Power Up: Trump and GOP go all in on law-and-order message as Kenosha protests continue

They're aiming to make law and order the central message in the campaign against Joe Biden, who they argue is complicit in calls to defund the police made by far-left extremists (he opposes defunding the police).

• “You won't be safe in Joe Biden's America,” Pence claimed before a crowd at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Md.
• “The intense focus on the rioting amounted to an acknowledgment by Republicans that they must reframe the election to make urban unrest the central theme and shift attention away from the deaths and illnesses of millions of people from the coronavirus,” write Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns of the New York Times.

They pointed to the scene playing out in Kenosha, Wis., in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake Jr., which left him paralyzed from the waist down. Republican denunciations of “violent mobs” in “radical Democratic cities" didn't note that self-declared militia members and armed counter-protesters have contributed to and instigated such violence.

It remains unclear if 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse is a member of any of the such groups. But he was charged Wednesday in Wisconsin “with homicide after two people were killed and another seriously wounded by gunfire,” our colleagues report. 

Pence, Lara Trump and others dug in to their portrayal of Trump “as a strong defender of conservative principles on law enforcement, defense and the economy — emphasizing his law-and-order credentials.” They failed to mention Blake nor did they denounce Rittenhouse specifically — even as sports leagues came to a halt when the Milwaukee Bucks, who play near Kenosha, refused to take the court for a playoff game to protest police brutality. 

• “Let me be clear, the violence must stop — whether in Minnesota, Portland or Kenosha,” said Pence, who accepted the formal nomination for a second term last night. “We will have law and order on the streets of America.”
• “In recent months, we've seen weak, spineless politicians seek control of our great American cities to violent mobs,” Lara Trump said. “Defund the police is the rallying cry for the new radical Democrat Party. Joe Biden will not do what it takes to maintain order to keep our children safe in our neighborhoods and in their schools, to restore our American way of life.
• “The differences between Trump-Pence and Biden-Harris are crystal clear,” Michael “Mick” McHale, a retired Florida police officer who heads the National Association of Police Organizations contended. “Your choices are the most pro-law enforcement president we've ever had, or the most radical anti-police ticket in history.”

The apocalyptic warnings, however, skipped over a different reality in Trump's America: Over 175,000 Americans have died from the novel coronavirus, a soaring unemployment rate due to the virus, and the rise of far-right extremist movements. 

Pence cast Biden as a “Trojan horse for a radical left,” and falsely claimed Biden supports open borders and defunding police departments; Biden's platform on justice and policing calls for a $300 million increase in law enforcement funding. Pence also criticized Biden for failing to condemn violence in the wake of protests. But Biden's campaign released a video hours earlier that did just that:  

• “Burning down communities is not protest, it's needless violence. Violence that endangers lives, violence that guts businesses and shutters businesses that serve the community. That's wrong,” Biden said in a video posted on Twitter.  
• By the numbers: “On issues, Biden has a 20-point advantage on who is more trusted to deal with the coronavirus outbreak, a 25-point advantage on race relations and a nine-point advantage on crime and safety,” a Washington Post-ABC News poll found in July.
• “Trump is the president,” Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the Associated Press's Russ Bynum. “So it’s a little bit strange for the incumbent president to be running on a platform of: `We’ve got these terrible problems. Elect me and I’ll solve them.’”

Alternative messaging: Pence didn't directly reference Blake, saying Americans don't have to  “choose between supporting law enforcement, and standing with African American neighbors to improve the quality of life in our cities and towns.” 

But the veep highlighted the killing of a police officer during protests in Oakland, Calif. That suspect “was an adherent of the ‘boogaloo boys,’ a growing online extremist movement that has sought to use peaceful protests against police brutality to spread fringe views and ignite a race war,” our colleague Katie Shepherd reported earlier this summer. 

• “Militia-style groups and their sympathizers have become a regular fixture in the United States this summer, appearing at dozens of events and confronting racial justice protesters,” Joshua Partlow, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Mark Guarino report. “Experts who track militia activity have been warning that the proliferation of powerful weapons in untrained hands during tense protests is a recipe for bloodshed.”
• “The numbers are overwhelming: Most of the violence is coming from the extreme right wing,” Clint Watts, a former FBI agent who studies extremist political activity, warned our colleague Craig Timberg in June. 
• “A review of 27 deaths linked to either protests or subsequent violence since late May indicates that those ultimately alleged to be culpable, in cases where a suspect or perpetrator were identified, were almost never actually part of the protest movement,” Philip Bump reports. 
• Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who went viral for confronting a Black Lives Matter protest with a handgun and a rifle this summer, were featured at the GOP gathering even though they face felony charges for threatening protesters with firearms.

Rittenhouse's alleged motives are unclear, but “it's impossible not to notice how [the Trump campaign's] rhetoric echoes in what appears to have happened in Kenosha,” Bump argues. 

• “The law enforcement — obsessed 17-year-old who was charged with shooting and killing two people … appeared in the front row at a Donald Trump rally in January,” BuzzFeed News's Ellie Hall, Amber Jamieson, Tasneem Nashrulla, and Kadia Goba report. “Kyle Howard Rittenhouse’s social media presence is filled with him posing with weapons, posting ‘Blue Lives Matter,’ and supporting Trump for president.” 
• Fox News host Tucker Carlson defended Rittenhouse on Wednesday night: “People in charge from the governor of Wisconsin on down refused to enforce the law … They stood back and they watched Kenosha burn. So are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder? How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would? "

Several Black men who spoke in support of Trump last night continue made the case the president is not racist, despite polls showing that many Americans believe he is. “It hurts my soul to hear the terrible names that people call Donald — the worst one is ‘racist,'" said former pro football star Herschel Walker, who has been friends with Trump for decades.  

• Civil rights activist and Trump supporter Clarence Henderson claimed  Trup “has done more for black Americans in four years than Joe Biden has done in 50.” 
• There were no explicit mentions of the sports league strikes but Henderson encouraged “peaceful protest”: “Our actions inspired similar protests throughout the South against racial injustice. And in the end, segregation was abolished and our country moved a step closer to true equality for all,” he said. “That’s what actual peaceful protest can accomplish.”

Trump and the GOP have long condemned peaceful protest from athletes like former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and others. The historic protests from major sports leagues that unfolded at the same time as the RNC's programming presented a jarring culture clash: 

• “…the president’s gleeful culture-war attack on the former N.F.L. quarterback Colin Kaepernick — who took a knee during the national anthem four years ago Wednesday to protest racism and police shootings — and his response to the current uprising over systemic racism seems to have steeled the determination of Black athletes across many sports,” the New York Times's Glenn Thrush reports. 
• “Starting with the Milwaukee Bucks, six NBA teams stopped dribbling because too many fellow citizens would rather they shut up and watch a man get shot in the back without feeling a sense of desperation,” Washington Post columnist Jerry Brewer writes. 
• “I commend the players on the @Bucks for standing up for what they believe in, coaches like @DocRivers, and the @NBA and @WNBA for setting an example. It’s going to take all our institutions to stand up for our values,” former president Barack Obama tweeted. 

Outside the Beltway

HURRICANE LAURA BARRELS INTO LOUISIANA: “Hurricane Laura slammed ashore in southwestern coastal Louisiana early Thursday with a ferocity that this region has never previously endured. The storm made landfall at 1 a.m. near Cameron, La. about 35 miles east of the Texas border," Andrew Freedman, Jason Samenow and Derek Hawkins report this morning.

Potentially historic storm surge is expected: “Laura struck near high tide and is predicted to inundate coastal areas of western Louisiana to the Texas border in up to 15 to 20 feet of water, perhaps the largest storm surge in the Gulf of Mexico since Hurricane Katrina in 2005,” our colleagues write.

One of the most powerful storms ever: “Hurricane Laura pounded the Louisiana and Texas coasts as it made landfall near Cameron, La., as a Category 4 storm early Thursday, delivering a barrage of 150-mile-per-hour winds and a wall of water that was predicted to reach as high as 20 feet,” the New York Times reports. 

• “Know that it’s just you and God,” Mayor Thurman Bartie of Port Arthur, Texas, warned residents who did not evacuate.
• “I think there’s some pretty compelling evidence that has been coming out in recent years—although it’s not clear that either of these storms will do this—but I do think there’s pretty solid evidence that climate change is causing storms to slow down or linger more—in some cases, stall out, as we've seen with [Hurricane] Harvey and Florence,” Meteorologist J. Marshall Shepherd told Scientific American's Andrea Thompson in an interview. 
• “You often hear that climate change is a threat multiplier for national security, but it’s an impact multiplier for hurricanes,” said Shepherd. 

The people

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: What else happened on night three.

A night riddled with falsehoods: “The third night of the Republican National Convention yet again offered a cascade of false claims, especially in [Pence’s] speech. Here are 19 claims that caught our attention. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios for a roundup of statements made during convention events,” our Fact Checker colleagues Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly report.

• Trump did not halt all travel from China: “Pence greatly overstates the impact of Trump’s action …,” our colleagues write of the vice president's claim that Trump's move “saved an untold number of American lives.”
• American has not achieved energy independence: Pence made this false claim while tacking on two other ones that Biden “would abolish fossil fuels and fracking.” 
• Our colleagues were brutal in their response, “All of this is false — and we fact check these lines so often from Trump, it seems like speechwriting malpractice or an intentional effort to deceive for Pence to include them in a prime-time speech.”

Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) made exaggerated claims about Trump's pandemic response: “The administration delivered public, private and semi-automated lab testing approvals at blinding speed.”

• The facts: “It has been widely documented that the administration bungled the rollout of testing for the novel coronavirus. The president spent nearly two months issuing confusing and contradictory signals — leaving the bureaucratic machine of the U.S. government to chart the course for the pandemic response.”

Former NFL player Jack Brewer dug way back for a false claim about Trump's response to Charlottesville: “Are you going to allow the media to lie to you by falsely claiming that he said they were ‘very fine’ white supremacists in Charlottesville? He didn’t say that. It’s a lie.”

• The facts: Trump made a number of contradictory remarks, but anyway you slice it what happened is clear: “The problem for Trump is that there were only neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the Friday night rally on Aug. 11 He asserted there were people who were not alt-right who were ‘very quietly’ protesting the removal of Lee’s statue. It’s possible Trump became confused and was really referring to the Saturday rallies. But that’s also wrong.”

CNN's fact checker extraordinaire Daniel Dale almost lost his breath correcting the falsehoods:

O say can you see … the lack of masks: The crowd gathered for Pence's speech at Fort McHenry, where a battle during the war of 1812 inspired “The Star Spangled Banner,” did not look to be observing proper pandemic protocols.

• “But just moments after presenting himself as a reassuring authority on the raging virus, the maskless vice president, along with [Trump], walked over to greet the mostly mask-free members of the audience,” Politico's Caitlin Oprysko reports. 
• “The lack of masks and social distancing served as a jarring contrast. And it reaffirmed that while Trump and Pence belatedly accepted public health experts’ recommendations on face coverings and distancing, they are still eager to embrace their base’s skepticism of such precautions.”

Meanwhile: “An abrupt shift this week in government testing guidelines for Americans exposed to the novel coronavirus was directed by the White House’s coronavirus task force, alarming outside public health experts who warn the change could hasten the disease’s spread,” Amy Goldstein and Lena Sun report. 

• "The new guidance — introduced this week, without any announcement, on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website — replaces advice that everyone who has been in close contact with an infected person should get tested to find out whether they had contracted the virus. Instead, the guidance says those without symptoms ‘do not necessarily need a test.’”
• “I was under general anesthesia in the operating room last Thursday and was not part of any discussion or deliberation regarding these new testing recommendations. . . . I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption asymptomatic spread is not of great concern. In fact, it is," Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN's Sanjay Gupta. 

Former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz aided a full assault on Biden's faith: “The Biden/Harris ticket is the most radically pro abortion campaign in history. They and other politicians are Catholics in name only and abandon innocent lives,” Holtz said.

• Trump himself previously attacked Biden's faith by claiming he was “against God.” Biden responded by saying his Catholic faith the “bedrock foundation of my life.”

A rare speech that didn't include the words “Donald Trump”:  “Rep. Dan Crenshaw, who faces a difficult reelection this fall in his suburban Texas district, used his speech at the convention to offer praise for military heroes as well as struggling everyday Americans, avoiding partisan sniping at a time when most other speakers blasted the Democrats,” Rachael Bade reports.

• “We are a country of heroes,” he said, later adding: “Every single day we see them if you just know where to look. It’s the nurse who volunteers for back-to-back shifts caring for covid patients because she feels that’s her duty. It’s the parent who will relearn algebra because there’s no way they’re letting their kid fall behind while schools are closed. And it’s the cop that gets spit on one day and will save a child’s life the next.” 

Famed Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng torched Beijing's Communist Party: “Chen’s remarks come as Trump has sought to present himself as tough on Beijing and Biden as too weak to stand up to President Xi Jinping’s regime. Yet Chen’s appearance underscored an area where Biden’s camp views Trump as weak: speaking out on human rights violations,” David Nakamura reports.

In the Media

IN OTHER NEWS: 

🚨:  “Kevin Mayer, the chief executive of the Chinese-owned video app TikTok, said on Wednesday that he was resigning after the company came under sustained pressure from the Trump administration over its ties to China,” the New York Times’s Mike Isaac scooped last night.

• “In a note to employees, which was reviewed by The New York Times, Mr. Mayer said that a series of changes to TikTok’s structure prompted him to leave. The app, which is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance, has been ordered by the White House to sell its U.S. operations by mid-September. Mr. Mayer, 58, did not address the specific timing of his departure.”

About RNC Night 2: “Sudha Narayanan and Neimat Awadelseid looked forward to Tuesday—the day, after a yearslong process, they would become U.S. citizens. They found out only minutes before the ceremony that President Trump would attend, and they didn’t know it would be aired during the Republican convention that night,” the Wall Street Journal’s Tarini Parti and Michael Bender report.

• “Several critics said in interviews that it was inappropriate not to tell the participants that they would be part of a political event, and noted that the Trump administration had sought to curb illegal and legal immigration.”

More Republicans for Biden, the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin scoops: “More than 100 former staff members for Senator John McCain are supporting Joseph R. Biden Jr., a show of support across the political divide that they hope amplifies the ‘Country First’ credo of the former Arizona senator.”

• “The list of signatories includes a range of people — from chiefs of staff in Mr. McCain’s Senate office to junior aides on his campaigns — who worked for him over his 35 years in Congress and during two presidential bids.”

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