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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