Episode 729: Republican National Convention – Night 2

Published Jul 17, 2024, 9:03 PM

Newt reports on the second night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Hi, this is news and I'm reporting on the second night at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Let me start by saying, Callista and I will be giving a talk tonight, and we're both very excited about the opportunity. She will be talking about religious liberty and freedom, and I'll be talking about foreign policy and national security. The second day was interesting, of course, people were still buzzing about what Trump seemed to be like when he came in Monday night. He was more subdued, a sense that he had, in some ways I think, been deeply affected by the shooting. He was a little bit more of a states He enjoyed himself. I talked to speaker Mike Johnson, who had been sitting with him for most of the evening, and he said it was really remarkable and that he had the sense that Trump felt that there was a providential thing that the bullet missed, killing him by literally a fraction of an inn had a chance to talk with Ton Jr. He was deeply affected. He'd actually was out fishing with his daughter and somebody called and said, your father's been shot, And they didn't know anything more than that, so they didn't if his dad was dead or what until he got to Shore and they, he said, took about ninety minutes to finally get through to him on the phone. That was still the big impact on Tuesday morning was the sense of Trump having survived, in the sense of excitement that he had come to the convention floor with JD. Vance, who, of course was the second big story with picking Vance was strategically a very big decision, and it was a decision not to go to the traditional old guard but instead to really create a new future for the party. Vance's thirty nine, the same age as Richard Nixon was when President Eisner picked him to be vice president, and Nixon of course played a major role in American politics for over twenty years after that. So you may be looking at a big factor in the future of the Republican Party with the picking events. And that I think was also a signal from Trump that he intends to be very explicitly Trump, he's not interested in compromising with the old order. He's not interested in appeasing people who don't agree on make America great, Ganner, who don't agree about putting America first. Frankly, he totally owns the convention I've never seen the depth of commitment that exists for President Trump at the present time. It's really pretty remarkable. There were a couple of things that were really interesting about programming on Tuesday. One, of course, which has been widely seen. Micky Haley, who had said at one time she wouldn't even vote for him, ended up giving a good speech and endorsing him and clearly committed to taking on Biden. Governor DeSantis was there again, somebody who at one point was pretty estranged and pretty bruised, but kim backing was very positive at that level. It was interesting to watch the parade of people who had run against Trump at one point or another, Ted Cruz, who'd run against him in twenty sixteen, for example, Vi Vaked Bramswami. I mean, it was really sort of a gathering of the folks that Trump had defeated and the fealty to the new leader, and a sign of how much he dominated the party. The second big thing was the extraordinary emotional impact of everyday folks who came and talked at the convention. When you hear a mother talk about her son having risked his life for America in Iraq and then being killed in New York and his murderer not being tried because of the district Attorney Alvin Bragg, who of course is the district attorneys going after Trump. The emotion, the power of the sense of anger was really compelling, and I think there were several witnesses to that, particularly people who whose children had been killed by illegal immigrants, that I think the audience found very powerful, very different than traditional conventions. Somebody pointed out this morning that there were probably more African Americans speaking at the convention yesterday than had spoken in the last three Republican conventions. So there's a real effort here at outreach to the Latino and the black communities all over it along the lines in terms of ideas that are totally compatible with Trump and with the concept of MAGA. But nonetheless it's a much broader Republican party. It's a Republican party, for example, which has an African American candidate for governor in North Carolina who has a very good chance of winning. You just looked around, you saw, wow, this is certainly not the party that I first became active in back in nineteen sixty in Palmbus, Georgia. That had changed very dramatically. The other big thing I thought was is what a great job Lara Trump did. She is a remarkable person. Her speech was tremendously effective at every level. It was effective personally as she talked about her father in law and the grandfather to her children. It was effective. She talked about the impact of Saturday shooting on the family and explaining things to kids. It was effective as she talked about what had gone wrong in America and what President Trump would do to fix it. Kliston and I watched and were really struck with how attractive, how intelligent, how photogenic, and she really reacted well with the crowd. You know, when you're standing up there and you're largely reading from a teleprompter, which virtually everybody does, and you've got several thousand people, you've got to really have a good message and a good delivery, or you'll lose the audience and they'll start talking to themselves. And she managed, I think for I don't know how long she was up, it looked like fifteen or twenty minutes. She managed to be just very effective at reaching out to people, getting the entire audience to pay attention. It was also interesting to watch in a number of these cases, because we had President Trump sitting in the presidential box with JD. Vanson with some friends, and he was clearly paying attention. They would cut Dahn occasionally and you'd see that somebody'd made a really good point. He'd be nodding yes. When the appropriate times were there, he'd jump up and applaud. So he was really into listening to the people who had come to talk to America. Now I had a very good chance person. I ran into Speaker Johnson and his wife, and we had a very good conversation about what's going on, about what needs to be done. I really very much am impressed with how much he knows. We talked a little bit about the concept of Trump having had a providential experience on Saturday. You can't really explain that he turned his head at just the right moment to be hit in the air rather than hitting the brain. As we were discussing it, Johnson just pulled up that famous story of George Washington, who Johnson pointed out was ambushed with General Braddock about forty five miles from Butler, Pennsylvania. Washington on that particular occasion had two horses shot out from under him and four bullet holes and his coat and felt that I wrote to his brother two days later and said that this was a providential moment. He clearly thought he should have been killed. And so this whole sense that there are moments when you sense God's hand changing what could otherwise have happened. But I thought it was interesting that Speaker Johnson could just pluck that out and knew all the details headed down pat He's a very bright guy, and that was a fun part of the whole experience. One of the other things I should say is that this is like a giant family reunion. Kriston and I kept running into people who he campaigned with, had been involved in our two thousand and twelve presidential campaign, people that had known us back on Capitol Hill. You really renew an amazing number of acquaintances in a very short time because they're all in this one building and the only thing they're doing is walking around talking to each other. So it begins to be a really nice time to get caught up again and to have a sense of what's going on. I think that the most recent polls, I don't know how valid they are, and I don't know whether it's just a temporary jump after the assassination attempt, or whether it's a real breakthrough. But I know there was one set of polls today in which in every single key state Trump has now had So there's Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, and every one of those states he's now ahead, but in some cases by a pretty significant margin. Now that's again all going to continue to evolve, and historically each party gets a little bit of a bounce in the polls coming out of their convention, so you have to also factor that in. You've had huge amounts of television coverage, and of course with the assassination attempt on Saturday and Trump's courageous response to it, He's had an unusual level of attention and that will and doudly have some effect. I should say, by the way, from what I'm seeing, I think that it's very likely that Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee and he controls the machinery. And what this has done, in part is it's taken away the time and the opportunity for the Democrats who really want to get rid of him to build momentum because they're sort of smothered by the news coverage about the assassination attempt and the coverage about President Trump and the Republicans having a convention. The last thing want mentioned is we had a very very interesting America First Policy Institute meeting yesterday morning. Somebody said, you know, we really need something like the kind with America, and I pointed out that the platform, which I urge all of you to read. The Platform is the shortest platform in modern history. It dropped from about thirty seven thousand words in twenty sixteen to about forty six hundred words now, so dramatically smaller, very clear, written to be understood by everybody, and personally edited by Donald Trump. I mean he went through that platform line by line, changed things, had them rewrite things, and so. And I've been told by John McLaughlin, who does polling for both Trump and he does polling for America's New Majority Project, which we run, and McLaughlin says, you can take that platform, lay it right next to our polling data, and virtually everything in the platform is sixty percent plus approval by the American people. I think this is a very important document, and I'm going to do everything I can to get them to send it out nationwide and get people to truly understand this is a roadmap for the future. It is what Donald Trump intends to do. It is his personal document, he personally edited it. And don't remember any time in modern times you've had this level of intense commitment by a president to a platform. So I recommend to all of you to build to the Republican National Committee website, get a copy of the platform and take a look at it. And I hope you'll both watch Glissa and I speak this evening. Callista is the former Ambassador of the Vatican and she will be discussing religious liberty starting at seven twenty four Eastern time six twenty four Central time, and then I'll be speaking right after her. So please tune in, listen to the speeches, and enjoy the convention.

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