What Went Down During President Trump’s Closing Speech At The RNC
Filed under 2020 Election
I agree with that, Galen. Should Trump be defeated this year, the front-runner Republican for 2024 is most likely either him or someone who has worked hard to sound like him.
This is the part where I would go to the GOP platform to see what they said about criminal justice reform, but there is no platform.
Johnson’s speech pitching criminal justice reform is anticipating common conservative tough-on-crime arguments against it, like “You do the crime, you do the time.” She counters, “That time should be fair and just. We’ve all made mistakes.”
Trump has a major hold on the party, and his influence has influenced the new faces in the GOP who have gotten elected in recent years, too. Even if he loses in 2020, I suspect the party won’t be leaving his shadow.
That’s a good point, Galen, and one that FiveThirtyEight contributor Lee Drutman made earlier this week in his piece on how there are so few GOP moderates left, arguing that our increasingly partisan politics reward extremism in the country’s current two-party configuration.
My hot take on 2024, Micah, is that win or lose, the future of the GOP looks pretty Trumpy. The base of the GOP agrees with Trump’s worldview and shows up for its preferred candidates in primaries. Non-college-educated white voters make up 44 percent of the overall electorate and will be strong force in the GOP for decades to come.
Alice Johnson was serving a life sentence on money laundering and nonviolent drug charges when her sentence was commuted by Trump in 2018. She’s now a criminal justice reform advocate. This is not the first time her story has been featured in support of Trump — she was the subject of a $10 million Super Bowl ad earlier this year. Her situation was brought to Trump’s attention by none other than Kim Kardashian West.
Tonight has featured more pathos than the previous three nights combined.
The parents of Kayla Mueller, a humanitarian who was captured and killed by ISIS, are speaking now. Their daughter’s story is truly tragic and horrifying. They mention that they have never heard from Biden and blame the Obama administration for not doing enough to rescue their daughter.
I’m not sure if I’m proud of how little 2024 talk has taken place on these convention live blogs or ashamed and disappointed at how little there’s been.
It’s true that the Old City of Jerusalem was the star of Pompeo’s speech.
One quibble … if Pompeo also has presidential ambitions, I’m unsure whether he or Cotton had the worse intro into America’s living rooms.
Nate, totally was just thinking that. WE ARE USED TO A SHOW NOW. YOU NEED TO TALK LOUDLY TO GET OUR ATTENTION.
Yeah, Nate, that was a pretty flat delivery by Cotton. Of all the potential 2024 contenders, I’d have to say Tim Scott has given the best speech so far.
Of the various people who are talked about as 2024 contenders (Pence, Haley, Tim Scott, Trump Jr.!) I’d say Cotton just delivered the least effective, least memorable speech.
For all the sound and fury from the speakers at tonight’s RNC, the response on Twitter has been mostly flat. Not a lot of breakthrough moments so far.
Cotton can turn his attention fully to 2024 now without any worry about winning reelection to the Senate this year. Not just because Arkansas has become strongly Republican, but also because the Democrats failed to field a candidate.
All this “China wants Biden” talk seems to me to be the counter to Democrats’ “Russia wants Trump” talk.
Another thing I’d be curious about is how this compares to past conventions with an incumbent president. Cotton is comparing Trump and Biden’s records side by side. That’s the kind of thing you do when you’re running in an open-seat race or you’re the challenger. For the incumbent party to do this, comparing a sitting president to his challenger is ceding a lot of ground.
God, 2020 has been so long. Cotton’s controversial op-ed in the Times came out in June of this year.
Cotton, of course, attracted a lot of notoriety (alongside The New York Times) for his op-ed calling for troops to be sent in to quell protests earlier this summer.
Sen. Tom Cotton takes the stage, so the 2024 campaign continues.
Giuliani’s claim that crime is ready to creep into the suburbs is without basis in fact (and a pretty obvious dog whistle), but what is true is that New York City has had a violent summer, with murders way up from last year
In fact, for one shining moment in 2007, Giuliani appeared to be the GOP front-runner for the nomination. As I wrote about last year, he’s a good example of how a front-runner can fail.
I knew we’d get at least one hipster John Lindsay reference with this group!
I’d say Bloomberg’s was definitely the most entertaining.
Nate, I’m going with John Lindsay, the one-time Republican who ran in a Democratic primary in 1972.
NOT JUST DELEGATES. HE WON AMERICAN SAMOA, SETH!
Yeah, Nate, it’s got to be Giuliani. He had high expectations but completely blew it with a baffling “ignore Iowa and New Hampshire” strategy. De Blasio did the worst overall (dropping out before voting started), but he never had a shot to begin with. And Bloomberg actually did pretty well, considering that he jumped in the race impossibly late!
My instinct was similar to Geoffrey’s — Giuliani fell the furthest short of expectations. But de Blasio’s campaign was also uniquely bad in that he seemed to fail to gain purchase with any consituency — in a year that was ripe for all sorts of candidates.
I’ll leave this here.
https://twitter.com/mike2020/status/1217254115132235776?lang=en
Honestly, de Blasio, because he is still at a stage in life where he’d like to have a future political career. He should have known better.
Nate, am I correct that Bloomberg is the only one with delegates?
Nate with the catnip.
Only one of them ever led in national polls — Giuliani. So in terms of potential, I’d say it’s him by a mile.
Slack status bar: “several people are typing”
Question for the group. Of the past 3 New York City mayors (Giuliani, Bloomberg, de Blasio) — all of whom ran for president with infamously bad results — which one had the very worst presidential campaign?
It’s true that shootings are up in New York City and other cities this year. But overall, crime is down. So even though the uptick in shootings is obviously worrisome, it is undeniably a weird year for crime statistics, and we won’t know if this is an actual trend or yet another bizarre 2020 phenomenon for some time.
“Don’t let Democrats do to America what they did to New York,” says Giuliani. However, I’m not sure voters will buy that de Blasio and Biden are the same thing. During the primary, de Blasio was one of the most liberal candidates in the race. Yet once again, Giuliani uses the phrase that Biden will be a “Trojan horse” for far-left Democrats like de Blasio.
Rudy Giuliani calling Biden a “defective” candidate is kind of a 19th-Century-sounding insult.
Ha, I still think the New York and de Blasio criticism is bigger than that. It’s part of a broader attack on Democratic mayors, governors and politicians, who they’re painting as ineffective. It’s the case they’ve been building all week. It is striking, though, that one thing many Republicans and Democrats might have in common is dislike of de Blasio. (As a non-New Yorker, I don’t really get it. But it’s no longer the 2020 primaries.)
Some of these attacks on New York make it seem like the GOP didn’t pivot when de Blasio wasn’t tapped as VP.
Yup, Dan, crime has been falling for the past 30 years but Americans consistently say it’s rising. The experts Maggie and I talked to say that part of the reason is that politicians and the media talk a lot about violent crime, even when it’s actually becoming rarer.
Here’s a little background on Lynch, the NYPD union, and their tension with de Blasio over police reform (people might remember when cops turned their backs on the mayor at an officer’s funeral).
Lynch is arguing that crime is on the rise, but earlier this month, Maggie and Amelia wrote about the myth of rising crime.
This is closer to the feeling of the 2016 convention, which tied the debates about policing to horrific stories of violence. Similar vibe to Trump’s inaugural address also.
Patrick Lynch cites numerous violent crimes and says they are on the rise during the Trump administration because “the Democrats have walked away from us.”
While Carson tells viewers that Trump is not racist, most Black Americans disagree.
On the other hand, though, Dan, a recent Pew survey found that 59 percent of Americans say violent crime will be “very important” to their vote — almost the same share as who cite the coronavirus outbreak. So it might not be Americans’ most important problem, but it does seem to be on people’s radar.