Republican National Convention 2020: Day 2

Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi attacked Joe Biden's son's overseas business ties in an RNC speech rife with debunked conspiracies Tuesday night.

"For Joe Biden, it's been the land of opportunism, not opportunity," Bondi said.

She said Biden "has been writing the textbook on abuse of power for 40 years." She lambasted Hunter Biden's former position on the board of Ukrainian company Burisma, saying that he had "only had one qualification that mattered: He was the son of a man in charge of distributing US aid to Ukraine."

Bondi also made misleading claims about Biden's push to oust Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, making the unfounded accusation that Biden sought to have Shokin removed to halt an investigation into Burisma. Ukrainian activists and European and American diplomats had sought Shokin's ouster before Biden intervened.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly made unfounded and false claims to allege that the former vice president and his son acted corruptly in Ukraine. Bondi made no mention of the reality that Trump was impeached by the House for attempting to pressure Ukraine's president to investigate the Bidens over Hunter Biden's role on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.

Hunter Biden was only briefly featured at the Democratic National Convention last week, in a video along with his sister Ashley Biden introducing their father ahead of his Thursday night speech.

Hunter Biden in October 2019 said he used "poor judgment" in serving on the board of a Ukrainian gas company because it has become a political liability for his father. But there is no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either Biden, and no evidence Joe Biden has profited from his son's business dealings abroad.

Bondi's speech accusing Biden of nepotism was followed by a video that featured Trump's daughter Ivanka and daughter-in-law Lara, and then a speech from Trump's daughter Tiffany. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are also part of the RNC's speaking lineup this week — Trump Jr. spoke on Monday night, while Eric Trump will speak later Tuesday night.

The two are high-level executives in the Trump Organization, which has benefitted financially from Trump's presidency.

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President Donald Trump’s youngest daughter, Tiffany Trump, spoke Tuesday evening, making an appeal to young Americans to “transcend political boundaries” as they cast their ballots in the November election.

Like half-brother Donald Trump Jr.’s remarks to the convention on Monday, she declined to share personal stories about her father in her remarks, instead opting to speak to his efforts to “challenge the establishment” and briefly referencing his faith and “uncompromising heart.” Trump, 26, is the daughter of the President and Marla Maples.

Her parents divorced in 1999, and Trump was raised by her mother in California. She currently resides in Washington, DC.

And like her father, she went after the media and “tech giants” for what she described as “bias” and “manipulation,” at times questioning the veracity of the media.

But she also cast a more bipartisan tone than many of the convention’s speakers: “Our nation suffers by inhibiting our diversity of thought and inclusion of ideas. Working together outside of our political comfort zones will accomplish so much more.” 

Trump also represented the many Americans who graduated last spring and are facing a tough job market. A 2020 Georgetown Law School graduate, she nodded to those challenges.

“Our generation is unified in facing the future in uncertain times — and many of us are considering what kind of country we want to live in. As a recent graduate, I can relate to so many of you who might be looking for a job. My father built a thriving economy once, and believe me, he will do it again,” she said. 

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Cissie Graham Lynch — a member of the Trump campaign’s evangelical advisory board and the granddaughter of famed evangelist Billy Graham — said, “President Trump became the first president to talk about the importance of religious freedom at the United Nations.” 

Facts First: This is not true. Previous presidents, including Barack Obama, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, have all spoken about the importance of religious freedom in speeches to the UN General Assembly. Trump himself has previously made a narrower claim than Graham Lynch did – saying that he is the first president to host a UN meeting specifically devoted to the topic of religious freedom. (We haven’t yet looked into that Trump claim.)

In Obama’s 2015 address to the UN General Assembly, he argued that freedom of “peaceful worship” is a self-evident universal truth that is not dependent on an individual country’s culture. In 2016, he called for equal treatment for “a religious minority in Myanmar.” In his 2014 address, Obama denounced the terrorist group ISIS for starving “religious minorities.” 

George W. Bush made appeals for religious freedom in various speeches to the UN General Assembly. He said in 2005 that he has an “agenda for a freer world, where people can live and worship and raise their children as they choose.” In a 2007 address, Bush too denounced the government of Myanmar (also known as Burma) for restricting freedom of worship, and later said of the world in general, “With the commitment and courage of this chamber, we can build a world where people are free to speak, assemble, and worship as they wish.” In his 2008 address, he also called on nations to allow people to “worship as they choose.” 

In George H.W. Bush’s 1991 address, he spoke of the need to defend “inalienable human rights” such as religious freedom, saying that “government has failed” if citizens “can’t practice their religion freely.”

In Reagan’s 1986 address, he castigated the Soviet Union for persecuting religious leaders. 

Sen. Rand Paul said he’s supporting President Donald Trump because he seeks to end wars and not start them, citing Trump’s position on the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq. 

Paul said, “Joe Biden voted for the Iraq War, which President Trump has long called the worst geopolitical mistake of our generation.”

Facts First: Paul’s comments about Trump’s stance on the war are misleading. It’s true that Biden voted for the war in 2002, though he did acknowledge a few years later that his vote was a mistake.

Though Trump himself has repeatedly claimed to have opposed the war before it began, he only became an explicit opponent of the war more than a year after it began. He even expressed tentative support for the invasion in late 2002 and in his 2000 book, "The America We Deserve," Trump argued that a military strike on Iraq might be necessary.

You can read more about Trump’s past comments about the war in Iraq here.

Eveleth, Minnesota, Mayor Robert Vlaisavljevich, who says he has been a lifelong Democrat, praised President Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention and said this election, the “Iron Range’s economic future and survival is at stake.”

Vlaisavljevich said “for far too long … both parties allowed our country to be ripped off by our trading partners, especially by China.”

But he said four years after Trump was elected, “the Iron Range is roaring back to life, and we have one man to thank: President Donald Trump.” Vlaisavljevich said Trump has fulfilled his campaign promises by lowering taxes and rolling back regulations. 

He said this election, “the Iron Range’s economic future and survival is at stake, and so is America’s. We know we can count on President Trump to fight for us and win.” 

The Iron Range refers to several iron-ore mining districts around Lake Superior in the United States and Canada.

The opening hour of Tuesday's Republican National Convention offered a clear window into how President Donald Trump's campaign believes it can reach 270 electoral votes.

Three early speakers, including a dairy farmer, hailed from Wisconsin. And a lobster farmer from Maine offered a narrow, but policy-focused, case for Trump's re-election.

Trump has trailed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three states he won in 2016. Setting those aside, if he were to hold onto every other state he won that year, he'd have 259 electoral votes.

Many Republicans believe Trump's best shot at reversing his fortunes in the Upper Midwest is in Wisconsin, where a win would earn him 10 more electoral votes, totaling 269 — one away from victory.

And Maine, though a Democratic-leaning state, has two congressional districts —and splits its electoral votes, with two going to the statewide winner and one each going to the winner of those districts. If Trump were to lose the state, but win the 2nd District — a rural district where lobster farming is a major industry — he'd land at exactly 270 electoral votes and win a second term.

Nicholas Sandmann, a Kentucky teenager who was at the center of a viral video controversy, used his personal story to condemn cancel culture and argue that President Trump and conservatives are treated unfairly by the press. 

Sandmann was filmed while wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat with his student group at the Lincoln Memorial after his group encountered other groups of protesters. He sued numerous news organizations and so far, has reached settlements with The Washington Post and CNN.

Sandmann said in a speech at the Republican convention on Tuesday that after video of the interaction with protesters in Washington, DC, went public, his life changed forever.

Speaking about the lawsuits against news organizations, Sandmann said he “fought back hard to expose the media for what they did to me and I won a personal victory. While much more must be done, I look forward to the day that the media returns to providing balanced, responsible and accountable news coverage.” 

“I know President Trump hopes for that too,” he continued. “And I know you’ll agree with me when we say no one in this county has been a victim of unfair media coverage more than President Donald Trump.”

CNN's Van Jones said Tuesday that he "loved" that President Donald Trump pardon John Ponder, a convicted bank robber, but added that he felt torn about the pardon, because it was done at the Republican National Convention.

Jones, a former Obama administration official, who worked with the Trump administration on The First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill signed into law December 2018, said that Ponder was deserving of the clemency, but was inappropriate to be done at a political convention.

"What we need to do is fix the whole pardoning clemency process, make it rational, take it out of the Department of Justice and put it in the White House," Jones added. "I don't think it's appropriate to do it at a political convention, because I think you take up something that's very sacred, a sacred power the President has. And you wind up cheapening it and using it as a political stunt."

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White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow claimed that President Donald Trump inherited a “stagnant economy on the front end of recession” from the Obama administration, adding that the Trump White House rebuilt the economy in three years. 

Facts first: This is misleading. The US economy was growing 1.7% in 2016 when Trump was elected. It continued to grow after he took office, especially after the 2017 tax cuts. 

America emerged from the Great Recession in the third quarter of 2009 and grew continuously with only a few hiccups – small GDP declines in 2011 and 2014 -- from there on out throughout the rest of President Barack Obama’s presidency. The length of the expansion provoked fears of a slowdown, but the Republican-led tax cuts in 2017 produced additional growth in 2018.   

In 2019, the US economy broke the record as the longest expansion in history, but economists grew concerned that the expansion might have run its course. Slowing global economic growth and a contracting manufacturing sector in the United States were among the biggest concerns, even before the coronavirus pandemic tipped the US into recession. 

Read more from CNN’s Tara Subramaniam and Katie Lobosco here.