POLITICO NIGHTLY: Trump's rhetorical evolution

 

BY MICHAEL KRUSE AND RENUKA RAYASAM With help from Myah Ward TRUMP’S BIG NIGHT — The last night of the RNC concludes with President Donald Trump’s acceptance speech. For video and analysis, head to POLITICO’s RNC hub: politico.com/rnc. Pregame starts at 8:00 p.m. ET with a live episode of Four Square. ENEMY WITHIN — For more than five years now, since he came down that escalator, Trump has pitched himself as a singular protector who stands against an array of ever-present enemies and threats. That’s never changed. But here’s what has: the enemies and threats. Trump’s focus in his most important speeches — his campaign announcement at Trump Tower in June 2015, his acceptance at the last RNC in July 2016, his inaugural address in January 2017, and the Mount Rushmore speech this past July 4 — has shifted over time. In the beginning he directed our fear toward attackers from foreign lands. Now it’s dissenters on the streets of domestic cities. Us versus them has become us versus us. In his announcement, he put forth what had been a remarkably long-held worldview: that the United States wasn’t winning, that the nation was getting “ripped off” and laughed at. The foes were clear. ISIS. China. Japan. Mexico. South America. The Middle East. “We have no protection,” he said. A little more than a year later, at the convention in Cleveland, he said this: “The most basic duty of government is to defend its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.” And “the growing threats,” he said, were “from outside America” — the “hateful foreign ideology” of terrorism, “the barbarians of ISIS,” “nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records.” Trump’s inaugural is remembered for a single phrase — “American carnage” — but when I reread it today, that’s not what stuck out. Trump mentioned “Radical Islamic Terrorism,” but it was nowhere close to the crux, practically a passing mention. Instead: “Washington flourished,” he said. “Politicians prospered,” he said. “The establishment protected itself,” he said. “Their victories have not been your victories,” he said, sketching in his remarks redrawn dividing lines. And earlier this summer, a month-plus after the killing of George Floyd, Trump stood in front of Mount Rushmore. The enemies now, he said, were “angry mobs,” “bad, evil people,” in urban areas “run by liberal Democrats,” committed in his telling to “wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.” He said, “They think the American people are weak.” He said, “They want to silence us, but we will not be silenced.” He said, “Their goal is not a better America; their goal is the end of America.” Now comes tonight’s renomination speech. POLITICO reporter Alex Isenstadt scooped some snippets of the speech. Trump is slated to excoriate Biden. “He is running now as an empty shell of a candidate, a Trojan horse of a candidate,” Trump spokesman Tim Murtaugh said shortly afterward on a call with reporters, one who “is being filled with the agenda of the radical leftists who are now in charge of the Democrat party.” The imagery of the empty-bellied war horse makes plain the evolution of Trump’s pitch. The enemy is no longer out there but within. “The enemies were external in 2016. It was the scary Mexican, the illegal immigrant, who are going to murder you, the Muslim refugees,” said Jen Mercieca, a Texas A&M professor and the author of a book about Trump’s rhetoric. “And now he’s really turned it so that the enemy is inside us.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. How to smize — from models to mask wearers. (h/t Nightly editor Chris Suellentrop) Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.   POLITICO'S "FUTURE PULSE" - THE COLLISION OF HEALTH CARE AND TECHNOLOGY : As the school year begins, campuses will be laboratories for the future of mental health care and contact tracing in the era of Covid-19. Can technology help ease students' anxiety? The health care system that emerges from this crisis will be fundamentally different, and technology will play a significant role in shaping it. Future Pulse spotlights the politics, policies and technologies driving long-term change on the most personal issue for voters: Their health. SUBSCRIBE NOW.     FIRST IN NIGHTLY MESSAGE: WE DID IT — The pandemic is all but vanquished. That’s the overarching health care message that has come out of the Republican convention, a message so strong that it has squeezed out all other traditional GOP health policies, with the exception of their opposition to abortion. Republicans aren’t even talking about repealing Obamacare, although that vow has helped define what it means to be a Republican for more than a decade. With Trump down in the polls, Republicans are betting their political survival on convincing Americans that the country has turned the corner on the coronavirus, and that Trump is the one leader who can deliver a vaccine in record-smashing time, health care reporters Rachel Roubein, Susannah Luthi and Alice Miranda Ollstein write. Republican strategists think the images they presented at their convention, including people gathering together without masks, is a winning contrast with the Democrats convention last week, with its Zoom shots of solitary people in their living rooms and diligent mask wearing, from Joe and Jill Biden on down. Of course the pandemic isn’t over. Covid-19 has killed more than 180,000 people in the U.S. and could, according to top disease modelers, kill 300,000 by December. The per capita death and infection rates are among the highest in the world. Whether Republicans convince voters that Trump has led them through the worst of Covid-19 and on to better days depends in part on how the unpredictable virus behaves between now and the election — especially because public health experts argue that the Trump administration’s failure to offer a coherent national response has helped the disease spread widely and led to whack-a-mole state and city shutdowns that have crippled small businesses and knee-capped local economies. NIGHTLY NUMBER $750 million The cost of the deal Trump plans to announce at the RNC with Abbott Laboratories for 150 million coronavirus tests that cost $5 and can produce results in 15 minutes. Sources tell health care reporter Dan Diamond the tests are slated to be deployed to nursing homes, schools and other areas with high-risk populations. A man pours out an alcohol beverage on a site where a demonstrator was killed in Kenosha, Wis. | Getty Images AROUND THE NATION LAURA'S WAKE — Hurricane Laura was one of the first big tests of how states should manage a natural disaster during a pandemic, Nightly's Myah Ward writes. Louisiana and Texas barely passed, said Tom Kolditz, director of Rice University’s leadership development program. Governors in the two states, which were in the storm's path, reduced capacity on buses, running them more frequently, and booked hotel rooms to keep evacuees from crowding into shelters. They also made masks and sanitizer freely available. But still they waited too long to warn residents and take precautions. In Texas, at least, that resulted in crowded grocery stores and hardware stores — creating the perfect set-up for super spreader events, said Kolditz, who led Rice’s volunteer effort after Hurricane Harvey. And Louisiana’s Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards shut down testing sites because of the storm. “We’re basically going to be blind for this week,” he said. A Covid spike is expected after major weather events. But that doesn’t mean, Kolditz said, that state leaders should take shortcuts with the long-term crisis while dealing with the more immediate one. “The response to the hurricane tends to concentrate people, and I also think there’s a tendency for people to feel like, ‘Well, I’ve got this other emergency so I can’t worry about the first one,’” Kolditz said. “And that’s bad business.” For the cleanup and rescue workers who are responding to Laura’s aftermath, states need to ensure there is enough testing, masks and necessary documentation to maintain effective contact tracing post-hurricane. “All of the things that work ordinarily are just even more important.” ASK THE AUDIENCE Nightly asks you: What is your favorite memory from previous editions of the RNC or DNC? Send us your response on our form and we'll include select responses in Friday's edition. COVID-2020 ‘PAIN, HURT AND DESTRUCTION’ — Kamala Harris today issued a sharp rebuke of Trump, hammering the president for a sluggish response to the coronavirus pandemic and spiraling racial unrest — and what she said was a lack of meaningful attention paid to both at the Republican National Convention, Caitlin Oprysko and Christopher Cadelago write. The Democratic vice presidential nominee began her speech by addressing the “pain, hurt and destruction” caused by wildfires raging in California and Colorado and Hurricane Laura in the Gulf of Mexico, and also by this week’s police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., which has prompted at-times-violent protests. Harris spoke emotionally about Blake, who she emphasized was “shot seven times in the back in broad daylight in front of his three young sons.” She expressed support for peaceful protesters and the Blake family, calling their experience “tragically common in our country.” Hours earlier, Trump refused to tell reporters whether he had seen the video of Blake’s shooting. Harris called the video of the episode “sickening.” PARTING WORDS TSAR SEARCH — The Republican convention has been laced with moments that are not traditional for a convention: Trump using the presidency itself, in real time, to bestow favors on ordinary people. He swooped in on a naturalization ceremony in which five people were sworn in as U.S. citizens. And he granted a full pardon to a reformed bank robber. The moments were scripted to be humanizing: Trump with normal people, offering a sense of concern and connection with American citizens. The criticism of them has mostly been framed around the public use of the office for partisan purposes, a move unfamiliar, and previously off-limits, for this type of event. For those who study authoritarian regimes and how they use the media, however, they looked very familiar — and more worrisome, Georgetown professor Kathleen Smith writes for POLITICO Magazine. They are part of a pattern that also includes the surfeit of Trump family members given prime speaking spots; a spate of sacred (or sacred-looking) spaces, and a truncated version of history. These are all visuals and gestures that come from the authoritarian toolkit. To put it bluntly, for those familiar with such images and gestures, the RNC convention has essentially presented Trump as a merciful tsar.   INTRODUCING POLITICO MINUTES: These unprecedented times demand an unconventional approach to political news coverage. POLITICO Minutes is a new, interactive content experience that delivers the top takeaways you need to know in an easy-to-digest, swipeable format straight to your inbox. Get a breakdown of what we've learned so far, why it matters and what to watch for going forward. Sign up for POLITICO Minutes, launching at the 2020 Conventions.     Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam   FOLLOW US

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