What Went Down During President Trump’s Closing Speech At The RNC

Honestly, yes, Galen. Any effort the Democrats make to find party unity and toss the progressives a bone will be seen as evidence that Biden is shifting further to the left. And I think for voters who are not paying super close attention, that narrative can stick.

Galen, I do think there’s truth to the claim that Biden, despite a middle-of-the-road reputation and record, would pursue liberal policies. Very liberal policies judged against the politics of 2012 or 2004. But I’m not sure voters actually care about ideology. They care about the appearance of moderation, and Biden — as a white man — fits many voters’ idea of moderation.

Nate, this is actually more like Trump’s pre-2020 SOTUs. His most recent one was filled with a lot of game-show gimmicks. At least so far, this one isn’t.

Speaking about immigration in his closing speech, the president has used the term “illegal aliens” on multiple occasions. The term is coded in a number of state and federal immigration laws, but there is a debate going about whether that term is derogatory to individuals coming into the country illegally. Some states have started replacing the term with “undocumented immigrants” or “undocumented foreign national.”

We’ll see how the campaign shapes up and, if Biden is elected, how much influence the left wing of the party has over him. But it seems like Biden has been able to win the nomination and seemingly consolidate party support pretty well because he’s able to speak to different factions of the party. It’s possible that association with Sanders or the Squad will hurt Biden. But I’m not sure there is a lot of evidence that these kinds of associations overshadow party affiliation and the higher visibility of the presidential candidate.

I don’t think it’s very convincing, Galen. Americans know Biden well from his time in the Obama administration, and they don’t perceive him as very liberal. We had a whole primary where Biden was criticized, explicitly or implicitly, for being too moderate!

In 2008, the Democrats’ advertising emphasized McCain’s age and fitness for the job. It sure seems like the GOP is going to return the favor in presenting Biden as unaware in 2020. I think the “Trojan horse” argument is part of that, Galen.

Seth is spot on — we just heard Trump call Biden’s agenda the “Biden-Bernie” agenda.

Galen, in some way, the “Trojan horse” argument is something of a concession, no? Trump had planned to brand his Democratic opponent as a socialist, but that label doesn’t stick with Biden, so he has to claim that Biden gives license to other socialists.

We talked about the “Trojan horse” argument on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast last week. It does seem that Biden, an older white man, has become something of a vessel for liberal policies driven by a young, diverse base. So is this a convincing/winning argument from Trump?

But Nate, most State of the Union addresses don’t end with fireworks. 🎆

Forty-five minutes into his remarks, Trump still isn’t seeing any extra volume of conversation on social media during this speech. Biden is ticking up a bit though.

I am waiting for Julia to weigh in on norms.

Are we allowed to say “fuck” here? Fuck!

As others have pointed out, this at times feels a bit like a State of the Union address, and it’s important to keep in mind that most State of the Union addresses are boring as fuck.

New York City’s bail reform has been blamed for the spike in violent crime this summer — but there’s not actually evidence that reforming bail leads to higher crime.

Regarding that claim that the Democrats removed “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance at their convention, I didn’t remember that happening. Turns out it didn’t happen during the nightly programming but during a couple of daytime meetings. It’s worth noting that the “under God” phrase was only officially added to the Pledge in 1954.

Real-time fact-checkers are being kept busy with this speech.

It’s hard to stress too much how unusual it is for immigration to be a top-line national issue. In the last few decades, the issue has somewhat divided both parties, with factions in each favoring more and less restrictive policies. I think we are sort of starting to see why it’s not usually an issue that presidential candidates focus on, even as it’s incredibly important and affects many lives. There’s some evidence that while Trump has been in office, the country has become more liberal on immigration, with persistent party divisions. But people’s views tend to be mixed, and it’s easy for party statements drafted to please the most ardent activists to sound extreme.

Remember when Kellyanne Conway argued for Sanders back in January? I get the sense tonight they’d rather be running against Sanders.

If there was any question about which of the many topics Trump has touched on this evening would be central to his reelection campaign pitch, he has made it clear now: “The most dangerous aspect of the Biden platform is the attack on public safety.”

Trump has mentioned Bernie Sanders and now Ilhan Omar, but isn’t set to mention Kamala Harris.

This has kind of been a Frankenstein’s monster of all the speeches we’ve heard this week: Trump has mentioned right-to-try, said “the best is yet to come” and attacked Biden as a “Trojan horse” for socialism.

Given the perceived success of Trump’s focus on immigration and undocumented immigrants in 2016, Trump stoked anxiety about immigrants ahead of the 2018 midterms by drawing attention to and speaking derogatorily about a migrant caravan heading toward the U.S. But this sort of rhetoric can have a mobilizing effect on Latino voters, according to a recent academic paper by Angela Gutierrez, Angela Ocampo, Matt Barreto and Gary Sugura. Latinos who felt anger toward Trump and his rhetoric in 2016 were mobilized to engage politically in the race and against Trump.

Trump claims that he will cut taxes even further for “hardworking moms and dads” after talking about how Biden’s tax plans will cause the stock market to fall and hurt 401(k) plans. But how many people actually have a 401(k)? Only about one-third of Americans have a retirement savings plan, so 401(k) talk seems to be primarily a white-collar concern.

On the topic of China, it’s well documented that the country did a poor job communicating about the virus to the world early on, and the Biden-Harris ticket has also been critical of the country. This has likely become a bipartisan issue, because Americans across the board have a negative view of China.

Overlong speeches are not completely foreign to Trump, but they’re usually when he’s ad-libbing. This is long and a bit meandering — and read off a prompter. And however effective it proves to be, you wonder if it wouldn’t be more effective if it were 30 percent shorter.

My memory is that it was Warren, Sanders and others who actually proposed fracking bans, and that Biden didn’t go as far. I imagine that some Democrats here in Pennsylvania breathed a sigh of relief at not having to run on a fracking ban.

OK, so Trump made a few technically correct but partially misleading statements about COVID-19 in the U.S. For one, he compared the U.S.’s pandemic to the entire European Union which is, of course, 27 nations, not one nation. Among countries with at least 50,000 reported cases, the U.S. is eighth for death rates at 47.9 per 100,000 people. It’s true that the U.S. has a much lower case fatality rate than many developed nations, at 3.3 percent, and that is a good thing, but unfortunately due to the high number of cases in the U.S., that small percentage has translated to more than 180,000 deaths.. The reality is you can pick and choose a number that shows America doing better or worse, but at the end of the day, hundreds of thousands of dead people is nothing to celebrate.

Yeah, Julia, when searching for that HuffPost article, I came across this article about China being a popular punching bag in political ads during the last economic recession.

Well, Dan, Trump has actually tried to act on his own to boost jobless Americans’ unemployment payments after Congress let the $600-per-week federal payment lapse at the end of July. I’m a little surprised we haven’t heard anything about that attempt — although the money isn’t really getting to people yet, and it would require criticizing his own party’s unwillingness to renew the expansion, so maybe those are two good reasons to steer clear of the topic.

Trump is making very confident claims that a COVID-19 vaccine will shortly be released. Producing a safe and effective vaccine within a year of a pandemic’s detection is historically unheard of, of course, and rushed vaccines have led to considerable errors in the past.

I do think that American commentators tend to understate how bad Europe’s coronavirus problems were in the spring — and a number of countries in Europe are seeing a resurgence now. But as Axios’s Jonathan Swan tries to explain to Trump in this famous interview, the case fatality rate — how many people die out of how many people are diagnosed with COVID-19 — is not really how you’d want to go about judging countries’ performance. Instead, you’d probably just want to look at the number of fatalities per capita. The US may not have that high of case fatality rate, but we have a ton of cases, which means the overall death toll has been very bad here, even on a per-capita basis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaaTZkqsaxY

In response to Nathaniel’s point about anti-China ads this year, I want to note that political scientists Jessica Chen Weiss and Amber Wichowsky have been writing about anti-China rhetoric for years, well before the Trump era.

President Trump mentions the collateral costs of a shutdown. The BBC just did a very moving and horrifying podcast on the rise in domestic violence in Britain during their shutdown.

My reaction to this COVID-19 section is that it’s an incredibly crass way to talk about the loss of hundreds of thousands of American lives. Trump’s framing is as if we are on a steady path to recovery, which is not the case, and he compares the U.S. death rate to other countries. Listen, I’m not naive, this is not new rhetoric from him on the pandemic. But it’s worth noting as he says it in front of the White House at his nominating convention.

That’s right, Nathaniel. And one reason why might be because negative impressions of China are on the rise among both Democrats and Republicans, as former FiveThirtyEight intern Likhitha Butchireddygari wrote earlier this summer.

“We are focusing on the science, the facts and the data,” Trump says, speaking about FiveThirtyEight.

Trump mentions the Paycheck Protection Program. One thing that has genuinely surprised me is that the Trump administration didn’t jump at the Democrats’ offer to spend trillions of dollars in the run-up to the election.

I have to say, the 9 million jobs that have been gained over the past few months don’t look as great when you consider that over 20 million people were unemployed in May.

China has been a popular target not just for Trump, but for all Republicans running for office this year. According to HuffPost, Republicans spent $8.3 million on TV ads referencing China from April 1 to May 15.

Micah, the RNC went with a far less risky approach (production-wise) than the DNC. Fewer moving parts, with most speakers from a single location. It’s easier to avoid technical hiccups if you have minimal live moments.

Trump and some other speakers have claimed that China wants Biden to win. But the real answer to that question seems complicated. Biden’s preference for multilateralism might make it tougher for China to get its way than Trump’s more unilateral approach that leaves allies behind. But at the same time, Trump has been an unpredictable force on the world stage, so China might prefer Biden as a more predictable international actor who they can better anticipate.

This has been a pretty standard overview of the Trump approach to talking about the coronavirus — blaming China and praising the U.S. response.

The other thing we should say about this convention as it hits the home stretch: It’s largely come off, production-wise, without any major hiccups or difficulties. Given the last-minute planning and how much was up in the air, I thought there was a decent chance the RNC could get real messy. It hasn’t. (Again, I’m talking only about production and staging in this instance.)

One key thing to keep in mind: Trump is so familiar to voters that it’ll be hard to move what voters think of him much. With Rafaela Dancygier, I did an experiment showing Americans clips from Trump’s 2016 RNC, and they did little to change viewers’ attitudes. So attacking the less-defined Biden makes sense.

As someone said higher up: It’s a little strange to talk about China or anyone else allowing the virus to spread while holding an event with more than 1,000 people in close proximity

The coronavirus has been with us for a while now, so if Trump is going to make China pay a price for it, one might wonder why he hasn’t tried to extract that price yet.

Yeah, I think that’s right Kaleigh. If the narrative from tonight from the media is: “Trump gives OK speech, but look at the crowd.” I think that further increases distrust in the media among Trump supporters, and that’s something we’re already seeing take root online in spaces like Facebook.

When Trump campaigned in 2016, he campaigned on undoing many of Obama’s unilateral actions, like the the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran nuclear deal. In 2017, I took a look at whether and when incoming presidents undo their predecessor’s actions. Typically, they don’t! They benefit from the expansion of the executive when they assume that role. But Trump has undone, or threatened to undo, many Obama actions the past four years. That said, he’s signed more executive orders of his own than the five most recent presidents.