Republicans Have Found the Perfect Spokesperson for Black Women

Unverified reporting from Newsmax commentator Mark Halperin set the far-right network ablaze Thursday night with word that President Joe Biden would step aside before the weekend, but would not endorse Vice President Kamala Harris while doing so.

In a bid to understand just how this would be received, Newsmax turned to a curious person to speak on behalf of the Black community: Don Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle.

“And I mean, recent polling shows, I mean, we have Kamala looking worse than Joe Biden in these swing states,” prompted Newsmax host Rob Schmidt. “If they do that, how are Black women going to respond when you try to subvert the woman on the screen?”

“Well, they’re going to be very unhappy,” Guilfoyle said, completely speculating. “I mean, Joe Biden chose her because he said she was the best person to serve as vice president of the United States.”

“But to pass over her is going to be a huge problem, probably with African-American Black voters, Black women voters, all of the above.”

It wasn’t Guilfoyle’s only flub of the convention. Speaking before the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, Guilfoyle blatantly lied about the quality of the jobs market when Donald Trump left office. She also suggested that she recently spoke to the centenarian veterans who fought in World War II about the unrecognizable nature of the U.S. while conveniently forgetting that it was fascism—not communism—that America fought in the war.

The soon-to-be Trump was also caught in an unfortunate visual gaffe just inches behind Trump’s head on Thursday night when she was caught aggressively grabbing her crotch on live television.

Before Donald Trump capped off the Republican National Convention with his speech accepting the party’s nomination for president, professional wrestler Hulk Hogan took the stage.

Trump seemed to really appreciate Hogan’s speech, delivered in the wrestler’s over-the-top passionate style. During the speech, the Hulkster even did his trademark T-shirt rip, discarding a black “Real Americans” muscle shirt to reveal a red Trump-Vance T-shirt underneath.

“They tried to kill the next president of the United States. Enough was enough, and I said, let Trumpamania run wild, brother. Let Trumpamania rule again. Let Trumpamania make America great again!” Hogan shouted, pointing at the crowd, who responded with chants of “USA, USA!”

Trump appreciated Hogan’s theatrics so much that he pumped his fist and blew kisses at the former wrestler.

Why Hogan was at the RNC to begin with isn’t known, although it may have had something to do with his relationship with right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, who funded his lawsuit against Gawker Media over the leak of a sex tape. Or it might have been because of Trump’s long relationship with World Wrestling Entertainment. Either way, Hogan’s job was to hype up the RNC crowd of “Real Americans,” and he succeeded, only for Trump to deliver a speech that went on way too long.

It appears that not everyone at the Republican National Convention was loving Donald Trump’s nomination acceptance speech Thursday night. What began as an intense retelling of Trump’s attempted assassination at a rally on Saturday gradually devolved into the same meandering, anti-immigration fearmongering Trump has touted throughout his campaign.

Dispatches on X, formerly Twitter, from within Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum said that Trump had a little trouble holding the crowd’s attention, as his speech stretched to one hour and 32 minutes, the longest nomination acceptance speech on record.

“People starting to leave. Loud chattering on fringes of the arena,” wrote Edward Luce, an associate editor at the Financial Times, who weighed in a little over an hour into Trump’s speech. “Trump is boring the audience.”

Around the same time, The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta wrote that even in the middle of the crowd, people were growing impatient. “I’m standing 10 feet from the stage, in a sea of diehards, and some are getting restless. Checking phones, stealing glances at the teleprompter, whispering about when it will be over,” he posted.

Wajahat Ali, a columnist for The Daily Beast, wrote that there were “a lot of concerned faces in the RNC crowd right now.”

“Definitely a different energy from an hour ago. I think some people are going, ‘Uh … what’s happening,’” he said.

While the energy in the room started high, with a wild appearance from Hulk Hogan and a weird rap performance from Kid Rock, Trump couldn’t keep the excitement alive as he worked his way through all the same beats as ever, sounding a bit more subdued than in his typical rants.

Donald Trump promised a massive deportation plan Thursday night, even larger than the biggest mass deportation in U.S. history: President Dwight Eisenhower’s racist-named “Operation Wetback.”

The former president was doing his typical fearmongering, blaming immigrants for any and all of the country’s ills, when he decided to name-drop the thirty-fourth U.S. president.

“And bad things are gonna happen, and you’re gonna see it happen all the time,” said Trump. “And that’s why the Republican platform promises to launch the biggest deportation operation in the history of our country. Even larger than that of Dwight D. Eisenhower, from many years ago.”

Under that program, which was implemented “many years ago” in 1954, U.S. authorities employed military-style tactics to deport around 1.3 million Mexican immigrants, some of whom had been naturalized. The government packed people into trucks en masse, and shipped them to locations without food and water, resulting in many unnecessary deaths.

During Trump’s speech Thursday on the final night of the Republican National Convention, he continued to baselessly claim that countries around the world were sending people from their prisons and mental institutions to the United States.

The former president also claimed that illegal immigrants were responsible for taking all the American jobs … even faster than they could possibly be created, it seems?

“Today our cities are flooded with illegal aliens. Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken. By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens,” he said, claiming they were taking the jobs from Black and Hispanic Americans, as well as unions.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that Democrats used the Covid-19 pandemic to cheat during the last presidential election.

During his speech Thursday at the Republican National Convention, Trump made a strange claim while talking about a failed deal he’d tried to make with Iran, ahead of the 2020 election.

“Iran was gonna make a deal with us, and then we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again. The election result, we’re never gonna let that happen again,” he said.

“They used Covid to cheat. We’re never gonna let it happen again,” Trump insisted, a strange shift in his election denialism.

Of course, Trump has been a broken record when it comes to believing he was cheated out of the White House. Earlier in his speech, Trump remarked that the Biden administration wasn’t “fierce” except for “cheating on elections, and a couple of other things.” But suggesting that Democrats had taken advantage of the deadly Covid-19 virus is a uniquely untethered claim, though it’s not totally clear how that would be even possible.

Earlier on Thursday, Lara Trump suggested that the former president had learned to embrace mail-in voting, a tactic pushed by Democrats in the previous election for the sake of public health. At the time, Trump heavily (and falsely) criticized the tactic as being rife with fraud.