Braced for uncertainty and hoping for unity, Republicans on Monday prepared to kick off their convention to crown Donald Trump as the nation reeled from another outburst of violence and dissident delegates angled for a last-ditch chance to deny the front-runner the nomination.
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SPEECH COPIED? Melania Trump, wife of Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, waves to the crowd after delivering a speech on the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.
Trump communications adviser Jason Miller told the Huff Post: ‘In writing her lovely speech, Melania’s team of writers took notes on her life’s inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking.
A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign declined to comment early Tuesday on Melania Trump’s claim that she has a university degree.
“We know the risk you’re taking out there tonight protecting us – black, white, Latino”, he said of American police.
She used the later half of her speech focussing on topics that were sometimes controversial for her husband.
A wide range of speakers, including a county sheriff, a decorated combat veteran and a former model, told stories of military service, urban crime and the dangers of illegal immigration.
“If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the guy”, Mrs Trump said.
An animated Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, won the prize for loudest audience response of the night as he painted a bleak picture of a fearful United States and angrily defended police from accusations of racial discrimination against the black community.
In an unconventional move, Trump himself appeared on the first day of the convention and made very brief introductory remarks for his spouse.
Daughter Ivanka Trump will introduce her father on Thursday, the convention’s final day. But numerous party’s past and future stars are glaringly missing from the lineup, underscoring the concerns GOP leaders have with closely aligning themselves with Trump. The businessman has cast aside decades of Republican orthodoxy in his unexpected political rise, creating a crisis within the GOP about its future. But it was clear afterward that the process, in which delegates shut down an attempt to force a roll-call vote on rule changes, left many delegates fuming.
Win or lose, Trump is likely to herald a major discontinuity in America’s political evolution.
“I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son”, Smith said, adding that she couldn’t get anyone at the State Department to answer questions about her son’s death because she wasn’t “immediate family”.
The Trump for President campaign should be using this week to unite Republicans behind its flawed candidate by urging reluctant conservatives to defeat Hillary Clinton. But Ohio Governor John Kasich, a one-time rival to Trump, said he was powerless to act despite heightened security concerns with the killing on Sunday of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
But the charge that President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are unable, or unwilling, to confront Islamic terror may have begun to pay some dividend to Trump as the recent attacks – Orlando, Florida and Nice in France – generate deep public anxieties in the US.
“And now Hillary Clinton is promising more of the same – open borders, executive amnesty, and the surge of Syrian refugees”, he said. “Her judgment and character are not suited to be sitting in the most powerful office in the world”, said Iowa Senator Joni Ernst. Convention speakers relentlessly painted her as entrenched in a system that fails to keep Americans safe.
Trump has been vague about how he would put the nation on a different course, offering virtually no details of his policy prescriptions despite repeated vows to be tough.
The three-day convention began on Monday night in Cleveland, Ohio, with some 5,000 delegates representing the country’s 50 states, the District of Colombia and five U.S. territories. Campaign manager Paul Manafort called Kasich “petulant” and said the governor was “embarrassing” his party in his home state.
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Even some of those participating in the convention seemed to be avoiding their party’s nominee.
