The Rev. Franklin Graham, one of President Trump’s most prominent evangelical supporters, opened the fourth and final night of the Republican National Convention with a prayer for Mr. Trump and his family, asking God to “unite our hearts to be one nation.”
Mr. Graham — the elder son of the Rev. Billy Graham, who built an evangelical empire and was for decades a spiritual adviser to presidents of both political parties before his death in 2018 — is a fierce defender of Mr. Trump and his agenda.
“Our country is facing trouble,” Mr. Graham said in his prayer, referencing “tens of thousands in the path of a deadly storm.” The pandemic, he said, “has gripped millions of hearts with fear. We’re divided. We have witnessed injustice. Anger and despair have flowed into the streets. We need your help. We need to hear your voice at this crucial hour.”
The president and chief executive of Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief organization, the younger Mr. Graham has been a key ally in Mr. Trump’s successful efforts to cement his support among evangelical voters, especially in key swing states.
In 2016, Mr. Graham criticized the “crude comments” revealed in a 2005 tape of Mr. Trump talking about grabbing women’s private parts. But he also condemned the “godless progressive agenda” of Hillary Clinton. And after Mr. Trump won the election, Mr. Graham became a vocal defender of the president.
In 2018, after Walmart briefly sold T-shirts that said “Impeach 45,” Mr. Graham responded by selling “Pray for 45” T-shirts. In June, after Mr. Trump came under fire for using a Bible as a prop in front of a Washington, D.C., church during protests about racial injustice, Mr. Graham again defended him vigorously.
Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, accused the president of using her church “as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.” Asked later whether he was offended by the president’s behavior, Mr. Graham wrote a lengthy defense of the president on his Facebook page.
“Offended? Not at all,” he wrote. “This made an important statement that what took place the night before in the burning, looting, and vandalism of the nation’s capital — including this historic house of worship — mattered, and that the lawlessness had to end.”
Amid an untamed pandemic that has cost more than 180,000 American lives and millions of jobs, a hurricane battering the Gulf Coast and unrest gripping another city after another police shooting of a Black man, President Trump plans to make his most direct case for re-election yet on Thursday night when he addresses the Republican National Convention.
“At no time before have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies, or two agendas,” Mr. Trump plans to say, according to advance excerpts from his speech. “We have spent the last four years reversing the damage Joe Biden inflicted over the last 47 years.”
Mr. Trump has been a much more regular presence in the hybrid live and virtual convention that the Republicans have put on this week than presidential nominees tended to be in pre-pandemic conventions, addressing the delegates on Monday and appearing on the evening broadcasts. But the acceptance speech will be his most important moment.
Mr. Trump will try to project a sense of optimism about America’s future, at a moment when the nation has had more trouble getting the coronavirus outbreak under control than any other wealthy country, and on a day when the Labor Department announced that over a million more Americans had filed new claims for state jobless benefits last week, in the latest sign that the economy was losing momentum.
“This towering American spirit has prevailed over every challenge, and lifted us to the summit of human endeavor,” Mr. Trump plans to say.
And he is expected to deliver a blistering denunciation of Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, attacking the former vice president’s positions and record on issues like policing and the economy.
“At the Democrat convention, you barely heard a word about their agenda,” Mr. Trump will say, despite the fact that the Republicans decided not to adopt a party platform in this election for the first time since 1856. (The Democrats did adopt a platform, and sketched out an agenda at their convention.)
“But that’s not because they don’t have one,” he will say. “It’s because their agenda is the most extreme set of proposals ever put forward by a major party nominee.”
And capping a week in which the convention sought to win back suburban voters in swing states who drifted from the Republican Party in the 2018 midterms, turned off by the president’s divisive record, Mr. Trump will make an explicit appeal to them: “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.”
President Trump will speak Thursday night in front of a large crowd sitting closely together on the South Lawn of the White House without significant social distancing, according to photos of the event space taken Thursday afternoon.
About 1,500 white folding chairs with roughly a foot between them have been set up facing the lectern where Mr. Trump will speak, formally accepting his party’s nomination for another four years in the White House on a day when the death toll from the coronavirus in the United States topped 180,000.
Officials at the Republican National Committee, which is producing the convention, declined to respond to questions about whether members of the audience would be required to wear masks or would be tested for Covid-19 before being allowed onto the White House grounds for the final night of speeches.
In a statement, the campaign noted that it had worked with Patronus Medical, a safety and health company, to “make certain proper protocols are in place to ensure the safety and well-being of individuals at convention venues.” It added that representatives of the company had been on site to make sure screening “meets the highest standards of public safety.”
But at previous convention events this week, attendees have mingled closely without masks, generating criticism from public health officials about the possibility that the virus could be spreading quickly through the crowds.
“This is deeply irresponsible,” Ashish K. Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said of the images on Thursday. “It goes against all that we know about keeping people safe. We should expect better from our national leaders.”
On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence spoke at Fort McHenry in Baltimore in front of a crowd where people were seated close together. Most of the members of the audience did not appear to be wearing masks at the event. On Tuesday, Melania Trump, the first lady, also spoke before a smaller but largely maskless crowd seated close together in the Rose Garden.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. responded on Thursday to Vice President Mike Pence’s blunt warning at the Republican National Convention that “you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America” by saying that “the problem we have right now is we are in Donald Trump’s America.”
“If you want to talk about safety, the biggest safety issue is people dying from Covid,” Mr. Biden said in an interview on MSNBC, during which he discussed the coronavirus pandemic, the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs and the unrest over policing that has gripped the nation.
“More people have died on this president’s watch than at just about any time in American history, on a daily basis,” Mr. Biden said. “And what’s he doing, what’s he doing about it? He continues to flaunt every single basic rule and basic tenet that Democrats and Republicans both have adhered to.”
Biden responds to VP Pence's RNC claim that "you won't be safe in Joe Biden's America":
"The problem we have right now is that we're in Donald Trump's America." pic.twitter.com/hD2SSUd7z7
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 27, 2020
Addressing the unrest in Kenosha, Wis., after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, which Republicans have seized on to try to present themselves as the party of law and order, Mr. Biden condemned violence “in any form” but also said that he supported the right to protest peacefully.
And he said that he was troubled by reports that Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old who was arrested in connection with shootings that left two people dead on Tuesday night, may have had “a connection to a militia in Illinois.”
“This is not who we are,” Mr. Biden said. “This is not who America is. They want to bring about some order in safety and security for people, we have to start dealing with the real problems underlying all these issues. And the president never speaks to that.”
WASHINGTON — Senator Kamala Harris said on Thursday that the Republican National Convention was operating in an alternate reality that ignored the coronavirus pandemic and unrest over the repeated police shooting of Black people.
“Unlike the Democratic convention, which was very cleareyed about the challenges we are facing and how we can tackle them, the Republican convention is designed for one purpose: to soothe Donald Trump’s ego, to make him feel good,” said Ms. Harris, the Democratic nominee for vice president. “He is the president of the United States and it’s not supposed to be about him. It’s supposed to be about the health and safety and the well-being of the American people. And on that measure, Donald Trump has failed.”
The remarks, delivered to about two dozen journalists in an auditorium at George Washington University, appeared to be an attempt to focus public attention on Mr. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, an issue avoided by most of this week’s speakers at the Republican National Convention. Very few convention speakers have addressed the nearly 180,000 Americans who have died from the virus, with discussion of the pandemic instead focusing on how China, where it originated, failed to contain the virus.
Ms. Harris, whom aides said would “prosecute the case” against Mr. Trump, said the president has “failed at the most basic and important job” of the presidency. She accused him of being too cozy with the Chinese government, citing his January statement praising the country for its transparency in dealing with the virus.
The senator couched her attack on Mr. Trump in the most personal of terms, suggesting he had choked under pressure. (The president has often ridiculed others for weakness under pressure, which he perceives as a fatal character flaw.)
“Right at the moment we needed him to be tough on the Chinese government, he caved,” Ms. Harris said. “Instead of rising to meet the most difficult moment of his presidency, Donald Trump froze. He was scared.”
Ms. Harris addressed for the first time before television cameras the Sunday police shooting of Jacob Blake, the Black man shot seven times in the back by the police in Kenosha, Wis.
“It’s sickening to watch, it’s all too familiar and it must end,” Ms. Harris said. She added that peaceful protesters should not be confused with “those looting and committing acts of violence.” An Illinois teenager was charged Wednesday with two counts of homicide after the fatal shootings of two people.
“We will not let these vigilantes and extremists derail the path to justice,” she said.
The Biden campaign will spend more than $2 million to air a two-minute ad on national networks and Fox News during coverage of the Republican National Convention tonight.
The ad spreads the campaign’s message of resilience and hope for recovery while also getting in a few not-so-subtle digs at President Trump, who is formally accepting his party’s renomination at the convention finale.
“When Joe Biden is president, America is just going to have to keep up,” the ad says, after the narrator tweaks those who “take it slow” as a shot of Mr. Trump gingerly ambling down a ramp in West Point plays. “We won’t have to wait to deal with Covid-19: He already has a plan.”
Both campaigns have been aggressively seeking to bracket the other’s conventions with paid messaging. Last week, during the Democratic convention, the Trump campaign ran an enormous digital ad operation, monopolizing the top strip of YouTube for a 96-hour stretch and taking over the home pages of The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post for 24 hours at a time. That digital buy, which cost more than $10 million, reached tens of millions of voters.
Buying lengthy ad slots has been a campaign tactic for years. Some candidates have even bought full 30-minute slots to run a campaign-produced documentary on broadcast television.
But an ad buy of this scale during the final day of a political convention is rare, even in the post-Citizens United, post-public financing world of modern political campaigns.
The ad will air on CBS, ABC and NBC nationally, and will also run on Fox News, local Fox affiliates and Fox Sports 1.
Rudolph W. Giuliani — a kind of at-large fixer and henchman for President Trump, first under the guise of “informal security consultant” and then as his “personal lawyer” — will speak Thursday night, Mark Leibovich writes in a memo on the Republican Convention. Mr. Leibovich explored the moment, and the arc of Mr. Giuliani’s long career:
On Thursday night, Mr. Giuliani will speak in a prime slot — the culminating evening of the convention. If precedent holds, he will accuse former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. of all manner of corruption and mental decline, blame China for the coronavirus crisis (if he mentions the pandemic at all), spin grim scenarios of burning cities and socialist anarchy if Mr. Biden prevails and heap flamboyant praise upon his unlikely late-career meal ticket, Mr. Trump.
Depending on where one sits on the Trump spectrum, the current iteration of Mr. Giuliani represents either a triumphant comeback or the further decline into farce of a once legitimately momentous figure in the life of New York City and the country. If nothing else, Mr. Giuliani is back and fully ensconced in prime time. Not some scaled back and chastened version, either.
“He’s got a boss who is not exactly reining him in,” said Andrew Kirtzman, a New York political consultant who two decades ago wrote a biography of Mr. Giuliani, “Emperor of the City,” and is now at work on a second volume that incorporates the former mayor’s work for the president. Indeed, Mr. Trump seems to be encouraging the fullest, loudest Rudy possible. While Mr. Giuliani fits no one’s profile of the kind of market-tested speaker that might appeal to, say, college-educated women, he is perhaps as close as there is to a stylistic alter-ego for Mr. Trump.
Television ratings declined for Wednesday’s installment of the Republican National Convention, which was seen by roughly 25 percent fewer live viewers than the third night of the Democratic convention last week.
About 17.3 million people tuned in to watch the convention on television on its third night, when Vice President Mike Pence gave the keynote speech, according to Nielsen. The decline followed a ratings bump on Tuesday, when 19.4 million watched a Rose Garden address from the first lady, Melania Trump.
Fox News, as it has throughout this week, dominated the competition. About 7.1 million people watched Fox News’s convention coverage from 10 to 11:15 p.m., a larger audience than ABC, CBS and NBC combined.
No other major network cracked two million viewers during that time period, according to early statistics.
Nielsen figures do not include viewers who may have watched the convention on the internet or a streaming platform. Many younger Americans now prefer to watch live events online, but the size of that audience is difficult to credibly measure.
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