Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I’m Giovanni Russonello, typically the morning newsletter writer, covering the evening shift during the conventions. |
 | | Doug Mills/The New York Times |
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In his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Donald J. Trump stood before a bitterly fractured Republican Party and sought to unite it around a single touchstone: himself. He painted a dark picture of a country’s values (read: its white identity) under siege and a political establishment impervious to the needs of working-class people. |
“I alone can fix it,” he declared. |
Almost four years into his presidency, the party is no longer divided. About eight in 10 Republicans tend to tell pollsters that they approve of the job he’s doing, and close to all Republican voters say they’ll support him in November. |
Yes, he remains broadly unpopular with the country at large. His response to the coronavirus pandemic has drawn increasingly negative reviews — and his marks on handling issues around racial injustice were never positive in the first place. In head-to-head polls against Joe Biden, he’s trailing by a nearly double-digit average. |
Yet at this week’s convention, that old 2016 mantra is still in effect. It is Mr. Trump alone, apparently, who can fix things for himself and his party. |
He already gave one address today — surprising the Republican delegates gathered at the Charlotte convention center after they had voted to officially renominate him. He’ll speak again tonight during the nationally televised broadcast, and every night of the four-day convention. (Typically, candidates only give a single acceptance speech.) |
This morning, stepping to the podium to chants of “four more years,” Mr. Trump encouraged the crowd to go bigger than that: “If you want to really drive them crazy, you say, ‘Twelve more years,’” he said. A few audience members took him up on it. |
The G.O.P.’s singular adherence to Mr. Trump was also evident over the weekend when, in an extraordinary move, the party announced that it would not adopt a policy platform at this year’s convention. Instead, it wrote in a resolution that “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda,” even though Mr. Trump’s policies have often veered from Republican orthodoxy. |
After the announcement about the platform, William Kristol, a prominent Republican critic of the president, wrote on Twitter: “It’s no longer the Republican party. It’s a Trump cult.” The Biden campaign has been aggressively courting the votes of moderates put off by Mr. Trump, and it released a list today of 27 Republican former members of Congress who had rejected Mr. Trump and endorsed the former vice president. |
Throughout Mr. Trump’s term, Vice President Mike Pence has played the role of quiet liaison between the chief executive and the party establishment. In a speech accepting his own renomination today, Mr. Pence sought to ensure the party faithful that backing Mr. Trump was tantamount to supporting key G.O.P. policy positions. |
He rattled off core Republican issues that he said Mr. Trump stood for, including free-market economics, “secure borders” and opposition to abortion. “Four more years means more judges,” Mr. Pence said. “Four more years means more support for our troops and our cops. It’s going to take at least four more years to drain that swamp.” |
Who else is speaking tonight |
The convention’s official proceedings begin at 9 p.m. tonight. You can watch at nytimes.com, where our reporters will be online to offer live analysis. CNN, MSNBC and PBS will show the full two-hour broadcast, but the major broadcast TV networks will air only the event’s second half. Fox News may air some of the first hour, depending on how Sean Hannity handles his 9 p.m. show. |
Among the evening’s notable speakers are Nikki Hailey, Mr. Trump’s former United Nations ambassador, who is widely regarded as a possible 2024 candidate for president; Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the president’s key allies in Congress; and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate. |
Among the nonpoliticians slated to speak are Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a couple who became a cause célèbre on the right after they were filmed holding guns to threaten peaceful Black protesters outside their St. Louis home, and Andrew Pollack, the father of a girl who was killed in the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. |
- An ABC News/Ipsos poll is among the first surveys to take a read on the impact of the Democratic National Convention last week. The poll, released yesterday, found that Mr. Biden’s favorability rating had risen by five points, to 45 percent. That was driven in particular by Democrats; 86 percent of them expressed a positive opinion of him, up from 79 percent in Ipsos’s previous poll.
- Three in 10 Americans reported having watched at least some of the Democratic convention, according to the poll. Among independents who had watched at least a glimpse of it, two-thirds said they liked what they had heard.
- A Florida judge today struck down Gov. Ron DeSantis’s order requiring public schools to reopen for in-person classes.
- In his decision, Judge Charles W. Dodson of the Leon County Circuit Court wrote that the order, which threatened to withhold funding from school districts that did not give students the option of returning in person, violated the state Constitution because it “arbitrarily disregards safety.”
- The ruling was a win for the American Federation of Teachers, which, along with one of its affiliates, the Florida Education Association, had filed suit to stop the order.
- LeBron James’s recently formed collective of athlete-activists, which is fighting voter suppression, will launch a multimillion-dollar program to deploy poll workers to voting locations in Black communities across the country ahead of the November vote.
- The collective, More than a Vote, is working in collaboration with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. It plans to focus its efforts on Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida and Ohio, among other states.
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