The NPR Politics Podcast - What To Know About The Republican National Convention

Episode Date: August 23, 2020

President Trump and the Republican party will lay out their vision for Trump's re-election all week. The NPR Politics Podcast breaks down what to watch and listen for. This episode: congressional correspondent Susan Davis, White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe, and senior editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Brad from the South Bronx. I just hit 1,500 miles on my daily pandemic bike ride from Yankee Stadium to the southern tip of Manhattan and back. This podcast was recorded at 221 p.m. on Sunday, August 23rd. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be riding my bike down to take a picture of the Statue of Liberty almost every day. All right, here's the show. I think I got a little flustered. Did he say 1,500 miles? That's a long way from Yankee Stadium to the bottom tip of Manhattan. That is, all right.

That's great. No, congratulations. I've been, I've started working out a little bit. I'm kind of proud of myself. Getting fit, getting the fitness in? You know, just to try to like run away from the pandemic. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. So this week, the Republican National Convention kicks off in Charlotte, North Carolina. And we know that President Trump really, really wanted to have an in-person traditional convention experience. But that didn't really work out. So, Aisha, what do we know about how the convention is going to go this week? So they didn't get to do, you know, a big thing in Charlotte or briefly they were going to do something in Jacksonville that didn't work out. But what they are going to do is they're going to have a series of nights focused on, you know, America, land of greatness, land of opportunity, and, you know,

these different themes for each night. And so President Trump is traveling to North Carolina tomorrow. You know, he may be stopping at the convention to speak in Charlotte. There is going to be a roll call tomorrow in Charlotte. And so we will see that. And then on the various nights, like you're going to have on Wednesday night, you'll have Vice President Pence speaking in Baltimore at Fort McHenry. And you will have President Trump speaking on Thursday night, delivering his keynote at the White House on the White House lawn. Domenico, what do we know about what's going to happen each night? What are the big themes? What are the sort of message of this convention? Well, I mean, I think that they have to do a

lot of things coming out of this. I mean, we've heard this sort of conflicting message from Republicans in saying that they want to have a more upbeat convention compared to what Democrats had, which Democrats would argue was talking about going from darkness into light, which is for them a more hopeful view. But you had them saying they want an uplifting message. Well, I think we're going to see something that is going to be very uplifting and positive. That's what I'd like it to be. Now, that's kind of tough, though, because if you just listen to what the president has said over the last couple of days, it didn't exactly sound so uplifting. I'm the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy, madness and chaos. And that's what it is. I'm representing you.

I'm just here. It seems like such a hard thing to strike, the tone here, because on one hand, conventions are supposed to be uplifting. They're supposed to be sort of rah-rah rallying events. But he's also the president during a pandemic. We have an economic crisis. There's still protests all across the country. I mean, it seems like a fine political line to look like you're recognizing reality, but also trying to have a good moment.

It seems like what President Trump has tried to do is to focus on what he feels like is the positive. They are making the argument of all the things that he did over the past four years, the economy that was booming before the coronavirus hit. And then for the main issues that the country is facing right now, whether it's, you know, racial tensions, you know, protests, putting that on the Democrats and saying it's the Democrats that are leading this and that President Trump is standing in the way of the chaos that the Democrats would bring. That's their argument. What I do find interesting, though, is that they're saying that the Democrats are being so dark.

But President Trump, when he ran for office, was I mean, his whole message was America is not great right now. I'm going to make it great. And this is American carnage. You know, the country's in horrible shape and I'm coming in to fix it. That was his message, which is kind of similar to what Biden is saying now. And all of the issues that he keeps talking about now, you know, with whether it's, you know, Portland or Seattle or Chicago or any of these other places where he's warning that there's going to be there's violence in these places that could sweep every town in the country. That's happening under his presidency. I mean, he would argue that these are Democrats who are running these cities, but Democrats been running these cities for 100 years. How much of this at this convention do you think needs to be about Joe Biden? How hard does Donald Trump have to swing at Joe Biden considering

Biden's relative strength in the polls right now? I think they're in a tough position because Trump has tried to throw a lot at Biden that so far hasn't stuck, you know, saying that Biden is beholden by the radical left, that he's, if you vote for him, is going to be crime that sweeps the country because he's in favor of, quote unquote, defunding the police like the left. So that's the argument that he's been trying to make. So far, it hasn't stuck with the middle, which is a group of people that Trump has not been able to totally appeal to at this point. I mean, suburbs, you know, Republicans up and down the ballot are worried that with Trump at the top that they're going to lose in the suburbs. So he needs to do something to win over those voters who need to get him over that sort of 46% ceiling that he looks like he's at. He hasn't averaged more than 46% in the polls against Biden since Biden has become the nominee.

And he got 46% in the general election last time. And if you get less than the third party vote from the last time around, how do you wind up winning if you get less than the third party vote from last time around, how do you wind up winning if you don't win over that sliver of people? That's really important for him. He needs to make this election a choice, not a referendum. And so far, it's largely been a referendum. I think that we've gotten a little bit of a taste of what the campaign seems to want to make the message, which is Joe Biden had his chance for 47 years. He's been in office a really long time. Why didn't he fix all of these issues?

And this could be for President Trump because this will be more scripted. And if he can stick to the script, I think that's what the campaign is hoping that they'll actually be able to get a message that will stick because often President Trump, when he's talking, it's all over the place. It's also interesting to me, too, because Trump is also a showman like he gets TV. He understands this experience. So I think that he is someone as a candidate probably personally really has a vision of how he wants this to go.

We know ratings are really important to him. Republicans have attacked Democrats for not having great ratings at their convention. Like he seems to really want a great TV experience this week. He does, but they're behind the Democrats as far as the planning goes. And I'm going to be really curious to see how they pull off the second virtual convention when Democrats clearly had a pretty glossy, you know, rollout. I mean, they had these glossy videos. They had a lot of pre-taped, pre-packaged things that Trump was sort of making fun of.

So I think you can expect a lot more live events than you saw with the Democrats. You know, and how do they... Risky, too. It's very risky. But if they pull it off, it'll certainly show a degree of competence. If they don't, that's certainly going to stand out, given what we saw last week with the Democrats. And the Trump campaign does have like a very large virtual, you know, online footprint. So they know how to put on these these virtual events because they do it every night for their campaign.

So maybe that will help them, you know, when it comes to this week. And you have two former Apprentice producers who are actually producing this thing. You had a couple Hollywood guys producing for the Democrats, a couple Apprentice guys producing for the Republicans. What else do you expect? I didn't actually know that about the Apprentice producers. That's pretty funny. It all comes back around. All right, well, let's take a quick break. And when we get back more on what we're watching for this week during the Republican National Convention. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, developing solutions to support strong families and communities to help ensure a brighter future for America's children.

More information is available at AECF.org. Hey, I'm Sam Sanders, host of It's Been a Minute. On my show, we catch you up on all the things in news and culture. The Space Force? I totally missed this. What is the Space Force? Stop it. Stacy, you don't know about the Space Force? No. What? I've been in my apartment for four months. Oh, man.

Crushing it, Stacy. Thank you. Feeling good. News without the despair. Listen now to the It's Been a Minute podcast from NPR. And we're back. And Ayesha, do you think that the campaign has done enough to frame sort of what a positive four more years of a Trump presidency would do for the country? It seems like so much of it has been focused on, wow, if Joe Biden and the Democrats win, it's going to be, you know, murder and blood

in the streets. But what's the case for Trump's another four years of Trump from the campaign's perspective? Well, President Trump has had problems answering this question of what is your second term agenda? You know, he was famously asked us about Hannity and he said a whole bunch of stuff that didn't really amount to a second term agenda. He's worked on that since then. A lot of this seems to boil down to making America great again, again. So essentially, essentially, it's I built a great economy and polls do show, I think Domenico would say that, you know, Americans trust him on the economy and that he will build it again. And so that's why you hear him talking

about a super V and talking V-shaped recovery. So I think that's the message that they're trying to get through. Clearly, the president is focused on the stock market, on the economy, on making that better. But, you know, we already juiced it in the first term with that tax cut. What do you do in a second term to try to turn it around? Do you do more tax cuts? You know, what is it ideologically that you can possibly do? He hasn't really answered that question yet. It's going to be interesting to see if he lays out anything for a concrete second term agenda. One thing I'm really fascinated to watch for is how they sort of talk about and address the pandemic. You know, the president has not really wanted to confront the tougher realities about the pandemic. The death toll is still climbing. You know, American life is not in

any way back to normal. Do they talk about it? Do they gloss around it? Like, how do they confront the reality of everyday American life right now? It seems like a lot of what they want to try to do is focus on China. So I think you'll hear a lot more about that, about how China gave us this, you know, this virus. It's, you know, it's their fault. They're the ones who have brought us down. And so President Trump will, you know, president trump will you know work to you know is doing the best that he can uh with the situation that he has been presented it's a hard argument to make when you know you have fought more than five million americans who've gotten the virus

and the u.s numbers in some cases look far worse than some other developed countries around the world, you know, to make the case that it's just China's fault. So far, that hasn't really worked in when we looked at polling, because, you know, a good majority of Americans, you know, are saying that they disapprove of how the president has handled coronavirus. Of course, nobody would have blamed President Trump for the coronavirus in the first place. So kind of blaming China doesn't really get to the next step. But even like culturally, you know, Democrats made such a show or such a point to be social distanced in their videos, to wear masks. Jill and Joe Biden wore masks right after he did his acceptance speech and like the

walk-off shot, you know, like all of those were very political choices. And it will be very interesting to see if Republicans make any similar aesthetic choices, not wearing masks, not social distancing. Those are choices, too, you know. Or even the drive through the drive in thing that Biden did at the end, you know, was this sort of look like a tailgate, you know, and you've got fireworks going off. But it was intentional to do it outside to say that they're to show they're being safe. One of the things I'm really curious to see when we talk about how this convention looks, because one thing that the party is trying to do is expand the tent and expand what a Republican

looks like, because it is frankly, an overwhelmingly white male party. And so the voices that they're choosing to elevate and focus on are part of that intention. And I think one of the things a lot of people will be watching for is what is the kind of presence of African American voices? How does the president talk about race relations, especially as polling has told us that this is something that is another issue driving a lot of people to vote this November. Yeah. And I just got an email from the RNC pointing out the diversity of the speakers listing all of the African-American speakers. You will have South Carolina Senator Tim Scott is speaking. You will also have the highest ranking

or one of the highest ranking African-American officials in the White House. Jerron Smith will be speaking on Thursday. Also speaking on Thursday will be Alice Johnson. She was the woman who had her sentence commuted by President Trump, a black woman. She had spent 22 years. So I think that a lot of times when they have talked about Alice Johnson's story, it has been to show a softer side of President Trump.

They featured her in the Super Bowl ad. It's when they've tried to show him softer side of President Trump. They featured her in the Super Bowl ad. It's when they've tried to show him reaching out, if not to African-Americans, if it's for those suburban women, for those women who may be concerned that President Trump is racist, this is a way to say, oh, he helped this black grandmother.

So it's interesting to me that that's the story they wanna highlight on Thursday when President Trump will be speaking. There's a huge empathy gap he help this black grandmother? So it's interesting to me that that's the story they want to highlight on Thursday when President Trump will be speaking. There's a huge empathy gap between President Trump and Joe Biden. So, you know, I think he's got to do whatever he can to try to close that. He's been down by a lot in polling about who's best to handle race relations. So I think you're exactly right that he's going to talk a lot about criminal justice reform, what he's done, and try to highlight as many of those diverse speakers within the Republican Party as he possibly can. I think you're right, Aisha, even if it's not to win over black voters, but to show those suburban voters, white voters, that he's not racist and

that he's trying to reach out. All right. Well, I think that's a wrap for today. The convention kicks off tomorrow, and you can find special coverage of the roll call on your local NPR station, and every night starting at 9 p.m. Eastern, coverage of the main event. To find your station, head to npr.org slash stations, or just ask your smart speaker to play NPR.

We'll, of course, be back every night to break down the key moments. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.