The four-day Republican convention in Cleveland, which braced for violent protests, has passed off with only a handful of arrests.
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Donald Trump officially accepted the nomination for president at the Republican National Convention Thursday night, giving a speech that excited the crowd and bashed his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
As the crowd, fiercely opposed to Clinton, broke out in its oft-used refrain of “Lock her up”, he waved them off, and instead declared, “Let’s defeat her in November”.
Eric Trump moved quickly to the podium.
Laying out his case against Mrs Clinton, he denounced foreign policies that were put in place to some extent by George W Bush, without mentioning by name the Republican president who launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Show me the suburban women… the Hispanic voters… the African-American voters clamouring to join this campaign… Syria is engulfed in a civil war and a refugee crisis that now threatens the West. After 15 years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before”.
Also in the transcript, Trump sum up Hillary Clinton’s legacy as “death, destruction and weakness” and shares his plan to – as his campaign slogan promises – “make America great again”. Ted Cruz’s dramatic refusal to endorse the GOP nominee from the convention stage.
At today’s run-through, trump couldn’t resist taking a shot at Ted Cruz, the runner-up for the nomination who was booed off the stage last night.
“All right, that was pretty well-orchestrated”, he said.
Republican candidates had pledged during the primary contests to support the party’s eventual nominee.
Mr Trump’s handling of the episode gave a rare glimpse into the shrouded and deeply personal culture of his New York-based real estate conglomerate, the Trump Organisation, where three of his adult children serve as executives and many staff describe themselves as part of a family with a dominant patriarch.
Mr Trump has previously suggested that Mr Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of John F Kennedy and criticised the appearance of his wife, Heidi. “I’m not sure what statistics you’re talking about”, Manafort said, and then took a swipe at the Bureau over its decision not to seek charges against Clinton over her email server. After some verbiage about freedom and the Constitution, Cruz got to the heart of the matter: “I’m not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father”.
“They’re embracing him after that, and I think it’s important to say, ‘Not everyone’s along for the ride, ‘” Hayes said.
It was left to Trump’s pick for vice president, the socially conservative Indiana Governor Mike Pence, to try to overcome the Cruz debacle in delivering a speech introducing himself to voters. “I am proud to be gay, I am proud to be a Republican, but most of all I am proud to be an American”.
Mr Trump has meanwhile said that if he is elected president he might abandon a guarantee of protection to fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organisation countries.
In response to a question about potential Russian aggression towards the Baltic states, Trump told the newspaper in an interview that if Moscow attacked them, he would decide whether to come to their aid only after reviewing whether those nations “have fulfilled their obligations to us”. At a morning meeting with the Texas delegation, Ccruz explained why his broke his pledge to support Trump.
“It is finally time for a straightforward assessment of the state of our nation”, Trump said.
“It’s not enough to just say, ‘I know all these coal miners who are… gonna vote for Donald Trump”, said Katie Parker, a campaign veteran who founded the anti-Trump Super PAC Our Principles. “He can unify just by giving an endorsement and he didn’t do that for us tonight”.
The New York businessman, who has never held elective office, needs a strong performance to improve his chances of getting a boost in opinion polls as Democrats prepare for their own, more scripted convention next week in Philadelphia. In the end, he judged the GOP nominee as unpredictable but still a better choice than Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“Trump will get us to 90 percent unity”.
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Sources also said that Trump will not pivot away from the controversial themes that worry the GOP establishment but have powered his grass-roots insurgency.
