WASHINGTON (AP) — Facing a moment of national uncertainty, President Donald Trump accepted his party's renomination on a massive White House South Lawn stage Thursday night, at the conclusion of the scaled-back Republican National Convention.
Trump painted an optimistic vision of America’s future, including an eventual triumph over the coronavirus pandemic. But that brighter horizon can only be secured, Trump asserted, if he defeats Joe Biden, against whom he unleashed blistering attacks meant to erase the Democrat’s lead in the polls.
“We have spent the last four years reversing the damage Joe Biden inflicted over the last 47 years," Trump said. “At no time before have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies or two agendas."
Presenting himself as the last barrier protecting an American way of life under siege from radical forces, Trump declared the Democratic agenda as "the most extreme set of proposals ever put forward by a major party nominee.”
When Trump finished, a massive fireworks display went off by the Washington Monument, complete with explosions that spelled out “Trump 2020.”
His acceptance speech kicked off the final stretch of the campaign, a race now fully joined and, despite the pandemic, soon to begin crisscrossing the country. Trump’s pace of travel will pick up to a near daily pace while Biden, who has largely weathered the pandemic from this Delaware home, announced Thursday that he will soon resume campaign travel.
The president was introduced by his daughter Ivanka, an influential White House adviser, who portrayed the famously outspoken Trump as someone who empathizes with those who have suffered through the pandemic.
“I’ve been with my father and seen the pain in his eyes when he receives updates on the lives that have been stolen by this plague," she said.
Instead of letting Washington change him, she says Trump changed Washington, and she says the U.S. needs four more years of leadership from the “warrior” in the White House.
The president highlighted swing states he needs to win in November, framing them as states Democratic nominee Joe Biden has betrayed.
Castigating Biden as an enemy of the auto industry, Trump slammed Biden for supporting, among other trade deals, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was responsible for U.S. manufacturing jobs being sent to Mexico and overseas.
The president said that laid-off workers in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, among other states, “didn’t want Joe Biden’s hollow words of empathy, they wanted their jobs back."
Trump won Michigan and Pennsylvania, carried by Democrats for the previous six elections. Trump also carried Ohio in 2016, and would likely need to win it again to be reelected.
Running as both an insurgent as well as incumbent, Trump included calls for patriotic unity and steadfast defiance amid violence in mostly Democrat-run cities.
He repeatedly leaned hard on support for law and order, and several Republican condemned the lawlessness. Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney and New York City's former mayor, declared that Democrats' “silence was so deafening that it reveals an acceptance of this violence because they will accept anything they hope will defeat President Donald Trump."
Giuliani also took aim at the Black Lives Matter movement, suggesting that it, along with ANTIFA, was part of the extremist voices pushing Biden to “execute their pro-criminal, anti-police policies" and had “hijacked the protests into vicious, brutal riots."
Earlier Housing Secretary Ben Carson offered sympathies to the family of Jacob Blake, the Kenosha, Wisconsin, man whose shooting by police has sparked deadly violence.
Carson says his sympathies also extend to other families that have been affected by the “tragic events” in the Milwaukee suburb.
Trump, who has defended his handling of the pandemic, touted an expansion of rapid coronavirus testing. The White House announced Thursday that it had struck a $750 million deal to acquire 150 million tests from Abbott Laboratories to be deployed in nursing homes, schools and other areas with populations at high risk.
Trump’s soaring rhetoric squarely focused on Biden’s Democratic acceptance speech, saying this opponent “is not the savior of America’s soul,” and “if given the chance, he will be the destroyer of American greatness.” Further, Trump declared, Americans “don’t look to career politicians for salvation” but instead “put our faith in Almighty God.”
Most of the final day of the convention was aimed squarely at seniors and suburban women.
Among the more emotional moments: testimony from Alice Marie Johnson, who was granted clemency from her life sentence on nonviolent drug charges, and from Carl and Marsha Mueller, whose daughter Kayla was killed while being held in Syria by Islamic State militants during the Obama administration.
“Kayla should be here,” said Carl Mueller. “If Donald Trump was president when Kayla was captured, she would be here today.”