Republican National Convention 2016: news and updates

Donald Trump officially accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency with a speech championing facts.

“I will always tell you the truth,” Trump said at a campaign rally in August.

When Donald Trump threatened millions of unauthorized immigrants with deportation on Wednesday night, he turned to a phrase he’s used time and again during his campaign: “America First.”

“We need a system that serves our needs, not the needs of others,” he said Wednesday night. “Remember, under a Trump administration it’s called America first. Remember that.”

On the second night of the Republican National Convention, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia went onstage and railed against Hillary Clinton’s “anti-coal agenda.” Her kicker: “I weep for the fabric of my state.”

Capito is right that West Virginia’s coal industry is collapsing and mining jobs are vanishing -- and it’s genuinely hurting the state. She’s also right that the industry will likely keep shrinking under Clinton, who plans to tackle global warming by further curtailing America’s coal use in favor of cleaner energy sources.

If you were going to groom a member of the Trump family for politics, your first instinct wouldn’t necessarily be to pick Donald Trump — a 70-year-old with outrageous wealth and a penchant for saying outrageously racist things.

You might pick Ivanka Trump: his glamorous, accomplished, 34-year-old daughter, who is more disciplined and on-message on her worst day than her father on his best.

Republicans and Democrats alike are vying to lead America’s future this year as President Barack Obama concludes his second term in the White House. But a couple of new selfies with congressional interns suggest one party at least looks more like the America it’s hoping to lead.

Here’s a selfie taken by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) that he posted on Instagram last Saturday with Capitol Hill interns:

Donald Trump loves bragging about bringing in yuuuge ratings. Back in his campaign’s infancy, it was one of his favorite talking points. “There’d be a major collapse of the race, and there’d be a major collapse of television ratings” if he weren’t in the race, Trump told the New York Times. “It would become a depression in television.”

Well, Trump might be disappointed to find out that the ratings are in for the first and second days of the Republican and Democratic conventions — and he lost.

It’s day two of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, but Full Frontal With Samantha Bee still had some choice words for the Republican National Convention, which the host and her staff crashed last week.

GOP delegates talked to Full Frontal about how they’re excited for a president who doesn’t care for “political correctness,“ who “talks like I want to talk,” and how “he says the things we’ve been thinking for years, that no one had the guts to say.”

Last week, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign made waves when it appointed Omarosa Manigault as director of African-American outreach.

“Donald Trump is focused on improving the economic conditions of African Americans in this country,” Manigault — a former “die-hard” Democrat whose current party affiliation is “undeclared,“ pastor, and breakout reality TV show star on Trump’s hit The Apprentice — said to MSNBC just hours before the first night of the Republican National Convention.

Last Week Tonight host John Oliver on Sunday concisely summarized the Republican National Convention in one sentence: “He just brought a feeling to a fucking fact fight.”

Throughout the convention, Republican speakers — including Donald Trump — argued that the crime rate was skyrocketing, unauthorized immigration is going up, the economy is getting worse, and terrorism is killing a record number of Americans. Antonio Sabato Jr., an actor who spoke at the convention, even said that President Barack Obama is a Muslim.

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment at which I realized Ted Cruz was about to drop a giant bomb in the middle of the Republican National Convention. I heard chanting coming from the New York delegation, and I slowly realized what they were saying: “Say his name! Say his name!”

You could write a whole sociolinguistic dissertation on those three words in this context.

Donald Trump has spent much of his presidential campaign touting his ability to drive ratings — but his speech at the Republican National Convention Thursday didn’t quite deliver.

Well, not exactly big TV ratings:

CLEVELAND — By the way some media framed it, Donald Trump’s mention of “L, G, B, T… Q people” at his acceptance speech on Thursday was the stuff of history: “For the first time in history, a Republican nominee has mentioned the LGBTQ community in a GOP nomination acceptance speech,” ABC News reported.

There was also a previous moment in which Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel told the crowd he’s “proud to be gay” — and they, a bit surprisingly, applauded.

CLEVELAND — Before the Republican National Convention, the warnings were grim: The FBI and other law enforcement agencies were preparing for the worst. Media outlets suggested all hell could break loose. Everyone seemed certain that the protests would turn into explosive riots.

But it didn’t happen.

Below is a complete transcript of Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on July 21, 2016. Also see our fact check of Trump’s speech.

Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

Two days after Ted Cruz pointedly refused to endorse Donald Trump in primetime at the Republican National Convention, Trump addressed the matter at a campaign event in Cleveland, extending an olive branch to Cruz and saying he hoped to eventually earn the Texas senator’s support.

LOL, who am I kidding, no he didn’t. Instead Trump revived an attack, last seen the day he beat Cruz in Indiana and forced him out of the race, claiming that Cruz’s father fraternized with Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s assassin:

It could have been more racist.

I’m not being flip. Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention avoided some of the crudest themes he hit during his long campaign to the Republican nomination.

So much has been written and said about Donald Trump’s manifest unfitness for office that at this point there’s hardly any reason to dwell further on it. But a national convention isn’t just about a single candidate. It’s about an entire political party coming together.

And the truly striking thing about the Republican Mistake By The Lake in Cleveland this summer isn’t the nonsense coming from Trump, his kids, his favorite soap opera actors, and that one avocado farmer — it’s the nonsense coming from the Republican Party’s “establishment.”

Most Republican politicians don’t lament how wealthy donors have corrupted the political system through big campaign contributions. But Donald Trump is not like most Republican politicians.

Accepting the party’s presidential nomination on Thursday night, Trump returned to an argument that’s at least superficially similar to one routinely made by the left: that the money sloshing through US politics privileges special interests.

For an event dedicated to the naming of Donald Trump as presidential nominee, the Republican National Convention’s big name wasn’t always Trump — it was his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

The speakers and delegates fixated on disparaging Clinton at the convention, at times more so than praising Trump, drowning the stadium in boos and “lock her up” chants at the sound of her name.

Donald Trump’s speech accepting the nomination for Republican presidential nominee was scary. Really scary.

Last night on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Elizabeth Warren said that Trump sounded like “some two-bit dictator of a country you couldn’t find on a map.”

Is Donald Trump a fascist? It’s a question that’s been asked and answered — in both directions — dozens of times this election season.

But you know what? I’m not sure it matters. Donald Trump isn’t a talented enough speaker to be a truly effective fascist dictator. His nomination acceptance speech at the Republican Convention wasn’t just over-long. It was a badly delivered, uncharismatic hector of a speech.

One of the big mysteries about this week’s Republican National Convention is why it has been such dreary television.

After all, Donald Trump is a successful reality television star, and he won the Republican nomination in large part due to his deft manipulation of the media — especially cable news channels — into covering him nonstop. So even people who can’t stand Trump’s politics expected him to put on a lively, entertaining show.

What he does is speak. A lot.

Trump’s words — at rallies, on television shows, and in press conferences — have been the alpha and omega of his campaign.

It’s been 351 days since Jon Stewart sat behind the desk of a late-night talk show and delivered jokes about US politics and the day’s headlines.

In the time since Stewart left The Daily Show (on August 6, 2015), his many proteges have spread far and wide across the TV landscape. Samantha Bee is on TBS. John Oliver has reached new heights on HBO. Trevor Noah took over The Daily Show. And Stephen Colbert has landed at CBS’s Late Show. (Stewart himself has a deal with HBO that he’ll presumably start producing content for one of these days.)

When Donald Trump delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Bernie Sanders was watching.

Recently coming off his endorsement of Hillary Clinton, Sanders live-tweeted Trump’s RNC convention speech Thursday night, largely using the #RNCWithBernie hashtag.