The Republican National Convention Begins With a New ‘Unity’ Message
From the Dispatch Politics on The Dispatch
Happy Monday! Welcome to the first of our daily dispatches from the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Be on the lookout for this newsletter every day this week as we help you keep up with what we expect to be one of the wildest weeks in political news. After all, we are getting an announcement of Donald Trump’s running mate today—less than 48 hours after the former president survived an attempt on his life.
Up to Speed
Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump on Monday morning, saying that special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment to his position violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution. “The Appointments Clause is a critical constitutional restriction stemming from the separation of powers, and it gives to Congress a considered role in determining the propriety of vesting appointment power for inferior officers,” Cannon wrote in her order. “The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers.” Her decision is expected to be appealed.
Former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has been invited to speak at the Republican National Convention this week, NBC News and other outlets reported over the weekend. As of last week, Haley had not received an invitation to speak at the convention despite releasing her delegates and asking them to vote for former President Donald Trump. On more scheduling notes, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin will deliver a prime-time speech at the convention Monday night, according to a memo from the governor’s team, and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders will speak the following night, she posted on X.
Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine, said she will not vote for Trump or President Joe Biden and instead write in Nikki Haley’s name in November. “Ultimately, I have to do what I think is right,” she said at an event in her state. “I publicly endorsed Nikki Haley, and I wanted her to win. She’s still my favorite candidate, and I think she could do a great job. She’s my choice, and that’s how I’m going to express it.” Fellow moderate Senate Republican Lisa Murkowski said in March she would not vote for Trump but did not indicate whether she would choose Biden or another option.
The National Republican Congressional Committee raised $37 million in the second quarter of 2024, including $14.3 million in the month of June, it announced Friday. The committee said the totals represented its best haul ever for the second quarter of an election year and for the month of June in an election year. It will need to compete with its Democratic counterpart, which has yet to release its fundraising numbers for the quarter. The House Republican campaign arm previously announced that it outpaced its Democratic counterpart in fundraising for May.
Vulnerable Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown’s reelection campaign raised $12.8 million in the second fundraising quarter of 2024, Axios first reported Thursday. Brown—who outraised his Trump-backed Republican challenger Bernie Moreno by a ratio of nearly 6-to-1, according to first quarter numbers—is facing a tough battle to retain his seat in a race that may decide party control of the next Senate. Despite Trump’s consistent polling lead in the Buckeye State, Brown has remained competitive due to his popularity and populist political stances.
The Democratic Party’s 2024 platform will focus heavily on contrasting itself with Trump, according to a draft released Saturday by the Democratic National Committee. Trump’s name appears nearly 150 times in the 81-page document, as reported by Politico. The draft platform also outlines Biden’s wish for a “durable peace” in the Israel-Gaza war and support for codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law. The DNC’s platform committee is scheduled to vote on the draft Tuesday.
Jury deliberations in the federal corruption trial of New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez and two co-defendants will continue today in a Manhattan courthouse. Jury members, who began deliberations on Friday, are weighing whether Menendez is guilty of 16 felony counts of bribery, extortion, fraud, obstruction of justice, and acting as an illegal foreign agent. Menendez is accused of using his former chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to advance Egyptian and Qatari interests in exchange for lavish gifts. Menendez, a three-term incumbent, is running for reelection as a longshot independent candidate after many Democrats called for his resignation from office.
Republicans Look to Reset Their Message on Unity
MILWAUKEE—The convention granting Donald Trump his third consecutive Republican presidential nomination, unfolding here Monday amid the specter of a failed assassination attempt on his life, is set for a last-minute rewrite.
Political operatives close to Trump and Republican National Committee officials said in interviews ahead of Day 1 that they expected the convention’s legion of prominent speakers to lower the temperature in prepared remarks that will still be designed to make a blistering case for ousting President Joe Biden. Of course, tone and tenor are in the eye of the beholder.
Prominent Republicans boosting the former president’s bid to return to the White House have not been ordered by the Trump campaign or the RNC to weaken their arguments against Biden’s leadership and agenda. No doubt, many Democrats who watch the televised festivities will conclude not much has changed since Saturday’s shooting at a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania left one attendee dead and others injured—including the 45th president, who was grazed by a bullet.
“The politicians, I think, are probably all rethinking what they have to say,” Trump confidant Corey Lewandowski told reporters Sunday evening during a stroll through the Fiserv Forum arena in downtown Milwaukee—the largest city in swing-state Wisconsin. “I think, obviously, you’re going to see a call, on both sides—particularly on the other side—to lower the vitriol.”
David Bossie, an informal Trump adviser and elected RNC member, said taking into account the tragic events of the weekend and Trump’s brush with death does not necessitate turning the celebration to nominate him must turn into a staid affair.
“We’re never going to forget what happened. But that doesn’t mean that this week, which is an opportunity for us to show the American people, through this prime-time television production, the importance of why Donald Trump must get back into the White House,” Bossie said. “His leadership will help fix these problems that the American people are feeling.”
As yet another reminder that the election season—and partisan politics—continues, the Trump campaign is using the assassination attempt to raise money. On Sunday, a series of email fundraising appeals were issued using the iconic photograph of Trump making a defiant fist in the air as Secret Service agents rushed him to safety amid the gunfire. “Fear not,” read one such email. “I am Donald Trump and I will make America great again.” And another: “Never surrender.”
Trump over the weekend told the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito in an interview that, in light of the shooting, he was scrapping the original, polarizing convention speech he had planned for Thursday evening, when he will formally accept the GOP nomination. Instead, Trump said, he plans to deliver a softer appeal for change, focused on American unity.
“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger,” Trump said. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”
But the list of Republican speakers previewed for this week in Milwaukee could still feature some rather polarizing politics and rhetorical invective. Among those scheduled to deliver an address from the dais are Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene of Georgia; conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who runs Turning Point USA; and media personality Tucker Carlson.
The Trump campaign and the RNC are keeping most details under wraps. On Monday morning, they held a news conference to highlight programming for the first day. But after reporters had assembled for the event, Trump campaign officials informed journalists that all information was off the record, for planning purposes only.
Democrats Shift Their Messaging, Too
The political wake of Saturday’s shooting is hitting the Biden campaign, too, as the president’s team has scrambled to respond appropriately to the attempted assassination of his political rival.
Since Saturday evening, the Biden campaign has effectively “gone dark,” pausing its political advertisements and public campaign activities out of respect for the situation facing the former president. Expect that pause to lift on Tuesday morning as President Joe Biden and the Democratic party kick back into their plan to counterprogram the GOP convention in Milwaukee.
But Biden’s Sunday night address, about what the president called “the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics,” reflected how Biden has temporarily pulled away from campaigning against Trump. It also demonstrated how the push by many Democrats to get Biden to withdraw from the race over concerns about his age and ability has stalled—though perhaps just temporarily.
“Yesterday’s shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania calls on all of us to take a step back,” Biden said, sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office—an image meant to convey that the Democratic president remains in charge.
He added that he spoke with Trump on Saturday night shortly after the shooting, which he characterized as an attempt to assassinate the former president. Biden emphasized the need to “cool it down” on heated political rhetoric, citing a number of incidents in recent years where political figures from both parties have been the targets or attempted targets of political assassins—though he failed to mention specific examples of assassins targeting Republicans or conservatives, including Rep. Steve Scalise or Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
According to a Biden campaign official, the president’s plan to conduct an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News on Monday night will shift slightly, with the interview happening at the White House instead of Austin, Texas, as previously scheduled. After that, the campaign against Trump will be back up.
“??Following the president’s interview Monday evening, both the DNC and the campaign will continue drawing the contrast between our positive vision for the future and Trump and Republicans’ backwards-looking agenda over the course of the week,” the campaign official told Dispatch Politics.
Democrats don’t see their attempts to highlight what they consider Trump’s dangers to the country at odds with the need to tone down the rhetoric.
“Two things can be true at once: Another Trump presidency is a threat to democracy, and political violence of any kind is unacceptable,” one Democratic operative told Dispatch Politics. “I think for the rest of the cycle we’ll be able to effectively carry both of those messages simultaneously. They’re not mutually exclusive.”
But the question of whether Biden is the most effective standard bearer remains, even if the shooting has stanched the constant drip of public calls from Democrats for the president to step aside. His brief address on Sunday was a display of many of the flaws that began the talk of pushing him out. Biden repeatedly referred to the need to solve political disagreements not with violence but at the ballot box—but garbled the phrase so that it sounded like “battle box.” He also stumbled and struggled to speak fluently even as he read the speech from a teleprompter.
“Biden probably benefits as the intense focus is now off him,” one Democratic consultant told Dispatch Politics, who added that the fundamental flaws with Biden’s age haven’t changed.
“Only a new nominee can command enough attention to possibly succeed now,” the consultant said.
Notable and Quotable
“We gotta turn the rhetoric down. We gotta turn the temperature down in this country. We need leaders of all parties, on both sides, to call that out and make sure that happens so that we can go forward and maintain our free society that we all are blessed to have.”
—Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on NBC’s TODAY, July 14, 2024.
