THE Republican National Convention was in bullish mood today after formally adopting former president Donald Trump as its 2024 presidential candidate on Monday night.
Videos at the conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, mocked sitting President Joe Biden’s physical and mental frailty, which has become a source of deep anxiety for the Democrats after high-profile lapses including incomprehensible remarks during a televised debate with Mr Trump and referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin” of Russia during last week’s Nato summit.
Mr Trump received a hero’s welcome when he appeared on Monday, ear bandaged because of its grazing during a weekend assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
Lara Trump, the ex-president’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, hinted that the party continues to dismiss the last election result as fraudulent, an unevidenced claim made by Mr Trump which inspired the January 6 2021 Capitol Hill mob incursion into the US Congress.
Urging delegates to vote early where they could — a reversal of Mr Trump’s previous claims that postal ballots are unreliable — she said Republicans needed to ensure their win was “too big to rig.
“What a time to be a member of the Republican Party,” she gushed. “We will be the party [that] through Donald J Trump saves the United States of America.”
Mr Trump says he would remove taxes on tips for serving staff, try to cut corporation tax further and impose tariffs on imports from foreign countries, something the Biden administration already does with regard to the US’s main rival, China.
The former president also pledges to increase exploitation of fossil fuels, investing in more extraction of oil, coal and natural gas, and enact “the largest deportation programme [for immigrants] in American history.”
Though most US unions are emphatic in their support for re-electing Mr Biden given the Republicans’ association with union-bashing and “right-to-work” laws that undermine union rights, the president of the 1.3 million-strong Teamsters general union Sean O’Brien addressed the convention, saying he would not be “beholden to anyone or any party” and that workers were being sold out to banks, big tech and the corporate elite by the whole US establishment.
