Takeaways From Day 3 of the Republican Convention

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By The New York Times

Published 2 months ago on

July 18, 2024

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida speaks on the second night of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wis., on Tuesday, July 16, 2024. After months of withering attacks from former President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke in support of him on Tuesday night. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times)

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MILWAUKEE — The penultimate night of the Republican National Convention belonged to the vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance.

Welcomed to the stage by his friend Donald Trump Jr. and introduced by his wife, Usha Vance, he was given nearly an hour to introduce himself to America and articulate his vision of blue-collar conservatism.

It was a relatively low-key address from the 39-year-old Ohio senator, who laid out his remarkable biography and economic vision without much passion. Viewers heard a diagnosis of America’s ills that often blamed policies that Republicans have embraced for decades, and many prescriptions that would break from the party’s orthodoxy.

Here are five highlights from Night 3:

Vance, Not Always Coherently, Pushed a Nationalist Vision.

Listeners might have been forgiven for thinking that President Joe Biden was the architect of economic and foreign policies dating to George H.W. Bush, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the opening of China to international trade and the war in Iraq.

But between partisan jabs and misplaced responsibility, Vance laid out an economic vision that in fact blamed his own party and its Wall Street and corporate patrons for the struggles of working Americans. He mentioned policies that might hearten blue-collar voters but would give Republican donors heartburn.

“Wall Street barons crashed the economy,” he said, then accused immigrants living in the country illegally of suppressing wages and saddling the economy with a housing crisis.

“We won’t cater to Wall Street,” he promised. “We’ll commit to the working man.”

“We won’t sacrifice our supply chains to unlimited global trade. We’ll stamp every product ‘Made in the USA,’” he said. “We will build factories again, put people to work making real products for American families, made with the hands of American workers.”

If those promises sound familiar, they actually echo Biden’s. And the Biden campaign was quick to note the resurgence of manufacturing that has come since the enactment of the president’s signature domestic laws, all of which included “made in America” provisions.

But with his dry delivery, Vance did show why former President Donald Trump tapped him as his running mate to articulate his own vision of nationalist isolationism.

Republicans Took the Gloves Off.

For the first two nights of the Republican convention, speakers tried imperfectly to show some restraint, holding back their rhetorical attacks on Biden amid calls for unity and appeals to broaden the pro-Trump coalition.

On Night 3, they let loose, and the tone turned, well, positively Trumpian. Placards proclaimed “Mass Deportation Now.” And Thomas D. Homan, who was Trump’s head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told immigrants without permanent legal status, “You better start packing — you’re damned right.”

It might have been impossible to restrain Donald Trump Jr., who deployed his signature bombast.

“All hell has broken out in America,” he told a crowd that lapped it up, “and it’s impossible to hide anymore.”

Peter Navarro, a former economic adviser in the Trump White House who was fresh from prison, where he had been sent for defying a congressional subpoena, spoke apocalyptically of the consequences for Trump supporters if they did not capture all branches of government in November.

“They stripped me of every possible defense and, just as they did to Donald J. Trump in New York, they threw me to the wolves of an anti-Trump jury,” he said, warning, “Make no mistake, they’re already coming for you.”

Military Families Questioned the Commander in Chief.

Portraying Biden as weak of spirit, soft on crime and lax on immigration has been a central mission of the GOP in the past three days, but on Wednesday night, the convention turned to harsh attacks on his military leadership.

Military veterans questioned the president’s command of the armed forces. Elected Republicans took up Trump’s line that Russia invaded Ukraine and Hamas attacked Israel only because Biden was feckless.

But the emotional punch came from the Gold Star families of the Marines killed in a tragic bombing during the evacuation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

In a heart-wrenching video, the families of the fallen Marines recounted the day they were informed their loved ones had died. They spoke of meeting Biden at the air base in Dover, Delaware, where repatriated military remains are returned; they said he had been distracted.

Then the families were invited onto the convention stage to make the matter personal, and to lay responsibility for their children’s deaths at the president’s feet.

“Joe Biden has refused to recognize their sacrifice,” one Gold Star mother, Christy Shamblin, told the convention.

Republicans Lined Up Behind Israel.

Hamas’ massacre in Israel and Israel’s retaliatory war in the Gaza Strip crashed into the convention in prime time on Wednesday, as the Republican Party tried to make Israel’s fight its own — and to further fracture the Democratic Party’s long-standing bond with American Jews.

A coterie of fresh-faced fraternity brothers from the University of North Carolina was invited onstage and celebrated for defending the American flag from pro-Palestinian protesters who had tried to take it down. An Orthodox Jewish student from Harvard, Shabbos Kestenbaum, castigated the Democratic Party he once supported as “ideologically poisoned” by “far-left antisemitic extremism.”

And Orna and Ronen Neutra, the parents of an American citizen still held by Hamas in Gaza, led the crowd in a chant of “bring them home,” after recounting how Trump had called them after their son was taken hostage.

It was a tricky two-step for a party whose nominee dined in 2022 with an outspoken antisemite, Nick Fuentes, and who has long perpetuated stereotypes about Jews himself.

But it underscored how the war in Gaza has badly strained a Democratic Party that is struggling to balance its ties with American Jewry and its support from American Muslims, even as Biden has staunchly backed Israel and its right to defend itself. The Republicans let it be known no such strains were afflicting their position. They were standing with Israel, regardless.

Democrats Revive Questions About Biden.

Biden has had the worst three weeks of his long political career, but Wednesday felt like salt in the wounds. First, Rep. Adam Schiff, the likely next senator from California, became perhaps the most prominent elected Democrat to publicly call for him to step aside.

Then, in yet another twist in the 2024 campaign, Biden came down with COVID, which forced him to cancel a campaign appearance in Nevada and retreat to his beach house in Delaware to self-isolate.

Also on Wednesday, it emerged that Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the two top Democrats in Congress, were said to have each told Biden privately over the past week that their members were deeply concerned about his chances and the party’s if he remained in the race.

The Democratic National Committee considered holding a “virtual” roll call of states as early as next week to officially make Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris its ticket for 2024. Loud protests from House Democrats not ready to see that happen forced the party to push it back.

And with the president leaving the campaign trail, his political future is once again in question.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Jonathan Weisman/Kenny Holston
c.2024 The New York Times Company