Basking in the glow of victory, Trump dismissed Cruz’s opposition in his remarks to volunteers and said he wouldn’t accept the Texan’s endorsement in any event. He arrived shortly after noon with his daughter to check out the set up. “You could listen to that speech and you could think, my goodness, he believes America is in decline”, the 68-year-old leader said.
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Trump’s speech was created to set the tone for the general election campaign against Clinton, an answer to Republicans who say the best way he can unify the divided party is to detail why the Democrat should not be elected on November 8. It sounded like it was going to happen, but it didn’t.
In no plane of reality does “vote your conscience” mean “vote for Hillary Clinton” but it was foreseeable that she’d coopt Cruz’s point – at least once the boos started raining down and it became the story of the convention. In response, they booed him as he left his stage. Ted Cruz rejected calls to endorse the GOP ticket. “The problem is, no one likes him, he is so unlikeable”.
That will shift the spotlight back to Clinton and give her a major platform to label Trump as divisive and unqualified for the job, he said. But some in the IL delegation were taken aback by the booing and the general negativity surrounding Cruz’s speech.
A particularly interesting moment was when Trump voiced his support for the LGBT community, and went off script to say he was happy to see the Republicans in the audience cheer for that. “Than all of the people who voted in the elections?” he said.
Yeah, so I know Ted Cruz said that people should vote their conscience. “Will I vote for Donald Trump?”.
As for Trump offering personal support to women in the workplace, the Boston Globe reports that Trump’s campaign has paid male staffers a third more than female staffers overall, whereas Hillary Clinton paid male and female staffers equally. The real-estate mogul formally accepted the Republican nomination for president the night before.
“In my father’s company, there are more female than male executives”, Trump said while introducing her father for his acceptance speech. A Trump campaign speechwriter took the blame for the use of passages from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech almost word-for-word on Wednesday, saying she had offered her resignation but the campaign refused it. On Wednesday, a member of the Illinois Delegation was stripped of her credentials and removed from the convention after publishing a racist Facebook post. It was a selfish, underhanded move completely typical of Cruz and his operation, some Texas delegates said. ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos naturally was curious how Trump planned to top Monday’s smoky rock-star entrance at the convention – or even Wednesday’s Trump Helicopter entrance (on Tuesday, he’d shown up as a large disembodied head on a screen, from Trump Tower, Wizard-of-Oz style).
And that wasn’t the only criticism he made of the presumptive Democratic nominee, whom he has dubbed “Crooked Hillary” throughout his campaign. “[And that] is why we need to support Donald Trump and Mike Pence to be the next president and vice president of the United States”.
The prevailing narrative at the Cleveland convention has not been about Trump’s positions, but dominated instead by the failure of he party’s various factions to unite behind Trump. He also says he would force US allies in Europe and Asia to pay more for the USA defense umbrella.
He tells The Associated Press that his “sense is that Mr. Trump was trying to place emphasis on the importance of all countries honoring their commitments”.
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Moreover, independents remain wary about Trump, experts said.
