GOP Convention Day 4 – Trump Accepts the Nomination

The GOP Convention culminated last night with the acceptance of the Republican nomination by Donald Trump. The expected violence from what some said would be 500,000 protesters never materialized, and the Trump campaign appears to have largely succeeded in getting the party unified behind him. 

On the strength of this last day, the Trump campaign raised close to $4 Million within a 24 hour period.

Ivanka Trump introduced her father, speaking with tremendous poise about her personal experience with her father. Some unique perspectives into the day to day integrity of Donald Trump. “Color blind and gender neutral,” she said.

She spoke about income equality for women, normally a Democrat issue, noting the Trump organization had more women executives than men, and that women and men were paid equally for equal work. She noted the bigger pay gap was with working mothers and, as a mother of three, vowed to push for better circumstances.

I would not expect this to become a major part of the Trump campaign, but with its real world examples of success, the campaign believes it has a legitimate claim to the issue over Hillary Clinton. Perhaps a greater goal was to demonstrate Trump is not sexist and has demonstrated equality throughout his organization for the last 30 years.

The best quote provided by Ivanka from her father – “If you are going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.” It got a nice chuckle from the crowd. 

The overall effect, Ivanka made great inroads into women’s issues and reinforced the crowd’s perception they were right in picking Donald Trump.

Donald Trump’s speech began with the acceptance of the nomination (really the whole point of the convention) and thereafter covered most of his existing campaign priniciples. 

He began by stating his campaign would be telling the truth, in contrast to the Hillary Clinton campaign. In attacking Hillary and the Obama administration, he covered illegal immigration, Benghazi, the Iran deal. He noted the middle east is in chaos, poverty is worse under Obama (with statistics), deaths by shootings are up in 50 major cities across America.

Trump made a play for Bernie Sanders’ supporters saying a major goal of Sanders had been to throw out trade agreements that hurt American workers. He vowed to do just that and invited Sanders’ supporters to join his campaign. 

Trump had casually thrown out before that Bernie had gotten a raw deal from the Democratic Party and that his supporters should be angry about it, but the trade agreement promise is much more tangible.

While ratings were perhaps not as high as the debate ratings they were excellent and showed a high energy convention staunchly behind Trump (with a few minor exceptions). All in all, in my opinion, this was carried by Trump’s kids, Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie.