CHARLOTTE: US Republicans launched their national convention on Monday with a full-throated endorsement of President Donald Trump’s record and laid out a bleak vision of how American life would change for the worse under a Joe Biden administration.
Trump, having claimed the party’s unanimous nomination earlier in the day as he opened his bid for a second term, was portrayed — perhaps misleadingly — as a president whose response to the coronavirus pandemic saved thousands of lives and ensured an economic recovery.
Trump’s right-wing firebrand son Don Jr, who like many spoke from an ornate theatre in Washington, channelled his father’s pugilistic style, throwing red meat to the party’s base voters by framing the November election as a choice between “church, work and school” and “rioting, looting and vandalism.”
Trump Jr — and nearly all other convention speakers — made no mention of the 177,000 Americans killed by COVID-19, saying his father “quickly took action” to thwart the pandemic’s spread.
“There is more work to do, but there is light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.
Black Trump supporters including Senator Tim Scott and former football star Herschel Walker appealed directly to African-American voters, while former UN representative Nikki Haley told her compelling story of being an immigrants’ daughter who rose to become governor of South Carolina.
But there was also a stream of dire warnings from participants who said Biden would bring “socialism” and danger to the nation.
“No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America,” said Patricia McCloskey, who with her husband made headlines in June by brandishing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their St Louis home.
Trump himself meanwhile doubled down on an increasingly familiar argument: that Democrats want to “steal” the election that polls currently show him losing.
Minutes after the party completed the nomination vote confirming Trump as the candidate for November 3, he appeared at the convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, to deliver an often dark speech.
He told Republicans to be on alert for what he claimed was a Democratic plan to rig the contest through increased use of mail-in voting — a measure Democrats say is needed to protect people from catching COVID-19 in crowded polling stations.
“They are trying to steal the election,” he told party delegates, many of whom were wearing masks. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”
Opponents say Trump’s increasingly extreme resistance to expanded mail-in voting — a method already used widely in the United States — is an attempt to suppress voter turnout, while setting up an excuse to challenge the result if he is defeated.
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Polls show Trump trailing Democratic challenger Biden, who had his convention last week, as Americans turn on the president’s handling of the pandemic and subsequent economic chaos.
Trump hopes the convention, which concludes on Thursday with his formal acceptance of the nomination, will shift voters’ attention from the coronavirus to what he says is the “super V” shaped economic recovery.
— AFP
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