As Trump was officially nominated, the stage included a witch hunt for Clinton, some obtuse comments from Trump’s kids and a little about getting jobs back as per Tuesday’s Make America Work Again theme. The speeches showed plenty of passion and imbalances.
Tuesday’s official nomination of Donald Trump has secured his place as the GOP candidate on the ballot in November. The official delegate vote was cast in the first half of the second day of the Republican National Convention, with Michigan being the only state to completely abstain from voting. The second half of the evening showcased a wide range of speakers, all of whom were meant to address Tuesday’s theme of Make America Work Again.
Almost none of them did that. Instead, RNC attendees and viewers at home were treated to speeches covering Hillary Clinton and Lucifer, avocado farms and many other bizarre topics.
1 – Chris Christie’s witch hunt for Hillary Clinton
Chris Christie took the stage and became the attack dog that Donald Trump had said he wanted in a vice-president. Unfortunately for Christie, it’s still not happening. However, that didn't stop the New Jersey governor from playing prosecutor, with the RNC audience acting as the jury.
Referring to the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute Clinton over her private email server, Christie said, “Over the last eight years, we have seen this administration refuse to hold her accountable for her dismal record as secretary of state.” He went on to say, “Tonight, as a former federal prosecutor, I welcome the opportunity to hold her accountable for her performance and her character.”
From there, the man behind the 'Bridgegate' scandal laid into Clinton’s ethically questionable history. Acting as the RNC’s own Reverend Hale, he would boldly ask, “Hillary Clinton, as a failure for ruining Libya and creating a nest for terrorist activity by ISIS - guilty or not guilty?”
The crowd, in turn, screamed “guilty!” and frequently broke out into chants of “Lock her up!”
2 – Paul Ryan asks, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) came to the stage and immediately acknowledged that the “last time around I was your nominee for vice-president. It was a great honor, even if things didn’t work out quite according to plan.” He then attempted to convince everyone that he was fine with everything that was happening.
Ryan touched on the need for party unity, saying, “Democracy is a series of choices. We Republicans have made ours.” In one of the only speeches to address the new shape the GOP seemed to be taking, he went on to say, “Have we had our arguments this year? Sure we have – and you know what I call those? Signs of life. Signs of a party that’s not just going through the motions. Not just mouthing new words for the same old stuff.”
He then went on to mouth the words that almost every other speaker on Tuesday said, labeling a Clinton presidency a third term for President Barack Obama. He warned his fellow Republicans of nefarious tricks from the Democrats, who will “talk down to the rest of America … to tell voters that the Obama years have been good for you … that you should be grateful.”
“Wages never seem to go up,” said the Wisconsin representative, who voted down a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $7.25.
3 – Donald Trump Jr. reminds us that his father is still Jenny from the block
Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., took the stage to make one of the only speeches that actually addressed the theme of jobs in America. In it, he referred to his father being “a kid from Queens,” who was laughed at, but went on to change the skyline of Manhattan. Indeed, Donald Trump ‒ a Wharton graduate who grew up in a Tudor-style home in affluent Jamaica Estate that was paid for by his philanthropist mother and real estate developer father ‒ did come from Queens.
However, that did not stop Trump Jr. from talking about the time the two of them spent on construction sites, watching cement get poured. In an attempt to make his father seem like a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy and not a man who lives atop a tower in Manhattan, he talked about the ways that his father “didn't learn from MBAs, we learned from people with doctorates in common sense."
Never mind that construction management requires at least a bachelor’s degree.
4 – The other Trump daughter
Tiffany Trump, the daughter that Trump has not said he would be dating if she weren’t his child, also took the stage to “address the nation,” despite only really addressing Republicans and the news media. The 22-year-old tried to paint a softer portrait of the father that rarely speaks of her in public, describing the annotations he would write on her report cards and how he was the first one to call her after a disaster.
She spoke of his unwavering support and unconditional love he has shown to her. She did not address how to Make America Work Again.
5 – Hillary Clinton shouts at the devil
When former presidential candidate hopeful and brain surgeon Ben Carson took the stage on Tuesday, few people were expecting the amount of energy he displayed – namely any.
However, that energy got very weird, very quickly.
After making a few forced analogies about the brain, he too went on to espouse the evils of Clinton and what she would do to the Supreme Court and to the educational system in the US. However, he took a hard turn from the prepared speech that was embargoed for delivery and went off-script.
Citing Clinton’s mentorship by Saul Alinsky, the father of community organizing, he said he that Hillary Clinton is unfit to lead the nation due to a passage in Alinsky’s 1971 book, ‘Rules for Radicals’, where he listed Lucifer as a mentor.
Prior to that, Carson had said he hated political correctness.
Bonus – Soap opera star turned avocado farmer turned incoherent speaker
Kimberlin Brown once starred on ‘The Young & the Restless’, ‘The Bold & the Beautiful’ and other TV shows your great aunt loves. She has since turned her back on the fast-paced life of a midday soap opera star to follow her dream of growing avocados, “for all of you guacamole lovers out there,” she said to applause.
She then went on to address Obamacare in a speech that sort of touched on Make America Work Again. She said, “This quarter we had several employees work over the 30-hour threshold set by Obamacare and, by the requirements of the law, they must sign up for one of the approved health care plans.” Why she allowed workers to work above their allotted hours was never explained.
She also bemoaned a lack of production in the TV and film industries, saying, “I have seen TV and movie productions move out of the country… if you were a cameraman, sound tech, boom operator or did any one of the many jobs in a production, you were out of luck.”
She went on to say, “At the time, it did not affect me and I didn’t understand what my local union boys were talking about. Now I do and I’m sorry for not understanding the plight of these men and women who lost their livelihoods.”
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) is the union that the aforementioned stagehands belong to and endorsed Hillary Clinton for president earlier this year.