Melania Trump will speak from the Rose Garden of the White House tonight. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will beam in to 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.”
A State Department official 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.
Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, criticized Mr. Pompeo on Tuesday for traveling to Israel for a political speech.
In a Zoom video call organized by the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Booker said that Mr. Pompeo’s trip to Israel to stump for Mr. Trump seemed to trample on the idea that certain places were sacrosanct and should not be used for political purposes.
“To me, it’s reckless,” Mr. Booker said. “It is counter to the traditions of our country.”
The convention speeches are only the latest examples of how Mr. Trump has further blurred the lines between the government and his campaign as he presses the advantages of incumbency to pull off a come-from-behind victory in November.
While other presidents running for a second term have mixed governing and electioneering, they generally followed boundaries between their public duties and political interests, proprieties that Mr. Trump has disregarded from the start.
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.
The second night of the Republican National Convention will feature some big names, like Melania Trump, the first lady; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.
It will also include Nicholas Sandmann, the teenager involved in a confrontation with a Native American man at a protest last year, and Mary Ann Mendoza, a consultant to the We Build the Wall organization, which was recently accused of fraud.
Here’s how to watch the convention and who else you can expect to see.
How to watch:
Convention proceedings will begin at 9 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday through Thursday but, as with the Democratic convention, the big speeches will happen at night.
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The Times will stream the convention every evening, accompanied by chat-based live analysis from our reporters and real-time highlights from the speeches.
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The official livestream will be available on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch and Amazon Prime.
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ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News will cover the convention from 10 to 11 p.m. every night; CNN from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m.; MSNBC from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m.; PBS from 8 to 11 p.m.; and C-SPAN at 9 a.m. and then at 8:30 p.m.
Who’s speaking:
Mr. Trump’s campaign released a partial list of speakers for Tuesday:
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Former Attorney General Pam Bondi of Florida
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Attorney General Daniel Cameron of Kentucky
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Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion activist
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Jason Joyce, a lobsterman in Maine
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Myron Lizer, vice president of the Navajo Nation
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Mary Ann Mendoza, whose son was killed in a car crash with an undocumented immigrant
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Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez of Florida, the first Hispanic woman elected to that job
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Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky
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John Peterson, the owner of Schuette Metals in Rothschild, Wis.
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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
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Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa
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Nicholas Sandmann, a teenager from a Catholic high school in Kentucky
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Eric Trump, the president’s son and an executive vice president of the Trump Organization
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Melania Trump, the first lady
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Tiffany Trump, the president’s younger daughter
TV viewership for the first night of the Republican National Convention fell short of the Democrats’ first night last week, according to Nielsen.
About 15.8 million people watched the Republicans live on Monday night between 10 and 11 p.m., down from roughly 19 million who tuned in for last Monday’s speeches by Senator Bernie Sanders and Michelle Obama.
Almost half 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 31 percent from its opening night in 2016. Last week, the Democrats saw a 25 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.
For Democrats and many independents, President Trump has shattered the norms of presidential behavior with racist tweets and divisive policies; his use of federal agencies to advance his personal interests; and, perhaps most important, his detachment from managing the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 175,000 Americans.
The revulsion toward the president that his opponents feel has colored how many regard Mr. Trump’s supporters. Portrayals of his base, these supporters say, are often distilled into a caricature: that they are all white bigots, in thrall to an authoritarian leader and lost in a fog of fact-denial.
While polling and interviews turn up ample evidence of these traits, tens of millions of Americans will vote for Mr. Trump, and there are plenty of supporters who transcend the stereotypes, whose personal experiences or policy interests make him the right fit for them.
In lengthy interviews over the last several weeks, a cross-section of Trump voters said they believed he had succeeded on issues like hardening the Southern border, appointing conservative judges, taking on China and putting “America first.” Many said the president’s grievances were their grievances, too. They believed kneeling during the national anthem was un-American, and they were appalled at what they viewed as liberals’ minimizing of violence that grew out of the protests over the killing of George Floyd.
At the same time, Trump voters dismissed as irrelevant aspects of the president’s behavior that critics say make him historically unfit for office. All politicians lie, many said; as for the president’s suggestion that he might not accept the election results, supporters said voters should judge his actions, not his loose talk or tweets.
“I didn’t vote for Trump because I wanted him to be my best friend,” said DiAnna Schenkel, a 59-year-old suburbanite in North Carolina, who voted twice for Barack Obama but now supports Mr. Trump. “I wanted to make a change and a difference.”
President Trump said on Tuesday that he would nominate Chad F. Wolf to be confirmed as the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, even after a government watchdog issued a report saying Mr. Wolf, currently the acting secretary of the department, was serving in his role illegally.
“Chad has done an outstanding job and we greatly appreciate his service!” Mr. Trump said on Twitter.
Mr. Wolf, the former chief of staff for former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen M. Nielsen, has led the agency since November of last year after the resignation of his predecessor, Kevin McAleenan. The Homeland Security Department has not had a confirmed secretary since April of 2019, when Mr. Trump forced out Ms. Nielsen.
At the time of Ms. Nielsen’s ouster, the Trump administration improperly reordered the department’s order of succession to install Mr. McAleenan, then the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, as the head of the department, the Government Accountability Office found earlier this month. The report found the subsequent moves involving Mr. Wolf and the acting deputy secretary of homeland security, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, were “also improper because they relied on an amended designation made by Mr. McAleenan.”
But the government watchdog does not have the authority to enforce the findings on the administration. Mr. Wolf has also won praise from Mr. Trump in recent months with ongoing construction of the president’s border wall and aggressively defending the deployment of Homeland Security agents to mass demonstrations in Portland, Ore. The decision to send the agents has prompted accusations that Mr. Wolf has turned the agency into a tool that can be bent to the political whims of Mr. Trump.
“I am honored to be nominated by President Trump to lead the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security in safeguarding the American people,” Mr. Wolf said in a statement. “As the Homeland faces evolving threats from natural disasters, violent opportunists, malign cyber actors, and transnational criminal organizations, the mission of DHS is as critical as ever.”
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.
The Fox News host Sean Hannity — a major ally of President Trump — revealed on his Monday program that he had been granted exclusive access to key sites on the convention lineup.
“We’ll be broadcasting live from the Rose Garden in the lead-up for Melania Trump’s speech tomorrow night,” Mr. Hannity told viewers. “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.”
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 three people briefed on the discussion who were not authorized to speak about it publicly.
The other networks said it was unfair of the Trump campaign to grant Mr. Hannity the additional access, which was expected to include a dedicated press riser for his broadcast, and requested parity, the people said.
Two people briefed on the call said that after the discussion, the Trump campaign was considering providing an additional riser in the Rose Garden on Tuesday for the other networks’ use.
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 generated their own unique camera shots and perspectives.
It is not unusual for TV networks to lobby convention officials for unique access to major events. For instance, CNN had multiple camera locations in the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia during the 2016 Democratic convention.
But Mr. Hannity’s announcement on Monday night caught rival network executives off guard, leading to Tuesday morning’s conference call.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Trump and his political allies mounted a fierce and misleading defense of his political record on the first night of the Republican convention on Monday, while unleashing a barrage of attacks on Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the Democratic Party that were unrelenting in their bleakness.
Hours after Republican delegates formally nominated Mr. Trump for a second term, the president and his party made plain that they intended to engage in sweeping revisionism about Mr. Trump’s management of the coronavirus pandemic, his record on race relations and much else.
At times, the speakers and prerecorded videos appeared to be describing an alternate reality: one in which the nation was not nearing 180,000 dead from the coronavirus; in which Mr. Trump had not consistently ignored serious warnings about the disease; in which the president had not spent much of his term appealing openly to xenophobia and racial animus; and in which someone other than Mr. Trump had presided over an economy that began crumbling in the spring.
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, praised his father’s management of the virus, one of several segments asserting an unsupported narrative that the president had been a sturdy leader in a crisis even as polls show Americans believe he has handled the pandemic poorly.
“As the virus began to spread, the president acted quickly and ensured ventilators got to hospitals that needed them most,” the president’s son said, making no mention of the millions of Americans sickened and killed or the complaints from governors that they were not receiving the necessary equipment. “There is more work to do, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.”
The tv Watch
Broadcasting so much of the Republican National Convention from a real location, the “imperious” backdrop of the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, was an attempt to send a message to pandemic-stricken America that “things aren’t bad — well, they’re not that bad,” The Times’s chief television critic, James Poniewozik, wrote.
But he added that “the first night of the R.N.C. also took place in a virtual space: the political augmented reality of President Trump.” Here is an excerpt from his assessment of the first night, where, he wrote, most of the lineup “either spoke to the Trumpist id, with its red-meat culture-war overtures, or to Mr. Trump’s own ego.”
Speaker after speaker launched into attacks and grievances steeped in the language of conservative culture and meme-making. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida denounced the “woketopians.” Natalie Harp, a cancer survivor, likened Mr. Trump to George Bailey of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” a character who famously battled a greedy real estate developer.
Other speakers insisted that Mr. Trump had a hidden caring side, or suggested, like the party’s chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, that a “tough” man like Mr. Trump could get more done than “nice guy” Mr. Biden. Donald Trump Jr., his tone jittery, called Mr. Biden “basically the Loch Ness Monster of the swamp.”
But the decibel champion of the night was Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former Fox News host whose delivery threatened to Make America Deaf Again. In a tinnitus-tempting, five-alarm blare, she warned about enemies who “want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal, victim ideology, to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.” The speech might have been better delivered to a roaring rally crowd, or maybe at an altar in front of an exploding volcano.
Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer who implicated the president when he pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, is the focus a new super PAC ad repudiating Mr. Trump.
Released this week by American Bridge, a liberal organization that has spent millions to oppose Mr. Trump, the ad is set to appear on television and online during the Republican convention this week, the group said.
In the 1 minute 39 second ad, Mr. Cohen challenged Mr. Trump’s credibility and called his claims of upholding law and order “laughable.”
“Virtually everyone who worked for his campaign has been convicted of a crime or is under indictment, myself included,” Mr. Cohen said.
The ad comes just days after Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, was arrested on fraud charges related to a private fund-raising effort to build a border wall. The ad shows Mr. Bannon emerging from the Federal District Court in Manhattan last week after a brief arraignment.
Mr. Bannon became the seventh Trump associate to have been charged with federal crimes since Mr. Trump took office, a list that includes Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; and Mr. Cohen, whom Mr. Trump called a “rat.”
Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations and other crimes related to his role as a confidant of Mr. Trump. He admitted to arranging payments during the 2016 presidential campaign to two women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, to keep them from publicly discussing affairs they said they had engaged in with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison, from which he was furloughed in May because of the coronavirus pandemic. Probation officers sent him back to prison last month when he refused to sign a document that would have barred him from publishing a tell-all memoir about Mr. Trump. A judge later ruled that the action was retaliatory and ordered Mr. Cohen’s release.
In the ad, Mr. Cohen said that anyone watching the Republican convention should not believe one word uttered by Mr. Trump.
“So when the president gets in front of the cameras this week, remember that he thinks we’re all gullible, a bunch of fools,” Mr. Cohen said. “I was part of it and I fell for it. You don’t have to like me, but please, listen to me.”
President Trump has long resisted criticizing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey — despite the authoritarian leader’s detention of American citizens and diplomatic employees, offensive against U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria and crackdown on protesters in Washington.
And hours after the Republican convention aired an interview on Monday in which Mr. Trump called Mr. Erdogan “very good,” the State Department issued a statement denouncing Mr. Erdogan’s recent meeting with leaders of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas, highlighting the disconnect between Mr. Trump and the rest of his administration’s policy toward Turkey.
The statement, from the State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus, said the United States “strongly objects” to a meeting that Mr. Erdogan hosted with two Hamas leaders in Istanbul on Saturday. The U.S. has designated Hamas a terrorist organization, and Ms. Ortagus said the leaders Mr. Erdogan met have been specifically designated global terrorists.
“President Erdogan’s continued outreach to this terrorist organization only serves to isolate Turkey from the international community, harms the interests of the Palestinian people, and undercuts global efforts to prevent terrorist attacks launched from Gaza,” Ms. Ortagus wrote. She said it was the second time that Mr. Erdogan had invited Hamas leaders to Turkey this year.
Contrast that with Mr. Trump’s comments in the convention segment: “I have to say that, to me, President Erdogan was very good,” he told the Rev. Andrew Brunson, who was detained in Turkey for two years until negotiators were able to convince Mr. Erdogan to release him in 2018. “So,” Mr. Trump said, “we appreciate that.”
“We just have to make this China virus go away, and it’s happening.”
— President Trump, in a taped conversation with frontline workers shown at the convention.
This is false.
While reports of new cases have dropped considerably since late July, when the country averaged well over 60,000 per day, case numbers remain persistently high, according to a New York Times database, and there is no evidence that the virus is going away anytime soon. On Monday, more than 40,000 new coronavirus cases and at least 500 new coronavirus-related deaths were reported in the United States. With more than 5.7 million people infected, the United States leads the world in coronavirus cases — roughly 2 million more than the country with the second highest count, Brazil.
“We just broke a record on jobs, an all-time record. There’s never been three months where we’ve put more people to work, over 9 million people.”
— President Trump, speaking after he was renominated on Monday.
This is misleading.
While it is true that the labor market has regained more than 9 million jobs since April, that rebound came on the heels of an even larger decline — and about 60 percent of the jobs lost since February have yet to return. The rapid labor market bounce back has come as many people who had lost jobs temporarily during state lockdowns returned to work. It is difficult to judge at this point how robust the rebound will prove going forward.
“The economy is coming up very rapidly, our farmers are doing well because I got China to give them $28 billion because they were targeted by China.”
— President Trump, speaking after he was renominated.
This is false.
Mr. Trump has channeled substantial government funds to farmers who were hurt when China, one of the world’s biggest agricultural markets, imposed tariffs on American products during the U.S.-China trade war. The Trump administration announced a total of $28 billion in aid for farmers in 2018 and 2019, then secured another $23.5 billion to help American farmers through the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package passed in March.
The administration says that these funds come from the revenue raised by the tariffs Mr. Trump imposed on more than $360 billion of Chinese goods. To date, the U.S. government has collected more than $60 billion of revenue from the tariffs Mr. Trump levied on Chinese bicycles, seafood, buttons, chemicals and many other goods.
But Mr. Trump’s frequent claim that the tariffs are paid for solely by China is wrong. Whether the Chinese manufacturer, American importer or another company ultimately pays the cost of any particular tariff varies from product to product, depending on the ability of each party to negotiate. But overall, recent economic research suggests that the burden of the tariffs has fallen heavily on American firms, and that American manufacturers and consumers have ended up paying a substantial portion of the tariffs.
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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