The Trump campaign finds itself in an unexpected financial crunch heading into the election’s homestretch: substantially behind Joe Biden in the cash it has on hand despite years of advanced preparation. If the president is looking to cast blame, however, the receipts suggest that it starts with himself. During the month of August, the Trump campaign spent nearly half-a-million dollars on fireworks, almost certainly for the display that was put on over the south lawn of the White House during the Republican convention. That display was indisputably ostentatious—a seemingly never ending stream of lights that culminated in the words “Trump” and […]
Republican National Convention
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Dan Forest stood on stage presiding in front of the crowd that had come to see Donald Trump in North Carolina Tuesday, a potential public health nightmare of not enough masks and too many people, and declared: “This looks like freedom.” But before he could even start rattling off all the things he’d do as governor to people who weren’t there to hear him speak, the state’s Republican lieutenant governor chose to indulge once again in a baseless, strange, and shocking idea about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s future. “We all know that Sleepy Joe’s not gonna make it. Not very long […]
On Sunday night, John Oliver dedicated all of his HBO show Last Week Tonight to two stories: the Republican National Convention and the events in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The portion of the chaotic, low-rated RNC that Oliver seemed to take particular issue with was the testimony of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a couple who were there purely because they pulled guns on non-threatening, unarmed Black Lives Matter protesters for walking by their home in St. Louis, Missouri, on the way to protest outside a different home. “They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single-family home zoning. This forced rezoning would […]
Earlier this week, The Daily Beast reported that President Trump had one thing on his mind heading into his Republican National Convention. The president was telling his closest aides that he was determined to beat his rival Joe Biden in the TV ratings. He was requesting daily ratings for the Democratic National Convention and insisted that his RNC spectacle would demolish their “pathetic” numbers, according to a senior administration official. In the end, apparently not even all of the unethical pomp and circumstance of a Trump-branded White House as the backdrop of his big speech Thursday night could draw more viewers […]
The 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC) ended on Thursday night with Donald Trump delivering his acceptance speech. American observers have discussed the competitive advantages and flaws of the DNC and RNC shows weighing up the GOP’s chances of attracting unaffiliated voters. “The Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, goes forward united, determined, and ready to welcome millions of Democrats, Independents, and anyone who believes in the greatness of America and the righteous heart of the American people”, the US president underscored on Thursday, arguing that his opponent, Democratic nominee Joe Biden “is not the saviour of America’s soul” but “the […]
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) claims that his life was saved by police Thursday night when he says he was “attacked by an angry mob” of protesters when leaving the White House after President Donald Trump’s big Republican National Convention speech. Videos of the confrontation appear to show that the senator was heckled, but not actually touched by protesters. Paul tweeted early Friday: “Just got attacked by an angry mob of over 100, one block away from the White House. Thank you to DC Police Dept for literally saving our lives from a crazed mob.” Videos show protesters surrounding the Republican and […]
“I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve got chills, I’ve got nausea,” Stephen Colbert told viewers at the top of his last live show of the week Thursday night. “It’s either the onset of COVID or seeing 1,500 people with no social distancing, no masks or testing packed on to the South Lawn of the White House. I know Republicans like voter suppression, I didn’t know they kicked it up to voter extinction.” While The Late Show host admitted that he skipped the third night of the Republican National Convention out of disgust for the GOP’s constant lies, he did […]
What can definitively be said about the Republican National Convention’s weaponizing of Blackness and poverty to spout predictable American mythology? Trump and his cronies say again and again that he has “done the most for black people.” In fact, every U.S. government has failed and brutalized Black Americans and countless racialized people in the country and outside of it. The most significant positive change to Black life has been made through grassroots activism. Not even Lincoln himself is responsible for the movement that would eventually lead to the eradication of slavery, yet U.S. politicians would have you believe otherwise. Historically, both […]
Four years ago, Rudy Giuliani took to the stage at the Republican National Convention to deliver a shouty monologue about how his friend Donald Trump would usher in a new era of law and order and end the racial strife prompted by police killings of Black men. Four years later, Giuliani is back at the RNC. He’s still shouty. And this time he’s monologuing about how an unprecedented wave of protests, civil strife, and outrage over yet another new round of police shootings is why we need to re-elect Trump. Claiming that “my city is in shock” over a rise in […]
Little Skylar Herbert was so precociously bright and engaging that her kindergarten teacher predicted she would become the first Black female president of the United States. But Skylar was only 5 when she instead became the first child in Michigan to die from COVID-19. This daughter of a police officer and a firefighter is now a heartbreaking marker of history as it is being made in these dire times. So, it is only understandable that Detroit Police Officer LaVondria Herbert would have some interest in the part of the saga being played out as the Republican National Convention sought to cast […]
Socialism—it’s a convention tradition for the GOP. References to the economic philosophy of government ownership were only slightly outnumbered by the words “the” and “Trump” on the first night of the remote-access GOP summit on Monday. Ex-United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley warned of the nefarious influence “the socialist left” would have on former Vice President Joseph Biden’s prospective administration, while Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) imagined the Democratic nominee and his understudy Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) would look to implement a “socialist utopia.” The first son’s significant other, Kimberly Guilfoyle, inveighed against a “socialist Biden-Harris future,” while Florida businessman Maximo Alvarez warned […]
Stephen Colbert opened his show Wednesday night with a confession. “Now, full disclosure: I did not watch much of the convention tonight. And fullest disclosure: I did not watch any of it,” the Late Show host said. “Because right now in America, we’re facing a global pandemic that has killed 180,000 Americans, heavily armed Rambo wannabes are murdering people in our streets, the strongest hurricane in the history of the Gulf Coast is making landfall as I speak, and the RNC’s message is: Who’s up for four more years?” “I know by not watching the RNC I didn’t do my job […]
On Wednesday night, as police described a 17-year-old out-of-state militant who shot and killed two protesters as “involved in the use of firearms to resolve whatever conflict was in place,” as a preventable pandemic’s death toll inched toward 200,000 Americans, as California burned and as a category 4 hurricane barreled toward the US, I thought about optimism. Wednesday’s was the third night of what GOP officials and sycophants promised would be an optimistic response to the “doom and gloom” of last week’s Democratic convention. But things are pretty widely acknowledged to be bad, no matter how many wrinkled flags are displayed […]
Bette Midler evidently was not a fan of Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention Tuesday night. As the First Lady took the stage and delivered a speech CNN pundits would later praise for its empathy, the entertainment legend mocked her for being an “illegal alien” who “can’t speak English”—insults she later said Trump has more than earned, given the racism both she and the president have openly embraced. “I’m surprised Trump wants to destroy the #PostOffice,” Midler wrote as she live-tweeted the convention. “He got all his wives from it.” Another barb: “Melania lacks warmth so severely that I […]
On Monday night, The Late Show’s Melania Trump—played brilliantly as always by Laura Benanti—previewed her big RNC speech by offering up this endorsement of her husband: “If there is one thing that’s absolutely clear to me, it is this: Despite our many differences we must come together for four more years of Donald Trump.” When Stephen Colbert asked her if that was from her upcoming speech, she replied, “No, those are the terms of my renegotiated prenup. Just four more years! Just four more years!” The host closed out his live monologue Tuesday night with a look at the actual first […]
Immediately after Melania Trump’s largely humanizing and empathetic speech at Tuesday night’s Republican National Convention, the analysts and hosts at CNN were effusive with their praise for it, applauding the first lady for expressing sympathy for victims of the coronavirus pandemic and addressing racial unrest. “The first lady doing something that I don’t think that any other speaker has done in the two days of the Republican National Convention have done, addressing pointedly and movingly the No. 1 crisis issue facing the United States right now: the coronavirus pandemic,” anchor Wolf Blitzer said at the conclusion of Trump’s address. “As she […]
On the second night of its national convention, the Party of Trump resorted to reruns, hammering home the message he’s been pushing for four years: That the radical left—with help from Communist China and the Lamestream Media—is hellbent on destroying the traditional (white) American way of life, and the only person who can stop them is Trump. Among the invitees to take up the theme was Nicholas Sandmann, the Kentucky prep school student who became a darling of the right after he and his MAGA hat went viral following an incident with a Native American activist last year. Sandmann blasted the […]
Being Secretary of State is, as it turns out, is really just a side hustle for Mike Pompeo. He’s happy to have the gig if it helps advance his personal political ambitions, but should the burdens or restrictions associated with being America’s chief diplomat ever get in the way of those ambitions, time and time again, this heir to the legacy of Thomas Jefferson chooses himself or his political party over his country. He, like his boss, has turned his solipsism into his brand. As Donald Trump turned the White House, his pardon power and the oath of citizenship into campaign […]
You thought what happened on-screen during the first night of the Republican National Convention was crazy? It’s nothing compared to Trump behind the scenes. Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, joined Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast on this episode of The New Abnormal to share the eye-watering tales of what Trump is really like when the cameras are switched off. The national security official couldn’t get through a meeting “without him doing 20 tangents, becoming irascible, turning red in the face, demanding a diet Coke, spewing spit,” Taylor explained. “Literally out of goddamn nowhere, […]
On Night 1 of the 2020 Republican National Convention, acolyte after high-profile acolyte lined up to lavish praise on President Donald Trump for standing tall between the American people and a Marxist, politically correct hellscape. They just couldn’t seem to figure out why, exactly, he was so great. Trump was alternately touted as a true champion of the Black community—but also as the only person standing in the way of the death of the “suburbs” at the hands of “low-quality apartments” and radical Marxist mobs. He was cast as a visionary leader who has made and kept his promises of law […]
The Republican party has been headed down the wrong path on inclusion and diversity for decades and on Monday night, America saw the results as a lineup intended to highlight the party’s diversity instead exposed how little of it there is. The night opened with Charlie Kirk, the 26-year-old white founder of Turning Point USA and one of the most divisive, and angriest figures in America. As the night went on, the party trotted out regular, everyday citizens to spotlight its supposed diversity, but they lost me when they spotlighted the man and woman who pulled loaded weapons on peaceful Black […]
Stephen Colbert admittedly had some trouble making fun of the Democratic National Convention last week. Thankfully, the Republican National Convention delivered him the gifts of Kimberly Guilfoyle and Donald Trump Jr. Going live after the RNC Monday night, The Late Show host began with the speech shouted into the void by “Trump Jr. girlfriend and vengeful banshee who will haunt your dreams, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who screamed this message of hope.” “If you want to see the socialist Biden-Harris future for our country, just take a look at California!” Guilfoyle exclaimed in her unhinged address. “I’m trying to look at California, but […]
Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday evening warned his viewers that the rest of the media was going to deliberately refuse to air large swaths of this week’s Republican National Convention. And he did so while speaking over large swaths of the RNC that the rest of the media aired. During last week’s Democratic National Convention, Fox News notably aired only a portion of the events, devoting an hour each night to the DNC speeches while airing Hannity’s regularly scheduled primetime program. Apparently believing that the rest of the networks would do to the RNC what Fox News did to […]
President Donald Trump welcomed his formal re-nomination at the Republican National Convention much like he has greeted crowds across the country, press in the briefing room at the White House and workers on factory floors in the months after his rallies were shut down: with a lengthy, rambling, grievance-filled speech. Despite promising an “optimistic” event, Trump had no sooner taken to the podium, before he complained about mail in voting, an evidence free attack on the democratic method that he returned to several times over the course of the more than 50 minute address. “The only way they can take this […]
Donald Trump really wanted to go big for his re-nominating convention. Long before the coronavirus pandemic utterly destroyed his vision of a great American “revival” this summer—to be packed with his signature mega-rallies, economic renewal, and an extravagant 2020 Republican National Convention that would show up Joe Biden—the president was planning for yet another evening of being treated as a Republican rock-star while anointed the party standard-bearer. Going back to last year, Trump was getting personally involved in pitching ideas and soliciting pitches for the four-day convention’s garish moments and granular details, according to three people who’ve discussed RNC planning with […]
The GOP—including a Black Republican organization—plans to hold “a First Amendment demonstration” during convention week in the same park where law enforcement rousted Black Lives Matter protesters to clear the way for a President Donald Trump photo-op in June. The Daily Beast obtained a permit application that the Maryland GOP submitted Thursday afternoon for three gatherings of 10,000 people on National Parks Service property, which the state Republican Party said it would run in conjunction with the Maryland Black Republican Council. The trio of events, described in the paperwork as sign-waving celebrations of the First Amendment, would occur on Tuesday morning […]
Alice Johnson, the criminal justice reform advocate whose life sentence was commuted by President Donald Trump two years ago, has been booked by Team Trump to address the Republican National Convention next week, she confirmed to The Daily Beast. “I’ll be there talking about criminal justice reform, that is my main mission,” Johnson said in a brief phone call Tuesday afternoon. “I’m there because I’ve been affected by our criminal justice system, and that’s my mission.” Johnson was released from the Aliceville Federal Correctional Institution in 2018 after serving 21 years of a life sentence on federal cocaine trafficking charges. Trump […]
Shortly before the summer kicked off, Donald Trump was hopeful. The president, his campaign, and his top lieutenants in his administration were busy branding Trump the face of an upcoming American rebirth. He and his White House staff made a big push to position him as the frontman for economic revival, as summertime employment upticks seemed on the horizon and as experts and politicians kept their fingers crossed that the season’s heat would help spur a respite from the global pandemic. Trump and his 2020 team kept promising that they were doing everything they could to get him back on the […]
President Donald Trump on Thursday announced during a White House briefing that he was ordering the cancellation of the Republican National Convention in Jacksonville, Florida, saying that “it’s not the right time” in light of the massive coronavirus outbreak in the state. Trump said the RNC’s delegates would still meet in Charlotte, North Carolina, and that he would still hold a convention speech, albeit “in a different form.” The president cited his duty to “to protect the American people” from the coronavirus, for which he used the racist epithet “China virus,” as superseding his desire to hold a “top of the […]
Airtime cut in half. A Zoom-style backdrop the size of a tennis court. Celebratory car-honking. And most of it won’t even be in the host city. These are the Democratic National Committee’s current plans for the party’s convention in four weeks, according to a ten-page preview outline for the event obtained by The Daily Beast. The plans, marked for internal use only, feature digital renderings of convention attendees seated at distant tables and separated by see-through partitions, a “Convention Across America” speaking lineup that is both dramatically shorter in length and vastly more ambitious in scale, and a program that emphasizes […]
Last year, the Republican National Convention began cutting checks to a former producer of NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice who was accused of having, as one contestant put it, “all the dirt” on Donald Trump. From August 2019 through May 2020, the Committee on Arrangements for the 2020 Republican National Convention made a dozen payments totaling more than $66,000 to Labella Worldwide, Inc. for “production consulting services.” The firm is run by Chuck Labella, a former NBC executive and the talent producer who worked on Donald Trump’s famous reality show. Labella is not just a former Apprentice bigwig. According to actor Tom Arnold, […]
North Carolina Republicans are making a last ditch effort to try and win back the marquee event of the Republican National Convention even after President Donald Trump made it abundantly clear he’s moving on from the state. The attempt amounts to the legislative version of the boombox scene in the 1980’s romcom Say Anything – a grand gesture to keep Trump’s affections in their state. But just like the romance in the film, no one really thinks it’ll work out in the end. “As far as the convention goes, as much as we want it here, I really don’t think it’s […]