The trade-off at Trump’s Republican convention: No stadium crowds, but full control
After changing cities twice and pining for a crowd, in the end, President Donald Trump may get a Republican National Convention this week that works to his advantage: A controlled, scripted show that is all about him.
Republicans who had planned to use the convention as a battleground for the future direction of their party will have to wait, unable in this pandemic-era event to bend ears in back rooms or win over party support on a packed convention floor.
Instead, RNC 2020 will aim for the appearance of a thoroughly unified party, rallying behind its divisive standard-bearer as he trails former Vice President Joe Biden, this year’s Democratic presidential nominee, in pre-convention polls.
“The Republican Party under Donald Trump is not a cast of many, it’s a show of one, so it will all be about Trump, not the future,” said Ryan Williams, a spokesman for 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney at the time of his convention.
Those looking for divisions within the GOP will have to look elsewhere – including at the Democratic National Convention last week, which featured several prominent, lifelong Republicans who have rejected Trump’s takeover of their party establishment.
“It benefits him because it keeps the spotlight squarely on Trump and his campaign,” said Alex Conant, a Republican political consultant and former communications director for Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Without being able to gauge the audience, it’s much harder to gain insight on what this means for the future of the party. So much of what happens at the conventions in terms of jockeying for the future happens behind the scenes.”
“All that is gone,” he said, “and all we’re going to have is largely scripted, largely pre-taped messages.”
The Republican convention that will unfold over livestreams across the country this week is the third iteration of the event that the Republican National Committee has planned in as many months. Initial plans to host the event in Charlotte, N.C., were scrapped by Trump, after state and local officials refused to allow him to pack the convention hall to full capacity during the coronavirus pandemic.
The president then named Jacksonville, Fla., as the new location for the convention’s main events, only to cancel that plan four weeks before the convention was set to begin amid a surge in COVID-19 cases there.
Those changes left the campaign scrambling to put on four nights of video-heavy programming it hopes will keep viewers engaged and entertained throughout.
In addition to former White House officials such as Tony Sayegh, one of the president’s impeachment messengers who is now helping with the convention, Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and a former television producer, has a leading role in pulling together the remote event.
A senior advisor to the Trump campaign, Lara Trump said in an interview that for all its drawbacks, the video component will allow the campaign to “tell a story and to draw people in maybe in a bit more of an emotional way.”
The president will be accepting the GOP nomination from the South Lawn of the White House, a federal property that is within his jurisdiction to gather a large crowd. First lady Melania Trump and the president’s daughter, Ivanka, a senior advisor to her father, will also speak from the White House.
Campaign aides declined to outline what pandemic precautions would be taken, other than to say they are working closely with COVID-19 advisors to make sure the event is carried out safely.
“The president will give some very specific mentions as to what he plans to do his second term in office, and I don’t think that he’s really, kind of cohesively put that all together before,” Lara Trump said of the president’s speech.
Vice President Mike Pence will deliver his speech from Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Md. All of Trump’s adult children and Lara Trump, the wife of his son Eric, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of his eldest son Donald, will be featured speakers.
The final version of RNC 2020 will not have the stadium crowds that Trump fought for. But it will be a medium the president is comfortable with – a live televised address that allows him to draw off his supporters’ energy and project an atmosphere of enthusiasm. Most of the Republican members of the House and Senate were invited to attend the president’s acceptance speech Thursday night.
“In this unusual environment, the president’s strategy has been aggressive, and I think disorienting for the Democrats,” Trump campaign advisory board member Ken Blackwell said. “What he has done is very effectively, he’s given a contrast, a visual contrast, between his energy level, his availability and his mobility, in direct contrast to Biden,” he said, reiterating one of the campaign’s main attacks on Trump’s opponent.
TRUMP’S SHOW
Conventions are often opportunities to showcase down-ballot candidates and rising stars within the political party. With truncated convention programming, there are far fewer opportunities for breakout performances.
A Republican National Committee spokesperson told McClatchy that the convention will be accompanied by “aggressive surrogate and field efforts” and that daytime programming will highlight “future leaders of our Party” and top Republican recruits for office. The Trump campaign said it plans to keep its two bus tours running in Colorado and other battleground states.
Trump on Monday will visit North Carolina, where his formal renomination as the Republican candidate for president will take place, and South Carolina. Pence has events this week in Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Republicans will also feature “every day Americans” who support the president, such as Alice Johnson, a first-time drug offender turned criminal justice advocate who was granted clemency by the president in 2018, and Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow died in the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, at their convention.
“It really felt in a lot of ways like it was very Hollywood and kind of political elites heavy on the Democrat convention, and I think our goal has always been to have this convention be the convention of the people,” Lara Trump said. “And that’s what we hope to showcase is, all of America, the Republican Party is for every person in this country.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Housing Secretary Ben Carson and Florida Lieutenant Gov. Jeanette Núñez will have speaking roles during the four days.
Some 2024 hopefuls such as Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former Kansas congressman, and Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas will be given a platform, too. Others, such as Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, are not scheduled to speak.
“This is Trump’s party,” Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump’s White House director of communications and now supports Biden, said in an interview. “In the short term, he gets a convention that benefits him because he loves the attention, and what we’ve learned about the American presidency in the last three-and-a-half years is that it’s a one-man Broadway show. There are no co-stars – there’s one spotlight. This virtual convention is going to allow him for that.”
Democrats during their convention focused on conveying a broad coalition of support for their nominee. They built a narrative around Biden’s compelling personal story and his promise to “restore the soul of the nation.”
Williams, the former Romney aide, said he anticipates that this year’s GOP convention will be about trying to “tear Biden down” and convince voters that his potential presidency would be “dangerous to the country.”
“The president has a remarkable gift for theatrics and promotion, so presumably he’ll put on a good show that will be at least interesting to people,” Williams said. “But he needs to use this convention to get his campaign back on track. He’s the underdog in this race now.”
Trump should use the convention to positively frame his response to the coronavirus and communicate how he plans to engineer an economic recovery, Republicans with convention experience said.
“The question that we’ve got to get back to,” Scott Golden, chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, said, “is which candidate do you trust to actually restore that economy.”
Referring to Biden and a running theme from the Democratic convention, he added, “I don’t know that ‘he’s a likeable guy’ is that sort of a message and quite frankly the question.”
Trump will be engaged in all four nights of his convention, including one night when he will honor frontline workers. Each night speakers will also talk about the “perils of socialism,” attributing the ideology to political and economic turmoil in Cuba and Venezuela.
Exiles from the two countries are heavily concentrated in the election battleground of South Florida.
Much like Democrats peppered their convention with former Republicans who say they are voting for Biden this year, the GOP will also broadcast testimonials from lifelong Democrats who supported Hillary Clinton and are committed to casting a ballot for Trump this year.
“We definitely want to improve on the dour and sour mood of the DNC,” Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to the president who also will be addressing the convention, told reporters last week. “The two most popular words at the Democratic convention were not ‘Joe Biden,’ they were ‘Donald Trump.’”
This story was originally published August 24, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "The trade-off at Trump’s Republican convention: No stadium crowds, but full control."
