Episode 731: Republican National Convention – Night 4

Published Jul 19, 2024, 6:38 PM

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

Well, this is nude, and I want to give you a final report on the convention week. Thursday night, of course, was the big night with President Trump accepting the nomination, but the whole week has been remarkably well orchestrated. You see the fine hand of the guy who did The Apprentice and who used to do them as Universe shows. And clearly President Trump wanted the whole convention to be interesting and fascinating. And I have to say any convention which includes Kid Rock and Haul Cogan is certainly not like a typical Republican convention. The very fact that he asked Dana White to come back as president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship to introduce him tells you again Donald Trump is his own guy. You had in the closing just before you get the President Trump, Franklin Graham, Eric Trump, and Dana White. It was a remarkable night. It was a very emotional night. Kris and I are sitting there watching as the Trump family gradually came together. It's a big families. When you see all of them at one time, you realize how big and how close the family is. It was terrific to have Malania come, and I think she was clearly a star hit just because she's so stunning in such a striking person, and she clearly made the president much happier. I have to say, the whole week has had an interesting feel to it. This is a much more populist, much more open program. You had lots of everyday people who were just deeply involved in telling their stories. I think, in many ways, still the most powerful emotional moment was the appearance of the gold Star families and the devastating emotional impact of their report about the degree to which they'd lost their sons and daughters and had President Biden basically ignore them. That may have been the most powerful single moment, except, of course, the moment when Donald Trump walked out on the stage. And the fact is everybody there was vividly aware that he was very close to death. That's the only way to put it. That he was faced with a moment that will change his life forever, and that he survived, and in fact, I didn't just survive, but he triumphed and came out of that experience with his fists in the air, yelling fight, fight, Fight, and then switching to USA. And it was really remarkable, and I think people bonded with him more, even more than Reagan, who I loved and I worked with closely. And I remember the nineteen eighty four convention as a remarkably positive event. This was different. This is a whole different league, and one you can only achieve if you've had all the years of campaigning and persecution and impeachment and the trials. I mean, everything that has been done to President Trump, culminating and literally an attempt to kill him, and all of that came together for his supporters in a deeply, deeply emotional way. That was my biggest takeaways. This is a party which is both united and extraordinarily determined to go out and do whatever it takes to win this fall, in terms of getting the votes out early, which is a new thing for Republicans, making sure the count's honest, really focusing on ensuring that non citizens do not vote and that the Democrats do not steal ballots, and at the same time carrying messages of hope and opportunity. The Trump speech, the acceptance speech, had a very long section on a better future, was much more positive, much less how bad things have been under Biden. And I thought the opening twenty five or thirty minutes were just extraordinarily profound and both gave you a sense of him as a person as he recounted what happened in Butler. And I think maybe the most emotionally compelling moment of the whole evening was when President Trump walked over and kissed Corey Compartour's helmet from his days a firman. It was very moving. I think it moved Trump to do it and move the rest of us watching it, and it reminded us that, well Trump had escaped, this would be assassin. Tragically, Corey did not escape, and that his family is suffering a terrible loss. President Trump announced they had founded a go fund me page which had already raised over six and a half million dollars for his family, but of course, no amount of money is going to replace their father. It was a very compelling moment when you watch the President walk across the stage and kiss the helmet. Then he talked in a positive way about the kind of future we could create together. And I think that all of that is sort of the baseline for where this campaign is going on the Trump side, which will be to argue that we can do dramatically better than we are that we can have a much better future, and that what we have to do is follow the path of lower taxes and less regulation and more opportunity, things will be amazingly good. The mood among the people I walked around and cless than I saw literally hundreds of people, chadow with them, got pictures made with them. The mood was totally positive, totally upbeat. It was really the best convention in that sense I've ever been to. The spirit was there. I thought it was interesting also that Tucker Carlson appeared. Carlson is probably the leading populist conservative commentator in the country for particularly people on the right, and is a very strong following. The fact that he was right there talking was I thought very very significant and reached out. Part of it, if you look at it, you had a series of people, each of whom brought a different part of America together and built an opportunity for us to see how the new emerging Republican coalition. Many more speakers who were black, many more speakers who were Latino, a real effort to reach out to everyday Americans with a remarkable series of speakers. All of that came together at the same time I have to say, having blown up two of the one hundred and fifty thousand balloons, it was the largest balloon drop in history at the very end, and it was just kind of funny to stand there and watch all of these balloons come floating down. It was a spectacle that Trump wanted, and he got the spectacle he wanted. My sense of the whole week was how really positive it was, how well orchestrated it was, how well thought out it was. If you had said to me twenty years ago, we're going to have this Republican Convention and we're going to have Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan on the final night, I would have thought that was not the Republican Party that used to exist, and it's not. This is a more grassroots, more populist, in many ways, more daring party, a party willing to be bigger and broader. As JD. Van said in his acceptance speech on Wednesday night, there are going to be tensions and arguments, which is good because that's how you get creativity. And if you have a coalition in this big you inherently have internal contradictions. I used to tell people many many years ago, when we were a tiny minority Republicans. At one point after Watergate, you know, I said, you can have a minority with no one arguing with each other, but by the way, you'll never govern. And if you're going to get to be big enough to govern, you're going to have lots of arguments inside your own tent, because that's the nature of bringing that many people together from that many different backgrounds. And the amazing thing about Trump and his team is that they were able to orchestrate all that. It was sort of like watching an orchestra play, and instead of having conflict, you had people generally talking in very positive ways. The other thing they worked at very hard was personalizing Trump, I mean everything from his granddaughter giving a very clever and I thought remarkably mature speech first time she ever talked to a national audience, and she pulled it off one hundred percent. But watching her talk, listening to Laura Trump's description of her father in law watching the president at one point sitting in the presidential booth with two of his grandchildren sitting in his lap, there's a whole sense of very serious effort to get across the idea that this is a much more interesting, much more caring and compassionate, much more living person than the national media would have you believe. And I have a haunched that that had an impact of positive impact on how people see Trump, and now he's got to launch a campaign. They were given a gift this morning when President Biden's campaign manager announced that he absolutely that was her word, absolutely was not going to drop out and so they would be bosses in Washington. Pelosi and Schumer and Jeffries and others are now faced to the real challenge because the guy who got fourteen million, five hundred thousand votes as of this morning said he's not moving. He's going to run for president again. And from the Trump standpoint, there are two great things about this. One is the think that Biden is the person they'd most like to run against. They've thought about it a long time. They sort of have a grudge match nature of you making up for twenty twenty. And then secondly, it just eats up the airtime when the Democrats can't be attacking Trump because they're busy fighting each other. And so the longer this goes on, the happier the Trump team is going to be. You know, there's a lot going to happen in the next few weeks, and I'll keep reporting as I see things I think that are really worthwhile, because the biggest feeling I have this is my ninth convention, and the biggest feeling I have is this is the most historic and the least political convention I've attended. We are really in the middle of making history. We don't really know how this all ends or where it all goes, but I can tell you that the feeling here in Milwaukee was extraordinarily good. People were unbelievably committed and had so much energy. They kept making up chance just because they wanted to do something that they had so much adrenaline. I've never seen a convention and this thoroughly committed to be engaged, to get he involved and to winning. And it's so thoroughly committed to their nominee and so happy with JD. Vans as the vice presidential nominee. So I think we're entering the general election campaign probably as strong as you can imagine, and now we'll have to execute and keep working at it. And remember that in nineteen forty eight, Tom Dewey thought he had won. The margin was so big that in mid September, Gallup quit taking polls and Harry Truman came from behind, and one see, you cannot take anything for granted in this process. But if the Trump people stay focused and keep learning and keep working, I think they're probably going to do very, very well. And I will report as things evolve.

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