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Trump proclaims himself the 'law and order' candidate in convention speech / Donald Trump's Republican convention speech: what he said and what he meant



 

Trump proclaims himself the 'law and order' candidate in convention speech

Republican strikes authoritarian tone in convention speech focusing on recent terrorist attacks and police killings to assure Americans ‘safety will be restored’

Dan Roberts and Ben Jacobs Cleveland
Friday 22 July 2016 05.43 BST


Donald Trump stoked the fears of an angry Republican convention on Thursday as he declared himself the law and order candidate in an acceptance speech that took a sharply authoritarian turn.

Promising supporters that “safety will be restored” once he becomes president, Trump sought to harness concern over terrorism and domestic crime to challenge Hillary Clinton on territory that has long proven a reliable rallying cry for parties of the right.

“In this race for the White House, I am the law and order candidate,” he claimed, encouraging and directing loud chants of “USA, USA” like the conductor of an orchestra.

“Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country,” he added.

The four-day convention in Cleveland has seen repeated cries of “lock her up” when Clinton’s name is mentioned, but Trump waved these chants aside as if granting mercy with his hands and urged instead: “Let’s defeat her in November.”

The 75-minute speech pushed familiar buttons. “Illegal immigrants are roaming free to threaten innocent citizens,” Trump told the booing crowd, which responded by chanting “build the wall”.

Another theme of the week in Cleveland has been loud cheers whenever speakers replace the “black lives matter” slogan with “blue lives matter” to signify sympathy for police over African American shooting victims and Trump received a standing ovation when he declared: “An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans”.

The interruption of a protester 23 minutes in prompted Trump to ad-lib: “How great are our police?” as the cries of a woman being removed could still be heard dimly in the distance.

But as the giant Quicken Loans Arena eventually filled with thousands of red, white and blue balloons to signify the end of what has been something of an awkward convention, the party’s once unthinkable nominee sought to strike a message of unity too.

Drawing a contrast with Clinton’s campaign slogan “I’m with her,” he declared: “I am with you.”

“I am your voice,” he pledged, stressing each word carefully as if claiming the popular will as his own.

Introducing Trump, his daughter Ivanka also sought to reach out to female voters – a group who rate the Republican nominee particularly poorly in opinion polls. In a polished and warmly received speech, she rejected repeated suggestions of Trump’s sexism, insisting: “My father is colour blind and gender neutral.”

“He will focus on making quality childcare accessible and affordable to all,” she added, arguing that motherhood, not sexism, was “the greatest factor in gender pay discrepancy”.

Trump said his business experience had given him the skills to fix a rigged country. “Nobody knows the system better than me,” he shrugged with smirk. “Which is why I alone can fix it.”

And he painted a bleak view of the US economy, promising “Americanism not globalism” and seeking to convert Democratic-leaning Bernie Sanders supporters with his opposition to free trade deals.

“I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders – he never had a chance,” said Trump. “But his supporters will join our movement, because we will fix his biggest issue: trade deals that strip our country of its jobs and strip the wealth of country.”

The Republican nominee echoed Clinton’s former Democratic challenger by promising to create millions of new jobs by building “the roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, and the railways of tomorrow”.

He also pointed out that Sanders had questioned Clinton’s foreign policy judgment and expressed sympathy with him over Democratic electoral rules said to favour its establishment, much as Trump struggled against the party leadership in the Republican primary.
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But tactical appeals to Democrats were limited compared to the unabashed message of security. “There can be no prosperity without law and order,” intoned Trump.

He stuck to his controversial campaign promise to build a wall on the Mexican border but slightly adapted his equally inflammatory proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States.

“We must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place,” he said.

“We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities,” added Trump.

In his warnings of “crime and violence” and his solemn pledge “I am the law and order candidate”, Trump sounded notes eerily similar to Richard Nixon’s campaign rhetoric in 1968.

In 1968, in the aftermath of consecutive summers of widespread riots across the United States, Nixon ran as the candidate of “law and order”.
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Ed Cox, the chair of the New York State Republican party and Nixon’s son-in-law, noted some similarities. “Certainly Donald Trump calls his supporters the silent majority unapologetically,” said Cox. “Now that was not a part of [Nixon’s] acceptance speech in ‘68, that was November ‘69, the Vietnam speech.

“But Donald Trump has captured that silent majority completely for the first time since Reagan, and maybe even better than Reagan. But certainly like my father-in-law.”

Amid a backdrop of terrorist attacks and police shootings, the celebrity billionaire seized on the theme of law and order as a potential rallying cry for a party bruised by internal feuds and a chaotic convention.

The torrent of violent news flooding into American TV screens in recent months was used to boost his own campaign at the expense of Democrats.

“Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims,” he said.

“America is far less safe – and the world is far less stable – than when Obama made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America’s foreign policy,” added Trump.

He took to the stage behind a specially-installed gold and black lectern, with the Shakespearean opening line: “Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.”

The text of the speech had been leaked three hours earlier, capping a week in which his wife’s opening address plagiarised Michelle Obama and a call for unity was torpedoed by Ted Cruz’s refusal to endorsee the nominee.

He was also forced to try to explain controversial comments on the future of Nato delivered in a New York Times interview, stressing his loyalty to traditional US allies.

“We must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying Isis and stamping out Islamic terror,” Trump said. “This includes working with our greatest ally in the region, the State of Israel.”

He concluded by claiming his political philosophy was unified by the theme of putting Americans first.

“To all Americans tonight, in all our cities and towns, I make this promise: we will make America strong again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again and we will make America great again,” said Trump, shortly before the room was filled with the sound of popping balloons that sounded eerily like gunshots.
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As Trump’s family joined him on the stage, the crowd looked expectantly to the rafters as the first bars of Free’s All Right Now started playing in the arena and the first few scraps of confetti started floating down.

Section by section, red, white and blue balloons floated down from the sky. The RNC had inflated 120,000 of them, many standard size, some much larger. Some delegates on the floor were buried waist deep as they thrashed about the kaleidoscopic scene.

They hugged, dance and embraced. Some had even smuggled alcohol onto the floor. Al Baldasaro, a New Hampshire state representative who supported Trump since he launched the campaign and has had a penchant for controversy, was euphoric. “It feels awesome,” said Baldasaro.

“We worked our butt offs. Donald Trump is the real deal. The people spoke and we’re there. Now on to Hillary and we’re taking the hill.”

Donald Trump's Republican convention speech: what he said and what he meant

David Smith reads between the lines of the Republican presidential nominee’s speech to the party convention in Cleveland

Friday 22 July 2016 05.07 BST


Donald Trump: Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims. I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon – and I mean very soon – come to an end. Beginning on January 20th of 2017, safety will be restored.

David Smith: Trump aims to be fresh and up-to-date by referencing recent news events but the message is as old as the hills. In his 1968 acceptance speech, Richard Nixon said: “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home. And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish. Did we come all this way for this?”

America is far less safe – and the world is far less stable – than when Obama made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America’s foreign policy. I am certain it is a decision he truly regrets. Her bad instincts and her bad judgment – something pointed out by Bernie Sanders – are what caused so many of the disasters unfolding today.

Instead of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 question, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”, Trump asks are you and your world more or less secure than you were eight years ago? He seeks to hold Clinton and Obama jointly responsible for the rise of Islamic State and recent surge of terrorist attacks. He also manages to mention three Democrats in as many sentences, getting in a dig via Bernie Sanders, whose voters he will court again later. But when the delegates chanted “Lock her up!”, Trump stood back for a moment and said pointedly: “Let’s defeat her in November.”

The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponent, is that our plan will put America first. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo. As long as we are led by politicians who will not put America first, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect, the respect that we deserve. The American people will come first once again.

After characterising Clinton’s legacy as “death, destruction and weakness”, Trump pivots to how he and the Republican will be different. It is unclear whether knows that the slogan “America first” echoes the America First Committee that campaigned to keep the US out of the second world war but was disbanded three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He hopes to present a stark choice between Obama and Clinton’s incremental, pragmatic, shades-of-grey foreign policy and Trump’s bold, brilliant colours that will restore this superpower.

Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They are throwing money at her because they have total control over every single thing she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings. That is why Hillary Clinton’s message is that things will never change: never ever. My message is that things have to change – and they have to change right now.

One of Trump’s strongest hands is to portray Clinton as an establishment figure, the secretary of the status quo: Washington, Wall Street and the mainstream media. He tries to plant an image in his audience’s mind of Clinton as a puppet on string. The message is that if she offers only more of the same, that is hard for anyone to get excited about. Trump, by contrast, is the change agent who will shake things up; the human Brexit.

Every day I wake up determined to deliver a better life for the people all across this nation that have been ignored, neglected and abandoned. I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country, and they are forgotten, but they’re not going to be forgotten long. These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice. I am your voice.

The anti-establishment non-politician is trying to speak beyond the convention arena, and the media elite, to connect with struggling workers in the rust belt and elsewhere who find their wages stagnating and feel long ignored by Washington. He says he has put in the shoe leather to go out and meet them and he feels their pain. As he has throughout the campaign, he presents himself as the only one who gets them. “I am your voice,” delivered with a pointed finger, are possibly the four key words of the speech.

In fact, her [Clinton’s] single greatest accomplishment may be committing such an egregious crime and getting away with it, especially when others have paid so dearly. When that same secretary of state rakes in millions and millions of dollars trading access and favours to special interests and foreign powers I know the time for action has come.”

Trump has just run through Clinton’s email scandal, in which the FBI found that she had been “extremely careless” in handling classified information. The point has been hammered home all week and Trump was never going to miss such an open goal. By also alleging that she has traded access and favours (while offering no evidence), he seeks to paint her as untrustworthy, with a whiff of corruption. The point: we need saving from Hillary Clinton – and he is the man to do it.

I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people who cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders – he never had a chance. But his supporters will join our movement, because we will fix his biggest single issue: trade deals that strip our country of its jobs and strip us of our wealth as a country. Millions of Democrats will join our movement because we are going to fix the system so it works fairly and justly for each and every American.

Trump argues that far from disqualifying him, his career as an arch capitalist gives him a unique insight into the dreaded system. In fact, he implies, he is doing us a favour by getting involved when he could otherwise be making money and, unlike a typical politician, will be beholden to no one. Then he slyly equates betrayed workers with Sanders and, not for the first time, tries to woo the Vermont senator’s supporters. It has often been remarked that Trump and Sanders are two sides of the same coin: outsiders who agree the problem but with very different ideas about how to solve it. Trump must know that few Sanders supporters will actually defect, but why not try to unnerve some Democrats.

When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country. I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job properly done. In this race for the White House, I am the law and order candidate. The irresponsible rhetoric of our president, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and colour, has made America a more dangerous environment than frankly I have ever seen, or anybody in this room has ever watched or seen.

In the wake of recent shootings of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge, the mantras “Blue lives matter” and “All lives matter” have been a regular drumbeat during the convention, a calculated slight of the Black Lives Matter movement. Trump places himself squarely in that camp without repeating the phrase himself, although elsewhere in the speech he bemoans the plight of African Americans and Latinos in poverty. He also forays into the delicate territory of blaming Obama, America’s first black president, for deepening rather than healing racial divisions.

Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist target: LGBTQ community. No good, we’re going to stop it. As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of the hateful foreign ideology, believe me. I have to say as a Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said. Thank you.

Trump, from cosmopolitan, liberal New York, makes his play for the LGBT vote, even though his running mate Mike Pence has opposed gay marriage and LGBT groups are staunchly pro-Clinton. Nevertheless, Trump’s stand may well encourage gay Republicans after years in the wilderness and came after openly gay Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel addressed the convention. The cheering that Trump acknowledges suggests that the party realised it was on the wrong side of history. It also enhances the perception that its nominee is difficult to categorise and can scramble the race.

We must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying Isis and stamping out Islamic terror. This includes working with our greatest ally in the region, the state of Israel. Lastly, we must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place.

The Middle East is one of many issues on which Trump sounded confused and self-contradictory during the campaign, where he was no favourite of Jewish Republicans. Omitting mention of America’s alliance with and loyalty to Israel would be an unforced error by any presidential candidate. Then he goes on to modify his incendiary ban on Muslims, recasting it as “vetting mechanisms” for immigrants from countries compromised by terrorism – a slippery category that could include America itself.

We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities. I have been honoured to receive the endorsement of America’s Border Patrol agents, and will work directly with them to protect the integrity of our lawful immigration system.

The wall. Of course, it had to be there. It’s the one policy that springs to mind when you think of Donald Trump. It got huge cheers on the convention floor. It has the advantage of being simple and easy to grasp, an example of thinking big, how ever wrongheaded. There are many, even on the convention floor, who doubt how practical the wall actually is, especially the intention of getting to Mexico to pay for it. Illegal immigration is a tried and tested dog whistle for Trump voters, with legal immigrants among the most zealous on the issue.

The replacement for our beloved Justice Scalia will be a person of similar views, principles and judicial philosophies. This will be one of the most important issues decided by this election. My opponent wants to essentially abolish the second amendment. I, on the other hand, received the early and strong endorsement of the National Rifle Association and will protect the right of all Americans to keep their families safe.

A reminder of what is at stake. With the confirmation of Obama’s nominee on indefinite hold, Trump wants to appoint a jurist to replace the late Antonin Scalia who will tip the balance of the supreme court towards conservatives. Even more divisively, he accuses Clinton (with no evidence) of wanting to end Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms. The Democrat, meanwhile, has repeated appeared with victims of gun violence on the campaign trail. The issue splits along party lines and will be a defining one in November.

It’s because of him [my father] that I learned, from my youngest age, to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people. He was a guy most comfortable in the company of bricklayers and carpenters and electricians and I have a lot of that in me also. I love those people. Then there’s my mother, Mary. She was strong, but also warm and fair-minded. She was a truly great mother. She was also one of the most honest and charitable people that I have ever known, and a great, great judge of character. She could pick ‘em out from anywhere.

The personal bit. Every character needs a compelling narrative and a human face. The convention was treated to a video, narrated by Hollywood actor Jon Voight, telling his life story and why he will make America great again. Trump makes sure to mention bricklayers, carpenters and electricians to convey why a New York billionaire and part-time golfer should be regarded as a working-class hero. The reference to his mother is a sure fire way to soften his image. Like America, like Trump, she was great.

David Smith in Cleveland

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