President Trump will take aim at Joe Biden and paint a clear contrast between himself and the Democratic presidential nominee as he gives arguably the most important speech of his 2020 reelection campaign.
Delivering his GOP renomination acceptance speech live from the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday night as he closes out this week’s Republican National Convention, the president will emphasize that “at no time before have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies, or two agendas.” This, as he makes his case to Americans why he deserves another four years steering the nation.
BIDEN CHARGES TRUMP ‘ROOTING FOR MORE VIOLENCE, NOT LESS’
But Trump is also looking to use his speech and the entire four-day confab to shake up a contest that has seen him consistently trail the former vice president in national public opinion polling and, more importantly, in surveys in the key general election battle ground states. The president is aiming for a reset in a race where his job combating the worst pandemic to strike the nation and the world in a century – and an economy severely deflated by the coronavirus – are top on the minds of voters.
The president will likely use his address to once again paint Biden as a candidate who will be subservient to the extreme left of the Democratic Party and warn of a chaotic future for Americans if Biden wins November’s general election.
“At the Democrat convention, you barely heard a word about their agenda. But that’s not because they don’t have one. It’s because their agenda is the most extreme set of proposals ever put forward by a major party nominee,” Trump will say, according to excerpts released in advance by the president’s reelection campaign.
Trump will continue to paint a portrait of the former vice president as a failed career politician, saying “we have spent the last four years reversing the damage Joe Biden inflicted over the last 47 years.”
Democrats, pointing to a convention devoid of any GOP leaders past or present who are not Trump supporters and spotlighting the endorsement of Biden by many former GOP leaders, are arguing the Republican Party lacks unity. But the president will push back in his address, saying that “the Republican Party goes forward united, determined, and ready to welcome millions of Democrats, independents, and anyone who believes in the greatness of America and the righteous heart of the American people.”
Hours before the president’s address, Biden took aim at the incumbent. Amid reignited nationwide unrest over racial inequalities following the police shooting last weekend of a Black man in Wisconsin, Biden charged in interviews on two of the three major national cable news networks that Trump is “rooting for more violence, not less” and that the president “just keeps pouring fuel on the fire.”
The former vice president also accused Trump of viewing the protests as “a political benefit to him.”
BIDEN, HARRIS, TARGET TRUMP OVER CORONAVIRUS AHEAD OF PRESIDENT’S CONVENTION ADDRESS
While Biden was making the cable news rounds, his running mate was also delivering a prebuttal to the president’s address. In a speech in the nation’s capital, Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris charged that Trump “failed miserably” in steering the federal response against the coronavirus. And she claimed that “Donald Trump froze – he was scared” as the pandemic swept the nation earlier this year.
In his renomination acceptance address on Wednesday night, Vice President Mike Pence – who’s led the White House coronavirus task force – touted Trump’s efforts as “the greatest national mobilization since World War II…. We built hospitals, we surged military medical personnel and enacted an economic rescue package that saved 50 million American jobs.”
Pushing back, Harris on Thursday pointed to a national death toll from COVID-19 that’s topped 188,000 people and claimed that the GOP convention was “completely absent” from reality.
This week’s Republican confab has very much been a family affair, and Thursday night will be no different.
Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka Trump – who serves as a White House adviser to her father – will give an address in which she will describe Trump as “the people’s president.”
“President Trump is advancing the American values of work and family,” the president’s daughter will say. “Four years ago, I told you my father would focus on making childcare affordable and accessible. As part of Republican tax cuts, in 2019 alone our child tax credit put over $2,000 dollars into the pockets of 40 million American families.”
The top two Republicans in Congress – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy – will also speak on the final night of the GOP’s quadrennial gathering. So will Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, one of the president’s top supporters in the Senate and one of a number of GOP lawmakers who’ve addressed the convention that may have national aspirations in 2024. A Trump rival from the 2016 Republican primaries – Health and Human Services Secretary Ben Carson – will also speak.
Among the others given speaking slots are former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who serves as one of Trump’s lawyers and a sometime cable news surrogate for the president, evangelist Franklin Graham, and Alice Johnson, a former inmate whose prison sentence was commuted by Trump.
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