The Memo: GOP seeks to detoxify Trump at convention

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Donald Trump isn’t a racist, a sexist or a xenophobe.

At least, that was the message that was written between the lines on the second night of the Republican National Convention on Tuesday.

The GOP is having to spend a lot of time trying to prove what Trump isn’t — an effort that tells its own story about negative perceptions of the president and the degree to which he is languishing in the polls.

Tuesday night’s programming featured an early tribute to Trump from Jon Ponder, a Black man who was convicted of bank robbery before reforming his life and founding an organization to help rehabilitate ex-prisoners. Trump pardoned Ponder before the cameras at the White House. Continue reading

Nominating Trump, Republicans Rewrite His Record

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President Trump and his party engaged in sweeping revisionism about his management of the coronavirus, his record on race relations and much else. And they painted a dystopian picture of what the nation would look like if Joseph R. Biden Jr. were president.

President Trump and his political allies mounted a fierce and misleading defense of his political record on the first night of the Republican convention on Monday, while unleashing a barrage of attacks on Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the Democratic Party that were unrelenting in their bleakness.

Hours after Republican delegates formally nominated Mr. Trump for a second term, the president and his party made plain that they intended to engage in sweeping revisionism about Mr. Trump’s management of the coronavirus pandemic, his record on race relations and much else. And they laid out a dystopian picture of what the United States would look like under a Biden administration, warning of a “vengeful mob” that would lay waste to suburban communities and turn quiet neighborhoods into war zones.

At times, the speakers and prerecorded videos appeared to be describing an alternate reality: one in which the nation was not nearing 180,000 deaths from the coronavirus; in which Mr. Trump had not consistently ignored serious warnings about the disease; in which the president had not spent much of his term appealing openly to xenophobia and racial animus; and in which someone other than Mr. Trump had presided over an economy that began crumbling in the spring. Continue reading.