Republican Convention: Live Coverage Of The Final Night

Interesting argument: “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” Trump then pivoted to courting Sanders supporters. But it’s worth pointing out, as photos have shown, that Clinton and Trump sometimes run in the same social circles. Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton were even friends. This is not the dynastic race that many anticipated out of 2016 — Bush v. Clinton. But in its own way, Trump v. Clinton has aspects of dynastic power and social class dynamics, with those who have achieved economic comfort from both parties speaking (or attempting to speak) on behalf of voters deeply uneasy about America’s future.

A typical example of a Trump ad-lib/riff on top of his prepared remarks: adding the words “very, very, very” before “badly” when referring to the injured police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s chief opponent in the Democratic primary, famously didn’t want to talk about her emails. Trump wants to, and did at length and with vigor in this speech. And for good reason: 56 percent of Americans in a Washington Post/ABC News poll earlier this month — including 90 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats — said they disagreed with the FBI’s decision not to recommend the Justice Department bring criminal charges against Clinton for using a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

Well, Trump does have a point that he knows corruption. He is from New York, which is one of the most corrupt states in the nation, according to a host of measures.

It strikes me that “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” a line just delivered by Trump, in some ways is also an argument that would feel fairly natural in a Hillary Clinton speech. Obviously the wording would be different, but the sentiment could be about the same.

Earlier today, Paul Waldman wrote in The Washington Post, “can we please not grade Donald Trump’s speech on a curve?” Waldman raises an interesting question — is a convention speech easier for a candidate to nail than another kind of speech? I think the question is more complicated than Waldman does. I see as I’m watching this how he’s right in a way: Trump seems on message, the crowd is responding the way people expect, there’s lots of chanting “U.S.A.,” which is hard for anyone to argue with. But I think the convention speech is the reverse of a lot of campaign rhetoric. It’s usually easier to talk about change than about continuity — how you’ll be different from the status quo. This will be Clinton’s challenge next week. But the convention speech is a national address before a partisan audience. If the main goal for Trump is to solidify his claims of a “national, not global” strategy and his “law and order” message, then this is a good opportunity. But with Trump’s divided party and high unfavorable ratings, this speech might be a chance to offer something different and either more appealing to traditional Republicans — deficits, taxes — or something more positive to broaden his appeal. As Clare pointed out earlier, Trump’s anecdotes are pretty dark. Tomorrow morning, it seems likely to me that the messages from this speech will be “law and order” and “forgotten Americans” — messages we’ve been hearing from this candidate for months.

That line praising the police and Cleveland for taking care of the protester was the first applause line for the crowd out here in the plaza — which is mostly made up of cops and locals working the food and drink stands.

Trump is arguing that Americans want things to change, and there certainly is a lot of discontent (polls show that clearly), but it’s worth noting that President Obama’s job approval rating is above his disapproval rating.

A few minutes ago, Trump called laid-off manufacturing workers “the forgotten men and women of our country.” But it often seems like politicians talk about nothing but manufacturing jobs. As I wrote earlier this year, I wish Trump and other candidates would talk more about how to improve the service-sector jobs that now dominate the economy.

The RNC is the biggest Trump rally we’ve seen so far, and protesters are a regular feature of those. Makes sense he was interrupted in that way, even if it would be notable in other years for a candidate’s speech to be interrupted by a protester here.

Voters in polls broadly agree that Trump would bring about change, but a lot of them think it would be the “wrong kind of change.” That may be the question the election turns upon.

We just had a protester holding up a sign, and the crowd is trying to drown her out with chants of “U.S.A.” She has clearly thrown things off here.

Donald Trump is critiquing Clinton for being the big-money candidate. That’s true, compared with his campaign — you can see a simple graphic here from The Washington Post. But it’s also true that Trump has spent a fraction of what Clinton has and has relied on press coverage. It’s unclear whether that strategy will work in the general election, one reason the super PACs seem to be trying to ramp up fundraising on his behalf.

I’m seeing a number of “women for trump” signs on the floor tonight — didn’t notice those before.

Listening closely, it sounds like Trump is sounding a slightly different note on trade tonight than he often did during the primary campaign. Back then, he often seemed to be outright hostile to trade. But tonight, he emphasizes the need for better trade deals. “I am going to turn our bad trade agreements into great ones,” Trump said tonight. (In fairness, he said similar things at times during the primary as well.) It isn’t clear whether Trump can deliver on that promise, of course — most experts are skeptical. But there’s at least an argument to be made that many American workers have suffered from U.S. trade policy in recent decades. In particular, research out of MIT has found that cheap imports from China have cost the U.S. as many as a million manufacturing jobs. Economists still broadly agree that trade helps the U.S. economy on balance. But they increasingly recognize that the negative effects of trade are more widespread and longer-lasting than previously believed. Few advocate imposing tariffs or other trade barriers, but many experts do argue that the U.S. should do more to push China to open up its markets to American goods and services.

https://twitter.com/BCAppelbaum/status/756316017211609088

I’m sure we’ll have a lot of discussion later about what an unusual speech this is for a modern American presidential nominee. But it’s a textbook “out party” speech in one respect, which is that it spends a lot of time critiquing the performance of the incumbent party.

We’re going to find out if this Trump speech works for the American people, but I will say that Trump isn’t exactly making the case for why he should be the leader of the free world. That’s been a common theme of this convention: making the case against Clinton but not making the case for Trump.

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Trump’s still mostly sticking to script, but as we get further into the speech, he’s changing more words, adding more riffs and repeating more lines for emphasis.

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According to the draft of Trump’s speech, the candidate seems to equate unrest in Islamic nations with the rise of Clinton, saying, “In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map. Libya was cooperating. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq was seeing a reduction in violence. Iran was being choked by sanctions. Syria was under control. … After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have? ISIS has spread across the region, and the world. Libya is in ruins. … Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos.” In all of these instances, years of geopolitics underlie changes in the region. The U.S., of course, initiated war with Iraq during the Bush era. Egypt was a dictatorship that repressed independent journalists and political opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood. The nation then experienced a revolution and counterrevolution, documented in part in the Oscar-nominated film “The Square.” In many cases, residents of nations listed in the draft of the speech do not feel well-served by any political faction, and nations including the U.S. seem to be growing fatigued of engagement.

A notable thing about Trump speeches, including this one, is that his anecdotes are all scary stories — murder, rape, etc. Most politicians try to tell stories that end with some sense of hope, even if they are tragic. That’s what we saw with Ted Cruz on Wednesday night and his invocation of a fallen Dallas police officer. It’s in keeping with the super ominous tone of this week’s convention.

Trump raps Obama for doubling the national debt to $19 trillion. That’s a bit ironic, given that by most independent estimates, Trump’s tax plan would add trillions to the debt.

Trump says that “14 million people have left the workforce entirely” since Obama took office in 2009. It’s not clear where exactly that figure comes from; the labor force is in fact 4.7 million people larger today than when Obama took office in 2009. But it’s certainly true that as a share of the population, fewer Americans are working today than when Obama took office. Despite a bit of a rebound in recent months, the so-called labor force participation rate is near a three-decade low. Much of that decline is due to the aging of the baby-boom generation, which would have happened regardless of the state of the economy. But the recession accelerated the process, pushing millions of Americans out of the job market; many of them have never returned. Earlier this year, I estimated that if all those people were counted as “unemployed” rather than “out of the labor force,” the unemployment rate would be nearly a point higher than it is.

Chants of “build the wall” are breaking out among the delegates. The vast majority of Americans (66 percent) are against building a wall along the Mexican border, according to a new Gallup poll.

I thought the first 5 or 10 minutes of Trump’s speech were quite effectively delivered. But as he sort of leaves the Ivanka glow and gets into the meat of the speech, the mood is changing a bit.

One other note on immigration: Trump says there are 180,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal records “roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.” But most research has found that the crime rate among immigrants is significantly lower than among native-born Americans. That holds for virtually every single immigrant group, including undocumented immigrants, which shouldn’t be too surprising — people here illegally run the risk of being deported if they’re caught committing a crime. And as conservative scholar Jason Riley noted in The Wall Street Journal last year, the period of rising illegal immigration was also associated with a big drop in violent crime.

Trump says “the number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015.” That’s true, but a bit misleading. First of all, that figure, which comes from the Department of Homeland Security, is for the fiscal year, which is already three-quarters complete. Second, while the number of undocumented families apprehended at the border is up significantly from 2015, it is running well behind the record-setting pace of 2014, when families fleeing violence in Central America flooded across the border. But the really important word in Trump’s claim is “families.” The number of families (with children) crossing the Mexican border is way up from last year; so is the number of unaccompanied minors, though not as dramatically. But the total number of unauthorized immigrants — most of whom don’t travel with their families — is up only modestly since last year. More importantly, illegal immigration is way down since the mid-2000s. In fact, according to estimates from the Pew Research Center, net illegal immigration has been roughly zero for much of the past few years, meaning that as many undocumented immigrants have left the country as have entered it. Of course, that also means that the total number of unauthorized immigrants remains at close to an all-time high of roughly 11 million people.

Back in the days before Trump won Indiana, there was lots of talk about how many delegates pledged to Trump were secretly against him. Well, they may have been, but they certainly aren’t anymore. Trump is getting the most applause and audience reaction out of any of the speakers so far.

https://twitter.com/claremalone/status/756314259554902016

After off-roading at the top of his speech with a bit on vote totals, Trump appears to be speaking to prompter per the speech leaked earlier. This is in and of itself an accomplishment — Trump has had an aversion in the past to speaking to prompter and on message.

“Did we come all this way for this?” That’s a line from Richard Nixon’s acceptance speech at the 1968 Republican National Convention. Comparisons between Trump and Nixon have been drawn at various levels, including signs carried by supporters reading “The Silent Majority Stands with Trump.” The silent majority, of course, refers to a phrase that Nixon used in this very 1968 convention speech. But are these comparisons apt? I see two main differences. One is that while Nixon was, without a doubt, a complicated and flawed candidate and president, there was little question about his interest in and knowledge about policy, especially foreign policy. Nixon’s humble background and uneasy personality made him a bit of a permanent outsider, but by the time he ran for president in 1968, he had served two terms as vice president and in both chambers of Congress. This is sort of the opposite of Trump, a newcomer to government and, to put it mildly, a policy neophyte. The other difference is in the manifestation of populism in their speeches. Both talk about crime (I’m working off the early-release draft of Trump’s speech from this afternoon) and about forgotten Americans. But while Trump has a few anecdotes about individual Americans, he rarely talks about the character of the American people as a whole. Nixon, on the other hand, talked a lot in his 1968 speech about the characteristics of the silent majority — hard-working, spanning race and class. Trump talks about national strength, crime and the failures of the Obama administration, but unlike most populists — and most presidents — his speech in draft form doesn’t offer a cohesive reflection on national character. Let’s see if the delivered remarks are the same.

“We will be a country of generosity and warmth but also a country of law and order.” The buzz about this speech is that it’s true Trump with a touch of professional speechwriter. To me, that line encapsulates that ethos that we can expect to see in this speech.

Is Trump’s speech the same as the one that was leaked widely in the media this afternoon? So far, basically yes. A couple of lines were added at the start, after he accepted the nomination, but now he’s back on the original script.

Donald Trump has accepted the Republican nomination for president of the United States.

I mentioned earlier that while Trump is right that murders rose in big U.S. cities last year, the rate is at historic lows. Since that claim is central to the theme of his speech — or at least the transcript of his prepared remarks — that America is far from great and must be made great again, it’s worth delving more deeply into that stat. The murder rate now is near the level in 2012, which at the time was just about the lowest since 1900, The Washington Post pointed out. That’s important context for Trump’s claim. But it’s also important to note that the murder rate isn’t a perfect proxy for safety. As Jeff Asher has documented on this website, murders sometimes rise when shootings fall. In the short term, that can be a result of the flukiness of where bullets land and how long it takes for emergency responders to arrive at the scene of a shooting. In the long run, it can mislead about the underlying criminal violence rate, because trauma medicine has improved rapidly, thanks in part to transferring advances by military medics in treating battlefield wounds into American emergency rooms and operating rooms. The Wall Street Journal explained the divergence between violence and murder in a 2012 article titled, “In Medical Triumph, Homicides Fall Despite Soaring Gun Violence.”

Ivanka Trump just said motherhood, rather than gender itself, is now the driver of the wage gap. That’s a bit of an exaggeration — women make less than men on average across ages. But it’s certainly true that the wage gap grows significantly when women take time off to raise children. Progressives, of course, argue that means the U.S. should require companies to offer paid parental leave so that new parents can take time off, and to provide child care so they can go back to work when they’re ready. But achieving real gender parity is hard; research suggests that generous leave benefits can in some cases hold women back because companies assume they will take off time to have children. (Some Scandinavian countries have begun pushing men to take time off, too, to achieve more balance.) For more on this, check out our Kitchen Table Podcast on the cost of raising children.

Ivanka Trump, who is quite a poised and accomplished speaker, and her brothers have all made references to ethics — usually their father’s, sometimes, in the case of Eric, about his own nonprofit. Ivanka, in particular, talks about her father’s “empathy and generosity … kindness and compassion … [his] sense of fairness.” It becomes difficult to keep noting the same points of fact when people, no matter the party, sometimes seem unpersuadable by fact, but Trump has been sued for housing discrimination in his buildings and many times for failing to pay small businesses that work with his organization. “He is colorblind and gender-neutral,” says Ivanka about his hiring. But at the same time, this is the man who said, “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” Ivanka also says her father will help protect working mothers. But Trump chose a running mate who made no bones about thinking working mothers are a mistake.

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Ivanka Trump said her father pays his employees who are women the same as those who are men. That may be true at his companies, but it’s not true on his campaign, according to reports by Jezebel, The Boston Globe and The Huffington Post: Most of his campaign employees are men, and they make more on average than the women do.

I think it might work, in the sense that people seem very eager to believe in colorblindness and thus ignore the racial and gender implications of, say, “tough on crime” rhetoric or people chanting “lock her up” about the first female major party nominee.

So the explicit message of this speech is, as Clare predicted, “my father is not sexist or racist.” Will this work? It’s getting a big reception in the hall, but that’s obviously not a representative sample.

https://twitter.com/HotlineJosh/status/756311047389253632

This speech by Ivanka Trump has been pretty good so far, in my view, and so was the one by Donald Trump Jr. on Tuesday night. I’m not sure that was as true for some of the other speeches given by Trump family members. But given that speeches by family members tend to be graded on a curve — they aren’t always praised, but they’re very rarely criticized — I wonder if we’ll see a trend toward politicians deploying family members at conventions more often.

It’s interesting to me that Ivanka played proxy for the independent voter in her opening by saying she didn’t think of herself categorically as a Republican or a Democrat.

Four years ago at this point, Clint Eastwood was talking to an empty chair. Ivanka Trump, fortunately for Donald Trump, is putting in a far better performance.

I know the GOP convention has sometimes been loose with facts, but perhaps since I’m writing this from the great New York City borough of Queens, I particularly bristled at the video’s claim that going from Queens to Manhattan was a trip from one city to another. That hasn’t been true since 1898.

Voight’s video made Trump seem beloved in New York City. According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, Trump’s unfavorable rating in New York City is 73 percent.

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