading.
Exaggerating economic assumptions and some misleading claims about Biden’s tax plan
The fact-checking fodder included claims about the economy, the Democratic nominee and the president’s actions.
Here is the analysis:
Kudlow painted a false picture, claiming Trump inherited “a stagnant economy on the front end of recession” and then adding, “The economy was rebuilt in three years.”
But the fact is, as we wrote on the day Trump took office, Trump inherited “an economy experiencing steady if unspectacular growth in output, jobs and incomes.” After the terrible 2007-2009 recession that Obama inherited, the economy had posted six straight years of economic growth and was about to post a seventh. Continue reading.
The third night of the RNC featured Lara Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
Night 3 of the Republican National Convention featured a number of elected officials, second lady Karen Pence and others who made the case for President Donald Trump’s re-election during a program focused on “law and order” as protests grow over the police shooting of a Black man in Wisconsin.
Vice President Mike Pence also accepted his renomination with a speech praising Trump for his leadership, but he frequently distorted the facts.
NBC News fact checked the speeches in real time. Continue reading.
Conway made a surprise announcement about stepping down from her top role in the misogynistic leader’s administration earlier in the week.
Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, used her time in the spotlight at the Republican National Convention to paint the president as a supposedly kindhearted champion of women.
“A woman in a leadership role still can seem novel,” Conway said. In 2016, she became the first woman to run a successful U.S. presidential campaign.
Later, she claimed to have “seen firsthand many times the president comforting and encouraging a child who has lost a parent, a parent who has lost a child, a worker who lost his job, an adolescent who has lost her way to drugs.” Continue reading.
There have been two sides to the Republican National Convention so far this week.
One side has featured what was expected: a grandiose, virtual happy hour to President Trump‘s conservative base.
The other side has been an open letter to minority voters — a bloc that the president struggles mightily with.
On the convention’s first two nights, a number of Black voices have been heard touting Trump, from the former NFL player Herschel Walker and Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones (D) to future and present GOP stars such as Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Kentucky Attorney General David Cameron. Continue reading.
In place of roses, the First Lady grew concrete. Prior to her address at the Republican National Convention, on Tuesday night, the White House unveiled Melania Trump’s renovations to the Rose Garden, which had been pitched as her personal project. Cultivation of the garden would link her to Jackie Kennedy, the one figure whose lineage Melania, and her boosters, can tenuously claim. Homage, to Melania, looked like draining the floriculture of its traditional crimson and magenta, replacing the garden’s formerly bright bushes with flowers of the palest shades, and removing the row of crab-apple trees around the perimeter, leaving a walkway of fresh pavement in their stead. If First Lady is an unofficial office whose only, and therefore critical, mandate is to rustle up symbolism, then Melania’s redesign was flawless: the content of the metaphor was clean and clear.
Drained of life, the garden now better functions as a stage. Cameras followed Melania as she strode into the garden, where she received movie-star lighting, to deliver her speech. So far, the production of the R.N.C. has emphasized scale—the single boasting figure at the dais in an empty hall, the wide frame a kind of implicit and defiant fuck-you to the pandemic’s constriction of space. In the Rose Garden, what looked like dozens of audience members, including Melania’s husband, as she would refer to the President, looked on from chairs. (According to reports, only the guests who sat near the President and Vice-President were tested for covid-19.) Her olive-green skirt suit, by Alexander McQueen, looked rather like fatigues, and recalled the palette of her other famous jacket, with its quick message of fast-fashion fascism: “i really don’t care do u?”
You know the thing about Melania by now. Profundity is wrung from her vapidity, messages decoded from the tea leaves of her rote silence. Belief in her moral grain, faith in the fable in which she is the innocent immigrant who has tumbled into an accursed set of circumstances, is, for some, the last thing standing in the way of full-on nihilism. The story of her R.N.C. address, then, is less about what streamed from the teleprompter than the trap it laid for the D.C. press. Already, the Washington Post has noted that Melania’s speech “emphasized her empathy, which only highlighted the president’s lack of it.”
You might have thought it would be hard to outdo the absurdity of Kimberly Guilfoyle screaming at the top of her lungs to an empty auditorium on the opening night of the Republican National Convention. But on Tuesday, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi reached new heights of absurdity in the second night of the event in a speech filled with unfettered hypocrisy.
Bondi returned to a theme of the Trump campaign that has largely been absent from the convention thus far: Joe Biden’s supposed corruption. As one of Trump’s lawyers during the impeachment trial, she tried to press the case against Biden at the center of the president’s high crimes. Trump tried to get Ukraine to investigate allegations that Biden, as vice president, corruptly sought to have a Ukrainian prosecutor fired to protect his son, who was working on the board of the energy company Burisma in the region.
The allegations against the Bidens have been repeatedly debunked. It was Trump’s demand that Ukraine investigate the matter that was deemed impeachable by the Democratic-led House of Representatives. Even one Senate Republican, Mitt Romney, agreed. Continue reading.
It was another tsunami of untruths on the second night of the Republican National Convention. Here are 19 claims that caught our attention. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios for a roundup of statements made during convention events.
“Biden has pledged to defund the police.”
— Eric Trump
This is a false claim that has earned President Trump Four Pinocchios. Former vice president Joe Biden does not support “defunding police,” according to the candidate and the campaign. The phrase generally means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities to public safety and changing the tactics used by police officers. Biden backs advocates’ calls to increase spending on social programs separate from local police budgets, but he also wants more funding for police overhauls such as body cameras and training on community policing approaches.
“No, I don’t support defunding the police,” Biden told CBS. “I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness. And, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.” Biden has come under fire from the left for his position and for proposing to spend an additional $300 million a year on the community policing program started in the Clinton administration. Continue reading.
