RNC’S FIRST CONVENTION NIGHT MISSED THE MARK

…Nicky Haley failed to sell the idea that the nation doesn’t have a racist problem

The GOP promised “lots of optimism”…it didn’t come close.

The Republican National Convention (RNC) began Monday, with hand-full of future leaders of the GOP speaking in favor of President Trump.

Below, are three areas that should be taken away from their first night.

First was their promise of lots of optimism, that issue was quickly abandoned

The GOP falsely claimed that this convention would be significantly more optimistic than the Democrat’s, last week.  After the first ½ hour, it became obvious that it was far from optimistic.

The RNC started the evening off with the following statement: “The big contrast you’ll see between the Democrats’ doom-and-gloom, Donald Trump-obsessed convention will be a convention focused on real people, their stories, how the policies of the Trump administration have lifted their lives, and then an aspirational vision toward the next four years”.

They got things rolling Monday by saying that, “ Nice guys like Joe Biden cared more about countries like Iran and China than the United States of America.”

Then a medical professional warned that some Democrats’ proposal for government-run health care would mean “we’d be lucky if we could even see any doctor.”   (To be clear, Joe Biden doesn’t support single-payer health care, as some Democrats do.)

The former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., offered a particularly bleak picture.  She was saying Democrats “want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear. They want to steal your liberty, your freedom.”

Then Trump Jr. said, “Biden also wants to bring in more illegal immigrants to take jobs from American citizens,” as if that were Biden’s goal. He added that Democrats are “attacking the very principles on which our nation was founded: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the rule of law.”

Even Trump Jr.’s more aspirational messages were repeatedly punctuated by warnings about what Democrats would do.

Cuban American immigrant Maximo Alvarez, in an impassioned speech, suggested Democrats and possibly even Biden are secretly putting the country on a path to communism…?

“I’m speaking to you today because I have seen people like this before. I’ve seen movements like these before,” Alvarez said, adding that things he heard from some Democrats “don’t sound radical to my ears; but they sound familiar. Fidel Castro was asked if he was a communist. He said he was a Roman Catholic.”

Some of the headliners were less about the “doom and gloom,” such as the former U.N. Ambassador, Nikki Haley and the fellow South Carolinian, Sen. Tim Scott (R). Their attacks were standard fare for conventions like this, but the thrust of the night was not as advertised about there being “lots of optimism.”

Next was their supposed focus of combating the allegations against them of racism

One of their focal points in the choice of speakers, and what some of them said, was their obvious recognition of the perception that Trump is a racist and that there is a racism problem, not only in the GOP, but all over the country.

The bluntest comments on this front came from former National Football League (NFL) running back Herschel Walker, who spoke of his decades-long close relationship with Donald Trump.

“It hurt my soul to hear the terrible names that people called Donald: The worst one is ‘racist,’ ” said Walker, who is very Black. “I take it as a personal insult that people would think I’ve had a 37-year friendship with a racist. People who think that don’t know what they’re talking about. Growing up in the Deep South, I’ve seen racism up close. I know what it is. And it isn’t Donald Trump.”

Walker was joined by other Black Trump supporters, including White House staffer Ja’Ron Smith, Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones (D), Maryland congressional candidate Kim Klacik (R) and Scott (R-S.C.).

Jones, who provocatively made the case that it was Democrats who were harming African Americans: “The Democratic Party does not want Black people to leave their mental plantation. We’ve been forced to be there for decades and generations.”

Of course, there were no examples of where the Democrats were doing what they were blaming them of doing.

Nicky Haley, the first, former Indian American female governor in the country, she took a broader pass at the issue, denouncing the idea of systemic racism.

“Here is one more important area where our president is right: He knows that political correctness and cancel culture are dangerous and just plain wrong,” Haley said. “In much of the Democratic Party, it’s now fashionable to say that America is racist. That is a lie. America is not a racist country.”

Haley notably took her stand that was against the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina State House after the 2015 mass shooting in Charleston.

Senator Scott spoke of the “evolution of the Southern heart,” suggesting it helped him win election.  Which means what exactly?

The reality is that the polls have shown that half of all Americans, or more, believe Trump is a racist.  Trump has suggested that America’s minority congresswomen should “go back” to their countries.  This is despite the fact that most of them having been born in the US.  The truth is that Trump said a judge of Mexican descent was being biased against him because he was Mexican.  In addition, the then-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) who had once called Trump, “the textbook definition of a racist.”  Ryan also recently retweeted a video that included a Ryan supporter pushing “White power.”  Ryan later deleted it, but he has declined to disavow it.

The third issue of the night was their re-writing the latest history of the coronavirus

The novel coronavirus is the issue Trump would rather not have looming over him. Polls show his approval rating on the pandemic being in the low to mid-30s.  This is as the death toll climbs and will probably go well over what Trump has stated would be the highest level of US deaths.

The convention began its prime hours Monday night by focusing on this unavoidable topic of the virus, and one major attempt to rewrite history.

The convention played a video featuring Democrats and others who, at one point or another early on, had downplayed the severity of the outbreak.

“From the very beginning, Democrats, the media and the World Health Organization (WHO) got coronavirus wrong,” the narrator actually said. “The World Health Organization said authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”  Which today, is totally incorrect.

The video then played the following clips:

• NBC News medical expert John Torres: “Overall, most people should not be terribly concerned about it.”
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.): “Everything’s fine here. We do want to say to people, come to Chinatown. Here we are. Come join us.”
• New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D): “We don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries.”
• New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D): “Go about your lives. Go about your business.”

The narrator then compared this with Trump’s supposed actions: “One leader took decisive action to save lives.”

What was left unsaid was that all of these comments downplaying the threat came very early, as Trump was doing precisely the same thing.  And Trump was doing it much more forcefully, and it was weeks before he would stop doing so. Some of the comments from the Democrats also left out their crucial context.

The W.H.O.’s comment was from Jan. 14, which was very early in the outbreak, and it allowed for the possibility that evidence of human-to-human transmission would arrive, as it quickly soon acknowledged. Torres’s comment was also from Jan. 24, the same date the US identified its second confirmed case.  And Torres had followed his statement up by saying, “You definitely want to pay attention,” which was left out.  Pelosi’s comment was from Feb. 24, and Cuomo’s and de Blasio’s were both from March 2.  Both before the country understood how bad it was going to get.

In fact, Trump continued to downplay the coronavirus threat for weeks after the latest of those video clips.  He was comparing it to the flu, saying on several occasions that it would just “go away, like a miracle” and even saying on March 15 that “it’s something that we have tremendous control over.”

Republicans point to Trump’s travel restrictions from China as evidence of his concrete action. But it was so late that it is more like “Closing the gate after the cows have escaped”.  But going down that road of the coronavirus is a slippery slope, especially for this president.

BTW: The Post's fact checkers have 20 pages of "less than honest" statements from the first night of the RNC's convention.

Copyright G. Ater 2020