Myron Lizer, vice president of the Navajo Nation, said President Trump had “made it a priority to repair the relationship” between the Navajo and the federal government.
“Our people have never been invited into the American dream,” Mr. Lizer said. “We’ve for years fought congressional battles with past congressmen and senators that were part of a broken system that ignored us. That is, until President Trump took office.”
Mr. Lizer, who is also a pastor and longtime businessman, said Mr. Trump had helped his community by signing a presidential proclamation that recognized missing and murdered Native Americans; by reactivating the White House Council on Native American Affairs; and by signing the CARES Act, which included $8 billion in funding for Indian Country.
He also praised Mr. Trump for nominating “strong conservative judges like Neil Gorsuch, who supports Native American rights.”
Justice Gorsuch, whom Mr. Trump appointed to the Supreme Court in 2017, has sided with tribes in several cases, and he wrote the majority opinion last month in a landmark ruling that much of eastern Oklahoma is a Native American reservation. He was joined by the court’s four liberal members, while the other four conservatives — including Mr. Trump’s second appointee, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh — dissented.
Republicans dropped a scheduled speaker from their convention lineup shortly before her planned remarks were to air on Tuesday, after she endorsed an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory on Twitter that was first posted by a supporter of the QAnon movement.
Earlier in the day, the Trump campaign had announced that Mary Ann Mendoza, the mother of a police officer killed by an undocumented immigrant who was driving drunk, would share her family’s tragic story and explain how “President Trump is fighting every day to secure the border and honor her son’s legacy.”
Ms. Mendoza deleted her tweet, which urged her followers to do themselves “a favor” and read a Twitter thread asserting, among many other wild falsehoods, that the infamous anti-Jewish “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was not a fabricated document. The tweet was first reported on by the Daily Beast.
The thread also asserted dark conspiracies involving the sinking of the Titanic and the Hindenberg disaster, and referred to “Satanic High Priestess Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton.”
She later sought to downplay her decision to boost the tweets, saying that she had not read “every post within the thread,” and apologizing “for not paying attention to the intent of the whole message.”
“That does not reflect my feelings or personal thoughts whatsoever,” she added.
The thread at issue included dozens of tweets, but begins on a highly conspiratorial note, asserting right off the bat that “In 1773, A Wealthy Goldsmith And Coin Dealer Named Mayer Amschel Bauer Summoned Twelve Wealthy And Influential Men To His Place Of Business In Frankfurt, Germany,” and hatched a plot to pool resources and “Gain Control Of The Wealth, Natural Resources, And Manpower Of The Entire World.”
In a statement the Trump campaign’s spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, said that Ms. Mendoza’s pre-taped remarks would not air at the convention.
“We have removed the scheduled video from the convention lineup and it will no longer run this week,” Mr. Murtaugh said.
Mr. Trump has long highlighted the stories of “angel moms” like Ms. Mendoza, whose children were killed by undocumented immigrants, as a way of building popular support for his crackdown on immigration and border security.
Melania Trump will speak from the Rose Garden of the White House tonight. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will endorse the president from a rooftop in Jerusalem. And President Trump appeared from the White House twice on the opening night of the Republican National Convention on Monday and plans to deliver his acceptance speech from the South Lawn.
Their appearances amount to a radical break from tradition even for an administration that has repeatedly shattered longstanding norms. Never in recent times has a president used the majesty of the White House to stage a nominating convention, nor has a sitting secretary of state participated in such a partisan event, much less from overseas where he is ostensibly on a diplomatic mission.
According to State Department guidance from December 2019, department employees are not allowed to “speak for or against a partisan candidate, political party or partisan political group at a convention, rally or similar gathering sponsored by such entities.”
On Tuesday, a House foreign affairs subcommittee opened an investigation into Mr. Pompeo’s political activities during the diplomatic trip to Israel.
The chairman of the subcommittee, Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas, wrote in a letter to Stephen E. Biegun, the deputy secretary of state, that Mr. Pompeo’s speech could violate the Hatch Act, a Depression-era law that bars federal employees from engaging in political activities while they are on the job.
“It is highly unusual, and likely unprecedented, for a sitting Secretary of State to speak at a partisan convention for either of the political parties,” Mr. Castro wrote in the letter. “It appears that it may also be illegal.”
Mr. Castro asked the State Department to provide documents on the legal advice it received on the propriety of Mr. Pompeo’s speech, as well as an accounting of expenses from the trip.
A State Department official had previously said that Mr. Pompeo would “address the convention in his personal capacity” and added: “No State Department resources will be used. Staff are not involved in preparing the remarks or in the arrangements for Secretary Pompeo’s appearance. The State Department will not bear any costs in conjunction with this appearance.”
But the official guidelines, and a cable Mr. Pompeo himself recently sent to employees, state clearly that such partisan activities are prohibited even on employees’ personal time. In his letter, Mr. Castro said that based on guidance from the State Department and the Hatch Act, Mr. Pompeo was barred from participating in the convention.
“It appears incontrovertible that the Secretary’s speech to the R.N.C. violates this prohibition,” Mr. Castro wrote.
Mike Pompeo is betting that he has more to gain, politically, than he will lose by breaking with diplomatic tradition on Tuesday night to become the first sitting secretary of state in at least 75 years to address a national party convention.
The setting of the speech, with the lights of the Old City of Jerusalem expected to be visible over his shoulder, provides Mr. Pompeo with an opportunity to praise one of President Trump’s few foreign policy achievements that has received wide and bipartisan support: the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
It also gives him a national platform with Mr. Trump’s core supporters — a political base that Mr. Pompeo is courting as he weighs a future presidential campaign.
“If he has any interest in running for president in the future, this is a way of inserting himself into presidential politics, but at the cost of breaking an important tradition in American history,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian.
Mr. Pompeo has been under criticism since it became clear that he would be giving the speech while on an official diplomatic trip to the Middle East and North Africa. For nearly a year, Democrats in Congress have accused Mr. Pompeo of violating the federal Hatch Act by using taxpayer-funded government aircraft and hosting receptions at the State Department to further his political ambitions.
Stuart Stevens, a Republican political consultant and former top strategist to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, said party loyalists “won’t care” whether Mr. Pompeo violated bans on engaging in partisan activities while traveling overseas on official business.
The bigger problem for Mr. Pompeo, he said, is the prospect of a Republican Party so fractured after November that those who follow Mr. Trump will be unable to draw the widespread support needed to win the 2024 presidential election.
On Tuesday morning, as he was flying across the Middle East, Mr. Pompeo offered a preview of his address. “President Trump has ensured the safety of America — and SECURED our many FREEDOMS, which is the cornerstone of this great nation,” Mr. Pompeo wrote from his personal Twitter account.
“Her words.”
That’s the message that aides to the first lady, Melania Trump, have underscored ahead of her headlining speech Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention. Mrs. Trump’s address, which will be delivered live from the newly renovated Rose Garden, will be “authentic,” written without the hidden hand of professional speechwriters. “Every word” of the address, Mrs. Trump’s chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham said, “is from her.”
It’s a necessary rebuttal to Mrs. Trump’s disastrous appearance at the R.N.C. four years ago in Cleveland, where she had discarded a speech prepared for her by two prominent conservative speechwriters and instead ended up borrowing word-for-word phrases and themes from Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention eight years earlier.
But for a first lady who for the past four years has chosen to be seen more than heard, sometimes letting her clothes (a jacket, most infamously) do the talking, a major speech in which she shares her own thoughts about her husband’s presidency is more than just an opportunity for a do-over.
“We don’t hear from her often, so that means every time we do hear her speak, people are intently listening to what she has to say,” said Anita McBride, who served as chief of staff to the former first lady, Laura Bush.
Mrs. Trump deserves credit, Mrs. McBride noted, for over the years subtly “getting her point across without poking the president in the eye.” While her husband was still promoting an anti-mask message from the White House, for instance, Mrs. Trump posted a portrait of herself wearing a face mask on Twitter, and encouraged Americans to wear face coverings and practice social distancing.
The second night of the Republican National Convention included a pardon from President Trump for a man who robbed a bank in Nevada.
The man, Jon Ponder, who received a separate state pardon this year, was pardoned by Mr. Trump for his crimes, and a video of the pardon was part of the formal convention program on Tuesday night.
Mr. Ponder, who has since founded a nonprofit organization to help former inmates, was arrested for the bank robbery in 2004 by Richard Beasley, now a retired F.B.I. agent. Mr. Beasley also spoke at the convention.
In the video, Mr. Trump said Mr. Ponder’s story was “a beautiful testament to the power of redemption” and said he would “continue to give all Americans, including former inmates, the best chance to build a new life and achieve their own American dream.”
Mr. Ponder expressed his gratitude in the video for what he said was a “second chance.” And standing with Mr. Beasley, he repeatedly praised law enforcement, saying he hoped the authorities and the people they serve “can come together.”
For his part, Mr. Beasley thanked Mr. Trump for what he said was his support of criminal justice reform and for his continued backing of law enforcement. “There’s nothing worse than knowing you’re being second-guessed when you’re doing your job,” Mr. Beasley said.
The video ended by showing Mr. Trump signing the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Ponder.
Mr. Ponder has three convictions; the other two are state charges related to domestic battery crimes in the 1990s and early 2000s. He was granted clemency for the domestic violence incidents this year.
Throughout his tenure as president, Mr. Trump has wielded his executive power to grant clemency in erratic ways, often pardoning or commuting the sentences of people who have connections to him or who have demonstrated their support for him in some way.
In July, he commuted the sentence of Roger J. Stone Jr., his longtime friend and former campaign adviser. Earlier in the year, he commuted the sentence of Rod R. Blagojevich, who was convicted of trying when he was governor of Illinois to essentially sell the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama when he became president.
And as recently as this month, Mr. Trump issued a posthumous pardon for Susan B. Anthony, the women’s suffragist who was arrested after voting illegally in 1872.
Major television networks lodged a protest with Republican officials on Tuesday after the Trump campaign agreed to provide Fox News with additional access to major speeches at this week’s Republican National Convention.
Representatives from rival networks — including ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN — cried foul in a conference call with Trump officials on Tuesday that grew heated at times, according to four people briefed on the discussion who were not authorized to speak about it publicly.
The dispute emerged after the Fox News host Sean Hannity — a major ally of President Trump — revealed that he had received exclusive entry to key convention sites.
“We’ll be broadcasting live from the Rose Garden in the lead-up for Melania Trump’s speech,” Mr. Hannity told viewers on Monday. “Wednesday, we’ll be at Fort McHenry where Vice President Pence will be, and on Thursday, we will be live on the South Lawn where President Trump will give his speech.”
The other networks said it was unfair of the Trump campaign to grant Mr. Hannity and Fox News the additional access, which was expected to include a dedicated press riser and camera, and requested parity.
Following the call, Trump campaign officials agreed to allow reporters from other networks into the Rose Garden for Mrs. Trump’s address, two of the people said, but the extent of that access was still being worked out.
Because of safety restrictions relating to the coronavirus, the major TV broadcasters are reliant this week on a single, so-called pool feed of live video and audio from the Republicans’ events. (The same format was in place at last week’s Democratic National Convention.)
In a typical year, the major networks would have built multimillion-dollar sets at the convention sites and arranged multiple anchor booths and camera stations throughout the arena floor. And it is not unusual for TV producers to lobby convention officials for unique access to significant events.
But Mr. Hannity’s announcement caught rival networks off guard, given Mr. Hannity’s closeness with Mr. Trump and what other executives deemed overly favorable treatment for his network.
The lead convention anchors for Fox News, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, will host their Tuesday broadcast from the network’s regular setup for both of this year’s political conventions, at the United States Chamber of Commerce building in Washington.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
TV viewership for the first night of the Republican National Convention fell short of the Democrats’ first night last week, according to Nielsen.
About 17 million people watched the Republicans live on Monday night between 10 and 11 p.m., down from the 19.7 million who tuned in for last Monday’s speeches by Senator Bernie Sanders and Michelle Obama.
A significant portion of that audience watched on Fox News, which brought in 7.1 million viewers — by far the biggest TV audience of the night. It was the network’s highest-rated opening-night convention audience in 24 years of broadcasting.
Overall, the Republicans’ TV audience was down about 26 percent from its opening night in 2016. Last week, the Democrats saw a 24 percent decline in their opening night viewership.
President Trump has a well-known fixation on television ratings, and he is sure to take note of the overnight figures. Aides to the president, who is a former reality TV star, hired two producers from his show “The Apprentice” to help oversee this year’s convention programming.
The downward ratings trend for both political parties speaks to the growing number of Americans who watch live events online or on streaming platforms, as traditional TV subscriptions continue to fall, and to the difficulty of staging a convention during a pandemic without a large live audience and the chance of the unexpected. The Nielsen numbers do not include those streaming viewers, an audience that remains difficult to credibly measure.
Taking on one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s political action committee endorsed Alex Morse, the small-city mayor who is challenging Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, a veteran lawmaker and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
The endorsement from Courage to Change, announced by Mr. Morse in a statement on Tuesday, is a significant boost to his campaign a week before the primary election. Mr. Morse, a 31-year-old rising progressive star from Holyoke, had considered dropping out of the race earlier this month after accusations of “numerous incidents” of unwanted and inappropriate advances toward students at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst while he was a guest lecturer there.
But Mr. Morse, who acknowledged some consensual relationships with students — though none he taught or supervised — and apologized to anyone he made uncomfortable with his behavior, remained in the race after The Intercept published messages from some of the students who had lodged accusations, revealing that they had discussed how they might damage Mr. Morse’s campaign. One suggested the effort might help his own career prospects with Mr. Neal. Mr. Neal has denied any involvement.
Because Mr. Neal has been in Congress for more than three decades, the race is seen as another test of the strength of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing and its ability to oust mainstream incumbents.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, became emblematic of that power in 2018, when she upset Representative Joseph Crowley, a 20-year veteran who was a member of the party leadership.
“When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took on her own entrenched incumbent in 2018, she changed public service for the better, further inspiring me and so many others to fight for our districts and empower those who have long been forgotten,” Mr. Morse said in a statement. “I am honored to have the congresswoman’s Courage to Change in our corner, and it will be the honor of my life to bring the people alongside me to Washington.”
Although Ms. Ocasio-Cortez initially suggested she would support a wide range of progressives taking on entrenched incumbents, she has been careful about which lawmakers she has chosen to focus on. Her political action committee, introduced earlier this year, has endorsed fewer than a dozen candidates, most of them women. One of those candidates, Jamaal Bowman, last month defeated Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson, who is scheduled to speak at the Republican convention Tuesday night, said in June that it would be “smart” for a police officer to be more suspicious of her biracial son than her white children.
“Statistically, I look at our prison population and I see that there is a disproportionately high number of African-American males in our prison population for crimes, particularly for violent crimes,” Ms. Johnson said in a video that she posted after the police killing of George Floyd, and which was reported by Vice News.
“So statistically, when a police officer sees a brown man like my Jude walking down the road — as opposed to my white nerdy kids, my white nerdy men walking down the road — because of the statistics that he knows in his head, that these police officers know in their head, they’re going to know that statistically my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”
While she would be upset if an officer behaved violently because of her son’s race, she continued, she would not be upset if the officer were “more careful” around him.
“That doesn’t actually make me angry,” she said in the video. “That makes that police officer smart, because of statistics.”
The disproportionately high number of Black men in prison is not evidence that they commit more crimes; research shows that Black people are arrested and incarcerated far out of proportion to the percentage of crimes they commit.
Ms. Johnson — a former Planned Parenthood clinic director who says she came to oppose abortion after watching an ultrasound-guided abortion of a fetus at 13 weeks’ gestation — also suggested in the video that when her son grew up, he would be “a tall, probably sort of large, intimidating-looking maybe brown man, and my other boys are probably going to look like nerdy white guys.”
Asked for comment on Tuesday, she said: “If you would like to to discuss my talk tonight, I’m happy to do so. However, I’m not going to discuss something that isn’t germane to the event this evening.”
Ms. Johnson runs And Then There Were None, a group that urges employees at abortion clinics to leave them. She opposes abortion in all circumstances and also opposes hormonal contraception.
Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, has a stark warning for her successor. In a close election where there may be efforts to challenge absentee voting, she suggested, Joseph R. Biden Jr. should not concede.
“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances, because I think this is going to drag out,” Mrs. Clinton told Jennifer Palmieri, her former communications director and a contributor to Showtime’s “The Circus,” according to a video clip the show shared. “And eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is.”
Mrs. Clinton’s remark came as she and Ms. Palmieri discussed the challenges of a close election, and Mrs. Clinton suggested Republicans might move to interfere with absentee and other kinds of voting.
President Trump has made false attacks on the practice of mail-in voting, and Democrats including Mr. Biden have predicted that the president may seek to disrupt the election.
Mr. Trump has also openly cast doubts on the credibility of the election outcome, though his allies have previously dismissed the idea that he would seek to move Election Day — and the president does not have the authority to make such a move.
“Republicans will be ready to make sure the polls are being run correctly, securely, and transparently as we work to deliver the free and fair election Americans deserve,” said Matthew Morgan, general counsel to Mr. Trump’s campaign. He also said that Mrs. Clinton was “trying to lay the groundwork for Joe Biden to deny the election results when President Trump wins.”
But both Democrats and Republicans have said that Mr. Trump’s repeated and often baseless efforts to question the integrity of the election process appear to amount to an attempt to dismiss a potential outcome he finds unfavorable.
Every four years since 1856, the Republican Party has produced a platform articulating its priorities for the next president.
But like so much else disrupted by President Trump, the Republican National Committee has dispensed with producing a 2020 platform, instead passing a resolution renewing what delegates enacted in 2016, bashing the news media and offering wholehearted support for Mr. Trump.
“The Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda,” reads the resolution, adopted this past weekend in Charlotte, N.C., just before the start of the Republican National Convention.
Most of what is on that agenda also remains a mystery — and is subject to change. Several times this summer, Mr. Trump has been asked by friendly Fox News hosts to articulate his second-term priorities, and he has regularly failed to reveal his plans.
So while the G.O.P. platform of 1856 called for abolishing “those twin relics of barbarism — polygamy and slavery” and building a transcontinental railroad, the party’s official stance in 2020 is that it is for whatever Mr. Trump says.
In June, the Republican National Committee announced it would not write a 2020 platform. It has instead carried over its 2016 version, word for word, including more than three dozen outdated condemnations of the “current” president — which was, when the document was written, Barack Obama.
Though in practice, a party’s platform often has little correlation with how a candidate campaigns or would govern as president, it has for more than a century served as guidance for what political parties believe.
Republicans this week found themselves maintaining that keeping the 2016 platform indicated that their party’s principles and priorities have not shifted during the Trump era.
President Trump and his advisers had talked up how they planned to present a sunny, uplifting and optimistic vision of America at this week’s Republican National Convention, but the first day of festivities was filled with brooding warnings of a dark Democratic future.
“Anarchists” would rule. Democrats would “abolish the suburbs.” There would be “rioting, looting and vandalism.” “Socialism” and “radicals.” “Cancel culture” run amok. “Woketopians” on the move. A “horror movie.”
Such divisive language was hardly a surprise at the renomination convention of a president who declared at his inauguration an end to “American carnage” and whose political calling card from the start has been amplifying and maximizing the grievances of his supporters.
But the explicit play to rev up Mr. Trump’s political base — from the list of speakers itself to their provocations from their various speaking perches — was a reminder of the narrow path he is pursuing as he seeks re-election. Suburban voters, especially white women who were essential to his surprise 2016 victory, have shifted decisively in the direction of the Democrats in the intervening years.
There were some efforts to show a softer side of Mr. Trump who “cares” — a buzzword that was used repeatedly — and to justify as purposeful his general bombast.
“Everyone knows he can be tough,” said Ronna McDaniel, the Republican Party chairwoman. “Some people don’t like his style,” noted the retired football player Herschel Walker. “President Trump sometimes raises his voice — and a ruckus,” said Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida.
The explicit division on Monday of America into “Democrat states,” as Donald Trump Jr. put it at one point, and the rest of the country stood in stark contrast to the promises last week by Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee.
Mr. Biden pledged to work as hard for those who vote for him as those who don’t. He said in his speech, “That’s the job of a president: to represent all of us, not just our base or our party.”
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