Facing a national moment fraught with racial turmoil and a deadly pandemic, President Donald Trump accepted his partys renomination on a massive White House South Lawn stage Thursday night, boasting of helping African Americans and defying his own administrations pandemic guidelines to address a tightly packed, largely maskless crowd.
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As troubles churned outside the gates, Trump painted an optimistic vision of Americas future, including an eventual triumph over the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 175,000 people, left millions unemployed and rewritten the rules of society. But that brighter horizon can only be secured, Trump asserted, if he defeats Democrat Joe Biden.
“We have spent the last four years reversing the damage Joe Biden inflicted over the last 47 years,” Trump said.
Presenting himself as the last barrier protecting an American way of life under siege from radical forces, Trump declared that “Joe Biden and his party repeatedly assailed America as a land of racial, economic, and social injustice.””
Trump portrays Biden as 'destroyer of American greatness'
“So tonight, I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?” Trump said. “In the lefts backward view, they do not see America as the most free, just, and exceptional nation on earth. Instead, they see a wicked nation that must be punished for its sins.”
As his speech brought the scaled-back Republican National Convention to a close, Trumps incendiary rhetoric risked inflaming a divided nation reeling from a series of calamities, including the pandemic, a major hurricane that slammed into the Gulf Coast and nights of racial unrest and violence after Jacob Blake, a Black man, was shot by a white Wisconsin police officer.
He was introduced by his daughter Ivanka, an influential White House adviser, who portrayed the famously bombastic Trump as someone who shaken up Washington with little record for norms or niceties.
How can there be middle ground 'when people not listening to each other?'
“Dad, people attack you for being unconventional, but I love you for being real. And I respect you for being effective,” she said.
The president spoke from a setting that was both familiar and controversial. Despite tradition and regulation to not use the White House for purely political events,a huge stage was set up outside the executive mansion, dwarfing the trappings for some of the most important moments of past presidencies. The speakers stand was flanked by dozens of American flags and two big video screens.
Trying to run as an insurgent as well as incumbent, Trump rarely includes calls for unity, even in a time of national uncertainty. He has repeatedly, if not always effectively, tried to portray Biden — who is considered a moderate Democrat — as a tool of the radical left, fringe forces he has claimed dont love their country.
'Give police their power back,' Trump says
The Republicans claim that the violence that has erupted in Kenosha and some other American cities is to be blamed on Democratic governors and mayors. Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday said that Americans wouldnt be safe in “Joe Bidens America.”
That drew a stern rebuke from his predecessor in the post.
“The problem we have right now is that we are in Donald Trumps America,” said Biden on MSNBC. “He views this as a political benefit to him, he is rooting for more violence not less. He is pouring gasoline on the fire.”
Both parties are watching with uncertainty the developments in Wisconsin and cities across the nation with Republicans leaning hard on support for law and order — with no words offered for Black victims of police violence — while falsely claiming that Biden has not condemned the lawlessness. Rudy Giuliani, Trumps personal attorney and New York Citys former mayor, declared that Democrats “silence was so deafening that it reveals an acceptance of this violence because they will accept anything they hope will defeat President Donald Trump.”
Though some of the speakers, unlike on previous nights, offered notes of sympathy to the families of Black men killed by police, Giuliani also took aim at the Black Lives Matter movement, suggesting that it, along with ANTIFA, was part of the extremist voices pushing Biden to “execute their pro-criminal, anti-police policies” and had “hijacked the protests into vicious, brutal riots.”
Along with Biden, running mate Kamala Harris offered counter-programming for Trumps prime-time speech. She delivered a speech a half mile from the White House, declaring, “Donald Trump has failed at the most basic and important job of a president of the United States: He failed to proRead More – Source
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