Republicans paint dark picture of future if Trump loses
WASHINGTON
(AP) — Republicans predicted a national “horror movie” should President
Donald Trump lose in November, flinging out dark warnings on Monday’s
opening night of their scaled down national convention.
Trump’s
campaign had promised to offer an inclusive and uplifting prime-time
message, hoping to broaden his appeal beyond his hard-core base by
featuring the next generation of party stars including two Republicans
of color, Rep. Tim Scott and former U.N. .Ambassador Nikki Haley. Yet
any efforts to strike an optimistic tone were overshadowed by dire talk
that Democrat Joe Biden would destroy America, allowing communities to
be overrun by violence.
Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida likened the prospect of Biden’s election to a horror movie.
“They’ll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door,” Gaetz declared.
Later
in the night, Haley did offer a softer tone as she highlighted her
experience growing up as the daughter of Indian immigrants in the South.
“I was a brown girl in a black and white world,” she said,
noting that she faced discrimination but rejecting the idea that
“America is a racist country.” She also gave a nod to the Black Lives
Matter movement, saying “of course we know that every single Black life
is valuable.”
Trump, who was not scheduled to deliver his keynote
convention address until later in the week, made multiple public
appearances throughout the first day of the four-day convention. And
while the evening programming was carefully scripted, Trump was not.
“The
only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a
rigged election,” Trump told hundreds of Republican delegates gathered
in North Carolina, raising anew his unsupported concerns about
Americans’ expected reliance on mail voting during the pandemic. Experts say mail voting has proven remarkably secure.
Trump
and a parade of fellow Republicans distorted Trump rival Joe Biden’s
agenda through the evening, falsely accusing the Democrat of proposing
to defund police, ban oil fracking, take over health care, open borders
and raise taxes on most Americans. They tried to assign positions of the
Democratic left to a middle-of-the-road candidate who explicitly
rejected many of the party’s most liberal positions through the
primaries. Trump set the tone with unsupported claims about voting fraud
and falsehoods about his own record in office.
The GOP convention
marks a crucial moment for Trump, a first-term Republican president
tasked with reshaping a campaign he is losing by all accounts, at least
for now.
A deep sense of pessimism has settled over the electorate
10 weeks before Election Day. Just 23% of Americans think the country
is heading in the right direction, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
More
than 177,000 Americans have been killed by the pandemic and millions
more have been infected. Coronavirus-related job losses also reach into
the millions
Trump and his supporters on Monday night touted his
response to the pandemic while standing alongside front-line workers in
the White House, although he glossed over the mounting death toll, the
most in the world, and his administration’s struggle to control the
disease.
Organizers also repeatedly sought to cast Trump as an
empathetic figure, borrowing a page from the Democrats’ convention
playbook a week ago that effectively highlighted Biden’s personal
connection to voters.
The evening program highlighted the tension
within Trump’s Republican Party. His harsh attacks against Democrats
who are trying to expand mail voting and demonstrators protesting deaths
in police custody, for example, often delight his die-hard loyalists.
Yet the party pointed to a somewhat more diverse convention lineup with a
more inclusive message designed to expand Trump’s political coalition
beyond his white, working-class base.
Two of the three final
speakers on the prime-time program were people of color. And one of
several African Americans on the schedule, former football star Herschel
Walker, defended the president against those who call him a racist.
“It
hurts my soul to hear the terrible names that people call Donald,”
Walker said. “The worst one is ‘racist.’ I take it as a personal insult
that people would think I would have a 37-year friendship with a
racist.”
Polling shows that Black Americans continue to be
overwhelmingly negative in their assessments of the president’s
performance, with his approval hovering around 1 in 10 over the course
of his presidency, according to Gallup polling.
The program also
featured Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple arrested
after pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their
home.
“Democrats no longer view the government’s job as
protecting honest citizens from criminals, but rather protecting
criminals from honest citizens,” the McCloskeys said in remarks that
broke from the optimistic vision for America organizers promised.
They added: “Make no mistake: No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”
Those
cheering Trump’s leadership on the pandemic included a coronavirus
patient, a small business owner from Montana and a nurse practitioner
from Virginia.
“As a healthcare professional, I can tell you
without hesitation, Donald Trump’s quick action and leadership saved
thousands of lives during COVID-19,” Amy Ford, a registered nurse who
was deployed to New York and Texas to fight the coronavirus.
Some
of the planned remarks for the evening program were prerecorded, while
others were to be delivered live from a Washington auditorium.
The
fact that the Republicans gathered at all stood in contrast to the
Democrats, who held an all-virtual convention last week. The Democratic
programming included a well-received roll call video montage featuring
diverse officials from across the nation. The Republicans spoke from the
ballroom in Charlotte and were overwhelmingly white.
Trump said he had made the trip to North Carolina to contrast himself with his Democratic rival,
who never traveled to Wisconsin, the state where the Democratic
convention was originally supposed to be held. Vice President Mike Pence
appeared with him.
The president has sought to minimize the toll
of the coronavirus pandemic and he barely addressed it on Monday, but
its impact was plainly evident at the Charlotte Convention Center, where
just 336 delegates gathered instead of the thousands once expected to
converge on this city for a week-long extravaganza. Attendees sat at
well-spaced tables at first and masks were mandatory, though many were
seen flouting the regulation.
Trump also panned the state’s
Democratic governor for restrictions put in place to try to prevent the
spread of the virus, which has killed more than 175,000 people in the
country and infected millions. The president accused Gov. Roy Cooper of
“being in a total shutdown mode,” and claimed the restrictions were
aimed at trying to hurt his campaign.
Mecklenburg County Health
Director Gibbie Harris said she had “shared concern about the lack of
mask wearing and social distancing in the room” with RNC staff and had
“been assured that they are working hard to address these issues.”
Republicans
will spend the week trying to convince the American people that the
president deserves a second term. Aides want the convention to recast the story
of Trump’s presidency and present the election as a choice between his
vision for America’s future and the one presented by Biden.
“Over
the next four days, President Trump and Republicans are going to talk
about all we have achieved the past four years, and cast an
aspirational, forward-looking vision about what we can achieve in the
next four,” said GOP Chair Ronna McDaniel.
Democrats were content to let Trump’s unfiltered message drive the day.
While he campaigned aggressively across the country throughout last week’s Democratic convention, Biden made no public appearance on Monday.
Peoples reported from New York. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Darlene Superville contributed from Charlotte, North Carolina.