We host a roundtable the morning after Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president on Thursday, just five days after surviving an assassination attempt, delivering the longest acceptance speech in convention history. Trump began with a somber recounting of what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a bullet grazed his right ear, and soon went off script to deliver a rambling diatribe against various political enemies and repeatedly demonized immigrants. “The first three or four days of the convention were pitched as a display of unity,” says Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker, who says the nominee “got in the way” of the party’s plans. “Trump was just straightforwardly weird.” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa, founder of Futuro Media, says the vicious anti-immigrant rhetoric from Trump and almost every other speaker throughout the week is built on lies. “If everything that he said is true, then our American economy would be tanking, right? And, actually, there would be rampant crime across the streets. That is not the truth. And even Trump supporters … know that’s not the truth,” says Hinojosa. We also speak with former Ohio state Senator Nina Turner, who says both Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance are promoting a false populism that does not actually support workers or challenge the power of big money. “We do need a president that will put the working-class people ahead of corporations. We do need a president that will line up the supposed values of this country with policy. The problem is, President Donald J. Trump is not it, and neither is J.D. Vance,” says Turner, a senior fellow at The New School’s Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy.
