WASHINGTON — Republicans kicked off their national convention Monday by trying to radically recast President Donald Trump’s failures in containing the coronavirus pandemic as triumphs and by painting an apocalyptic vision of America if Democratic nominee Joe Biden wins in November.
With Trump significantly trailing Biden in national and battleground polls, a parade of elected Republican officials, activists and the president’s eldest son, Donald Jr., sought to lure back suburban and independent voters by trying to erase the president’s perceived deficits of empathy and competence.
But the program was marked by a dissonance between the upbeat, revisionist appeals and the dark, hyperbolic visions that repeatedly warned that Biden would champion socialism and lawlessness while Trump would stand, as one speaker put it, as a “bodyguard” who would protect America.
Trump’s campaign had promised an uplifting tone, seeking to contrast it with a Democratic convention that the president’s aides claimed was negative and overly critical of the country. But the kinder, gentler approach quickly fell by the wayside as the president warned in a midday speech to delegates that “your American dream will be dead” if Biden wins.
“They want no guns. They want no oil and gas, and they want no God,” he said of Democrats.
Strikingly, Republicans offered few expressions of grief with the families of the 177,000 Americans who have died of COVID-19, or the nearly 30 million who lost their jobs over the past six months.
But the RNC spent ample time addressing the matter, aiming to turn a major liability into a political strength by portraying Trump’s response to the pandemic as a smashing success.
A West Virginia nurse praised Trump’s response to the health crisis. A Montana business owner said a federal loan allowed her to keep her coffee shop. A Louisiana maxillofacial surgeon lauded Trump for removing FDA “barriers” to unproven therapeutics.
And video clips of lawmakers praising Trump, portrayed him as a leader “who got everything right” in responding to the pandemic, even though the U.S. caseload and death toll is the worst by far in the world.
Trump appeared in two taped segments from the White House East Room interacting with seven first responders, most of whom praised his actions, and again later in a sit-down with six former hostages whose releases he had helped to negotiate.
While several Black speakers defended Trump from allegations of racism, the night also featured a white St. Louis couple who were charged with felonies for drawing guns against Black Lives Matter protestors earlier this summer. They declared that only Trump could defend the suburbs.
The night’s final speaker, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, tried to thread the needle between the grievance that has always animated Trump’s core supporters and a conciliatory message that might expand his base.
“We don’t give into cancel culture, or the radical — and factually baseless — belief that things are worse today than in the 1860s or the 1960s,” said Scott. He lauded Trump for signing criminal justice reform and blasted Biden for supporting the 1994 crime bill that dramatically increased the country’s prison population.
Echoing other speakers, Scott claimed that Biden, who Democrats accused of being too close to the banking industry, and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., would turn America “into a socialist utopia.”
Donald Trump Jr., the scion and heir apparent to some of the most incendiary aspects of his father’s politics, framed the election as “shaping up to be church, work and school versus rioting, looting and vandalism.”
