Will Trump’s Long Courtship of Black Voters Work? By Julie Kelly • August 27, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/27/will-trumps-long-courtship-of-black-voters-work/

If so, it will mark Donald Trump’s greatest political achievement—at least equal to his stunning 2016 victory—potentially destabilizing the Democratic Party’s most faithful constituency in the future.

Democrats are panicking—and not just because their presidential candidate isn’t up to the task of running for president let alone running the country.

No, Democrats are fearful that Donald Trump’s four-year courtship of black voters will reap electoral dividends in November. “Both campaigns tell me that there is a chance that Donald Trump could overperform with African American men,” NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd admitted this week. “It’s a concern of the Biden campaign and it’s a focus of the Trump campaign.”

While Todd blamed Trump for “stoking racial tensions” in an attempt to win back suburban voters, the fact is that no other Republican president or candidate has worked harder to earn the long-elusive support of black Americans. “What have you got to lose?” Trump memorably asked black voters during a rally in August 2016. “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”

Trump’s gauntlet was both a backhanded slap at the country’s first black president and a promise that he would do better. Turns out, it wasn’t empty campaign sloganeering; from negotiating a rare moment of bipartisanship to pass the First Step Act in 2018 to hosting the first-ever Young Black Leadership Summit at the White House, President Trump and his family have had some success in dismantling the partisan barrier between blacks and the Republican Party.

President Trump Offers a Choice Between Loving and Destroying America The “People’s President” gives Americans back their country. Will they take it? Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/president-trump-offers-choice-between-loving-and-daniel-greenfield/

When President Trump walked down the staircase to the strains of Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA, followed by chants of, “USA, USA”, it was not only a callback to his famous escalator moment, no longer at Trump Tower, but at the White House, but a contrast between the parties.

“How can the Democratic party lead our country when they spend so much time tearing down our country?” President Trump asked.

Where the DNC had the feel of some long zoom session in a liberal suburb where everyone works from home and tries to keep up with the latest politically correct trends, the RNC was unapologetically physical and patriotic, its speakers embraced the great landmarks and trademarks of the nation, demonstrating that you can be diverse without destroying America.

The final night of the RNC wasn’t just a powerful antidote to the DNC, or even to the mainstream media alone, but to the hypocritical totalitarianism and the corporate buzzwords that we have been drowning in since the winter gave way to the spring, and to fear and violence.

President Trump and the array of speakers for the fourth night did not deny that we are a nation in crisis, instead they lit a torch to light the nation’s way out of the tyranny of terror and lies. 

Former NFL Star Jack Brewer Scores Touchdown in Stunning Defense of Trump and the GOP By Megan Fox

https://pjmedia.com/election/megan-fox/2020/08/27/jack-brewer-scores-touchdown-in-stunning-defense-of-president-trump-and-the-republican-party-at-rnc-n852998

Former NFL star Jack Brewer delivered one of the best speeches of the night on Wednesday. He absolutely destroyed the “Republicans are racist” lie that Democrats run on every election. He began by describing the racism he saw as a child and scolded people for comparing the KKK to Republicans.

I remember my dad’s bravery when he personally stood up against a KKK rally in my town. In my house, my father taught me to back down from no one. I know what racism looks like, I’ve seen it firsthand. In America, it has no resemblance to President Trump and I’m fed up with the way he’s portrayed in the media, who refuse to acknowledge what he’s actually done for the black community.

Then Brewer launched into the refusal of black people who vote for Democrats to wake up, even when faced with the fact that mass incarceration was a Democrat strategy. He also confronted the “Fine People Hoax” head-on and called the media liars.

5 Things to Know About Night 4 of the Republican National Convention: Trump’s Powerful Speech By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/08/27/5-things-to-know-about-night-4-of-the-republican-national-convention-trumps-powerful-speech-n856943

The Republican National Convention (RNC) was absolutely incredible, especially after the Democrats’ Gaslighting America Telethon. Each night had inspiring moments, but Thursday closed out the convention with Ann Dorn (widow of David Dorn), Alice Marie Johnson, and Stacia Brightmon, a formerly homeless mother who found her way to a career thanks to an apprenticeship program championed by President Donald Trump. Trump himself closed out the night with a mammoth speech on the gorgeous White House South Lawn.

The Republicans blew the Democrats out of the water. After the Democratic National Convention, Trump — not Democratic nominee Joe Biden — got a poll boost. The president’s numbers are only likely to rise even higher after this powerful convention. After all, since Democrats didn’t delve into their policies at their convention, Republicans got the chance to define Joe Biden as a candidate.

Here are 5 things to know about the final night.

The Republican convention ends on a high note – literally By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/the_republican_convention_ends_on_a_high_note__literally.html

The Democrats and Republicans approached their virus-era conventions in different ways. The Democrats opted for a dark, barren, and claustrophobic convention, bounded by the size of a computer monitor. The Republicans, however, chose a magnificent convention, one with a sense of spaciousness and color. After three dynamic days, it was hard to know if they could keep that momentum for the fourth day — but they did.

On Thursday, Republicans again used the vast and splendid Andrew Mellon auditorium as a backdrop for many of the speeches. And then, for Ivanka’s and the President’s addresses, the setting moved to the White House’s South Lawn. Behind the speakers was the beauty of the White House; behind the audience was the symbolism of the Washington monument. It was a wonderful culmination to a powerful convention conducted under challenging circumstances.

Before I even get to the substance of the speeches, compare how Biden and Trump appeared:

Trump’s setting was open, brilliant, and powerful. Biden’s looked like a high school student council election. It’s true that Trump benefitted from the symbolism of the White House, but the Democrats could easily have found an equally beautiful and powerfully symbolic site . . . if they’d wanted to. They didn’t even try, though, both because their goal was to make the point that America is a grim and dark place, and because Joe would have been overwhelmed if taken off that high school auditorium stage.

What Is the Violence in American Cities All About? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/what-is-the-violence-in-american-cities-all-about/

The point of the mob is to destroy what it cannot create.

It is hard to tell what the current revolutionary violence in our major cities is all about.

So far, hundreds of police have been injured, dozens of people have been killed, and we have seen billions of dollars in property and collateral damage.

Ostensibly, many of the summer demonstrations were in protest over the gruesome detention and death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody on May 25.

Yet three months later, few of those trying to burn down a Portland police precinct — with police barricaded inside — or looting the high-end boutiques of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, or indiscriminately beating up innocent pedestrians, appear to be driven by Floyd’s death.

Apologists argue that the perfect-storm furor of June, July, and August was the dividend of a collective six-month fear over the COVID-19 pandemic that has, as of this writing, killed nearly 180,000 Americans.

The unprecedented national quarantine and the sudden, self-generated recession of a once-booming economy certainly added to the tensions.

Millions of youths were sequestered in their apartments and basements, unemployed, without school, and worried over their career prospects. Many simply wanted to vent their rage at the world and almost everything in it.

The media romanticized the “summer of love” unrest and downplayed the violence. Newspapers ran bizarre photo essays on the chic garb at the protests — umbrellas, leaf blowers, wooden shields, armor, and colored bike helmets.

Douglas Murray Politics US Politics Protesters are clearing a path for Trump The ‘mostly peaceful’ carnage unfolding in American cities Douglas Murray

https://spectator.us/protesters-clearing-path-trump-kenosha-black-lives-matter/

‘This city is not going to stop burning itself down until they [the protesters] know that this officer has been fired.’ Thus spoke Whitney Cabal, a leader of the Kenosha chapter of Black Lives Matter, in response to the latest police shooting in Wisconsin. The use of the passive in that sentence is revealing.

As Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out (see ‘The knife went in’) it is common for people to assign motive to inanimate objects when they are loth to admit to being in the wrong. I suspect that the suitably named Ms Cabal knows that the state of Wisconsin did not auto-combust this week, as Krook does at the end of Bleak House. True, there was first a police shooting and arrest. But someone must then have put a match to the place. The American public, press and politicians know that. But any willingness to say it appears now to fall along strictly party-political lines.

It is one of the most striking things about the violence and unrest that have followed the killing of George Floyd. Not the violence, but the increasingly ostentatious desire of a portion of the population to pretend they do not see it. Some friends in New York tell me of gang robberies at restaurants in broad daylight, of lootings, shootings and boarded-up shops. ‘Peaceful demonstrations’, I am assured by other friends, who identify as ‘liberals’ though have mysteriously stayed away from the city of late.

The same story is rolling out across America. The left says that there are nightly protests for ‘social justice’. When these protests involve mass lootings, such as those in Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, they are claimed (if acknowledged at all) to be the actions of a tiny fringe. Such dogged blindness has a clear political and cultural purpose. The political purpose is a desire to prevent the reelection of Donald Trump. The wider justification would appear to be a belief that ‘anti-racism’ is such an important omelette of a cause that a few broken eggs — or cities — is a price worth paying.

A Trump In Full Matthew Continetti –

https://freebeacon.com/2020-election/a-trump-in-full/

President Trump accepted the Republican nomination Thursday night with his family flanking him on a dais constructed atop the South Lawn of the White House. His speech hit all the marks of Trump-ism. He said Joe Biden was inept and a vehicle for the socialist left, described how he’s fulfilled the MAGA agenda, and reasserted his opposition to political correctness. “We are not a nation of timid spirits,” he said. “We are a nation of fierce, proud, and independent patriots.”

The setting of the convention was another reminder of how unusual the Trump era has been. Donald Trump appeared out of nowhere when he came down the escalator in June 2015. Since that moment, he has been the indefatigable element of American (and world) politics. There is no getting around him. We have been living in a world in which Donald Trump defines media coverage of his candidacy and administration, reshapes the Republican party, and tugs the government of the United States fitfully and persistently in a national populist direction. Then the coronavirus struck, and the oddities that have defined American life for the last half decade metastasized. And so we were left with a sitting president delivering a convention address from the White House for the first time since 1940.

Donald Trump narrowly won the presidency four years ago because large swathes of America decided that the political class had failed them. He represented an anti-politics, a rejection of the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, immigration, and trade that had influenced public policy since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Trump defied the consensus, and he also flouted every single norm that has governed presidential decorum since at least World War II. As every pundit (including me) assailed his character and his methods, a plurality of Republican and then American voters gave him their assent.

The Trump Disruption His policy record is better than he and his opponents have made it sound.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-disruption-11598570719?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

When Donald Trump won the Presidency four years ago, half of America gnashed its teeth or cried and even supporters who cheered weren’t sure what to expect. Four years later our verdict is that he has been better on policy than we feared but worse on personal behavior than we hoped. Whether Americans re-elect him depends on how they assess that political balance sheet.

We realize that even considering the Trump Presidency in these conventional terms is offensive to some readers. Don’t we get that he’s a would-be authoritarian, a Russian plant, or at least so deeply flawed as a human being that he can’t be trusted with power? Yet our democracy survives, and the Constitution’s checks and balances are intact. Americans who heard him ask for a second term Thursday night were trying to make sense of what has been a raucous and disruptive Presidency.**

This week’s virtual GOP convention has spent hours educating voters about Trump Administration successes, and many are real, starting with the pre-Covid-19 economy that we examined this week. The political irony is that this success was due to Mr. Trump’s adoption of conventional GOP economics, not his trade or immigration agenda.

Remembering other historic flights As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo highlights the first non-stop flight from Israel to Sudan, we remember the Zionist values that led to years of flights bringing Ethiopian Jews home. Moshe Phillips

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/remembering-other-historic-flights/

While many critics of the Trump administration were focused laser-like on the second day of the Republican National Convention in their criticism of Secretary Mike Pompeo for speaking to the convention from Jerusalem, part of his own focus seemed to be on a different historical aspect of the day.

The secretary tweeted on August 25th that he was “Happy to announce that we are on the FIRST official NONSTOP flight from Israel to Sudan!”

The word that may have stood out to some readers of the tweet was “official.” When were there any “unofficial” flights? Were there any illegal flights?

The very popular and star-studded Netflix movie The Red Sea Diving Resort (2019) featured just such a Sudan to Israel flight at its dramatic conclusion.

The Chris Evans / Ben Kingsley film reveals the amazing true story of the 1984-1985 covert op when Mossad agents with members of the Israel Defense Forces rescued hundreds of Ethiopian Jews. The Ethiopian Jew had sought shelter in Sudan from both a devastating famine and a bloody Marxist insurgency that ravaged Ethiopia leaving over a million dead. Sudan itself was in the midst of a Civil War.