A breakdown of the Republican National Convention.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Quick hits.

1. Vice President Kamala Harris secured enough pledges of support from Democratic National Convention delegates to become the party's nominee, a strong signal she'll secure the nomination at the August convention. (The pledges) Separately, President Joe Biden announced he would address the nation at 8:00 PM ET on Wednesday for the first time since dropping out of the race. (The announcement)
2. Kimberly Cheatle, the head of the Secret Service, announced her resignation today after bipartisan calls for her to step down. (The resignation)
3. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly floated working for the Trump White House as he considered endorsing Trump, according to The Washington Post. The Trump campaign said it declined the offer. (The report)
4. More than 70 people were killed in Gaza after strikes around the southern city of Khan Younis, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. Israel had ordered residents to evacuate ahead of time. (The strikes) Separately, Israel confirmed two more hostages were dead, and 44 of 116 remaining hostages are believed to be dead. (The deaths and the latest)
5. President Biden made his first public remarks since dropping out of the 2024 presidential race on Monday, speaking over the phone to an audience in Delaware to introduce Vice President Harris at a campaign event. (The call)

Today's topic.

The Republican National Convention (RNC). Last week, Republicans convened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to nominate their presidential and vice presidential candidates for the 2024 election. The four-day event featured speeches from the party’s most prominent figures as well as celebrities, political commentators, and activists. Former President Donald Trump, who survived an assassination attempt two days before the event began, was in attendance for much of the week and addressed the convention on Thursday in his first major speech since the attempt on his life.

On Monday, July 15, the convention’s first day, the Republican Party officially nominated Trump as its presidential candidate. To win the nomination, Trump needed the support of a majority of the estimated 2,429 delegates in attendance. During the party’s roll call vote, Trump received 2,388 votes; 41 delegates abstained and no other candidates received votes. Republican delegates also voted to pass the party's platform and rules. 

Trump’s selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (OH) as his running mate highlighted day one of the convention. That night, Vance was officially nominated by a voice vote. On Wednesday, Vance gave his first address as the Republican vice presidential candidate in a speech accentuating the senator’s Midwestern roots and promoting Trump’s vision for the country. Vance also criticized President Joe Biden and Democrats for policies he said neglected the working class. "To the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio and every corner of our nation, I promise you this: I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from,” Vance said.

On Thursday, Trump closed the convention with a 92-minute speech accepting his party’s nomination for president. Trump began the address by recounting his experience during the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, five days earlier, telling the audience, “The assassin’s bullet came within a quarter of an inch of taking my life… I’m not supposed to be here tonight.” The remainder of the speech touched on key themes of Trump’s campaign — immigration, inflation, and rising global instability — and the former president’s “vision for the whole nation” in a prospective second term. 

Other notable moments from the convention included a primetime speech by Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, the first address delivered by a union president to the RNC. The speech proved divisive; O’Brien attacked business groups that have typically backed the Republican Party, while Teamsters leadership and other prominent unions criticized him for speaking at the convention. 

Notable speakers also included the next two most popular presidential candidates in the 2024 Republican primary: former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who both endorsed the former president. 

Today, we’ll share perspectives from the right and left about the RNC. Then, my take.

What the right is saying.

• The right says Trump delivered a winning message with broad appeal.
• Some say Vance’s speech cemented him as the party’s future standard bearer.
• Others note how the convention successfully blended the past and future of the party.

The New York Post editorial board praised Trump’s “perfect tone and message at [the] RNC.”

Trump “delivered a speech packed with appeals to unity and healing. Knock us over with a feather… Even those who back Trump have offered advice that too often seemed to fall on deaf ears: Don’t tweet so much. Don’t be so angry. Reach across the aisle. In his speech, he did it all,” the board wrote. “For his third nomination for president, a rarity in American history, Trump was calm, charming, and at one point said he was asking with ‘great humility.’ Reader, we’re not kidding. He said humility!

“It was the perfect choice of tone and message. Trump’s welcoming delivery, his appeals to lift the nation higher, only highlighted the increasingly deranged rhetoric of the left,” the board added. “Of course, Trump is still Trump. He went off script many times, particularly towards the end, and the speech went on for a long time. But the overall idea was correct. There were voters who took a chance on Trump in 2016, but he lost in 2020 because he alienated too many of them. This address proves he realizes that, and has made strides to win them back.”

In Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown suggested “J.D. Vance is a bridge to Trumpism beyond Trump.”

“Watching Vance onstage at the Republican National Convention (RNC) last night was like seeing a mirror-world version of a normal GOP convention speech. In content and substance, Vance often strays far from GOP candidates of yore. He talks trash about free markets and free trade. He rails against Wall Street and war,” Brown said. “But stylistically and character-wise, this is what you would expect from a Republican vice presidential candidate: dignified but affable, well-groomed and telegenic, capable of sticking to a script. Folksy and commanding in the right degrees.”

“Another way to think about Vance is to contrast him with the current vice president, Kamala Harris. Harris, too, was intended to serve as a sort of bridge to the party's future. But her appeal was mostly identitarian rather than ideological, and she has mostly failed to develop a personal brand that looks likely to live on,” Brown wrote. "Time will tell how Vance does on unsympathetic turf. But on the Republican National Convention (RNC) stage last night, Vance appeared at ease and spoke eloquently, making platitudes seem heartfelt and bantering cheerfully with the audience… Vance shows us what the party of Trump may look like in a post-Trump world.”

In The Washington Examiner, Ben Rothove wrote “the Republican National Convention was surprisingly normal.”

“The Republican National Convention concluded Thursday evening after four days of conflicting messages on economics, foreign policy, and what it means to be a conservative. In the weeks before the convention began, an internal fight grew over the platform moderating on social matters such as abortion, failing to address critical problems such as unsustainable entitlement programs, and being unnecessarily vague,” Rothove said. But “the shooting Saturday evening at a Pennsylvania rally defined the convention, as there was a stronger emphasis on unity than divisiveness.”

“While the GOP has fully accepted a new range of personalities, it remains to be seen whether it will fully accept the fundamental redefining of conservative policies that figures such as Vance are pushing. The RNC did not answer that question, as it did a fair job of balancing representation from the old guard and the new guard of the party. The Republican Party is undeniably changing, but this convention focused more on when conservatives agree than when they disagree.”

What the left is saying.

• The left says Trump’s speech was at odds with his newfound interest in national unity. 
• Some suggest Vance’s address emphasized the campaign’s investment in Midwestern swing states.
• Others say the convention sent an ominous message about the future of the GOP.

In MSNBC, Hayes Brown argued “Trump’s RNC speech proved again there’s never a ‘New Trump.’”

“For a minute there, former President Donald Trump sounded different on Thursday night… As with most things Trump, though, any shift away from his usual bombast was surface level — at best. The facade of a new Trump evaporated quickly, just like the last several times we were promised a new Trump,” Brown said. “Even when he has managed to momentarily project a calmer persona, a state that lasted only minutes into an address that broke records as the longest acceptance speech ever, Trump remains substantively the same: impulsive, xenophobic and more than happy to go on the attack in exchange for the applause of a crowd.”

“Despite promising unity, his speech only grew Trumpier as it continued, as he leaned into his worst instincts, riffing to the crowd’s delight as he threw it red meat… It was still filled with lies about a supposed surge in crime fueled by migrants sneaking across the border. It still framed the criminal cases against him as partisan witch hunts from Democrats, rather than the results of his own actions,” Brown wrote. “The Trump we saw on display Thursday night wasn’t the chastened, humbled man some predicted might be on display. It was exactly the Trump we’ve come to know over the last nine years.”

In The Washington Post, Karen Tumulty said “after Vance’s convention speech, it’s clear why Donald Trump chose him to share the ticket.”

“Donald Trump’s newly minted running mate introduced himself to the country Wednesday night with a spellbinding speech that wove his own spectacularly unlikely life story into the fabric of grievances felt by ordinary Americans, less lucky than he was, who have been left behind,” Tumulty wrote. “But what made his account on Wednesday night so remarkable was the context: the stage of the Republican National Convention. As Dana Bash on CNN pointed out, much of what he said could have been delivered by his socialist fellow senator Bernie Sanders.

“Also striking were points of MAGA dogma that he didn’t mention: No mass deportations of undocumented people. Or culture-war issues such as allowing transgender women into female sports. Or ending support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Or denying the results of the 2020 election,” Tumulty said. “Given how often he cited three states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania… — it is clear where Vance will be spending the months between now and November. And it is just as clear why Trump chose Vance to share the ticket.”

In The Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch said “America will never be the same after Milwaukee’s tent revival for the cult of Donald Trump.”

“Like any cult, the real mysticism in Milwaukee was the things that went unsaid. I never thought I’d see a four-day national celebration of a presidential candidate who just 45 days earlier had been convicted on 34 felony charges,” Bunch wrote. “But I’m much, much more flabbergasted by how quickly those convictions just vanished from your TV screen and the national conversation — just like the massive financial fraud, just like the E. Jean Carroll rape case, just like the taking of our top secret documents, just like the role he played in trying to tamper with his 2020 election defeat, and his summoning of a violent mob to the U.S. Capitol.

“Any need to ‘tone it down’ or ‘lower the national temperature’ after Saturday’s shooting in Butler doesn’t undo the fact that all of those disqualifying things have happened. But here’s the other thing: Nobody at the RNC was really toning it down or lowering the temperature. Instead, it was like a weeklong heat dome of baseless accusation settled over eastern Wisconsin,” Bunch said. “The 2024 RNC is indeed all about unity, but only the creepiest and most cultist kinds. I saw unity of fear, in a party of ritual humiliation where dissenters like Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney are tossed down the memory hole.”

My take.

Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism, or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• I was moved by the first few minutes of Trump’s speech, but he quickly reverted to his worst habits.
• J.D. Vance’s address was far more interesting to me, and it said a lot about where the party is headed.
• I think we’ll remember this week as transformational for the GOP. 

We were planning to cover the Republican National Convention yesterday, but the insatiable beast that is our news cycle demanded another campaign-altering story — that Joe Biden dropped out on Sunday.

Still, the convention remains relevant. It marked the first time Trump spoke since the assassination attempt, and it was the first primetime speech for J.D. Vance, Trump's new running mate. I had two distinct reactions to each address from home.

For Trump, it was mostly disappointment. The first fifteen minutes of his speech were genuinely captivating — the firsthand account of his assassination attempt, yes, but also the change in tone, the grace, and the humility with which he described his experience. A lot of what came after, though, was disappointing. He lied incessantly: He claimed that the U.S. has record inflation (the high-water annual mark for inflation under Biden was 8.0% in 2022, and it never approached the all-time year-over-year record of 23.7%, set in 1920), that illegal immigrants are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare (there are a lot of reasons to keep unauthorized migrants out of the U.S., but they actually help fund Social Security and Medicare without reaping the benefits), that Biden is going to quadruple the current tax rate (it's hard to even fact-check this because it is so detached from reality), and that crime is going up in the U.S. while going down across the world (which is almost the opposite of the truth — violent crime has spiked at times under Biden, but it is lower in the U.S. than it was in 2020 while it’s increasing in Europe).

It was frustrating to hear him lie even about things he doesn't need to lie about, like defeating ISIS "in a couple months." Trump’s handling of the terrorist group was certainly a crowning achievement, but “defeating” them actually took a couple of years. Exaggerations like this are frustrating in part because Trump doesn't have to lie to make a strong case against Biden — there are plenty of compelling, fact-based arguments he could use. It's also frustrating because his campaign spent all week saying he was a changed man who was going to strike a different tone (I obviously doubted that, but still); instead, he still told us that Nancy Pelosi is "crazy," that Biden is worse than the 10 worst presidents combined, that the "invasion" of illegal immigrants is at our doorstep, etc. His speech was a genuine opportunity to make a call for unity, but, contrary to The New York Post’s portrayal, that call was only present in the opening minutes, and no appeals to unity could be found in the remaining 75 minutes of his speech.

It was far more interesting to listen to Vance's speech, the content of which was laced with stories, ideas, and themes that I think have much broader appeal than what Trump delivered— and they represented a genuine shift from what you might traditionally hear from the Republican Party.

Vance focused his speech on the country's fight against drug overdoses (and his mother overcoming addiction), the idea that we should "welcome" immigrants but "on our terms," the story of his immigrant wife's family, and the imperative that we take care of American workers first. He hammered Wall Street bankers that caused the 2008 crash, then spoke about the unaffordability of housing and the need to address it. Here are a few snippets of his speech:

• "Our movement is about single moms like mine, who struggled with money and addiction but never gave up."
• "We will put the citizens of America first, whatever the color of their skin."
• "We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man."
• “We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike.”
• "Now we won’t agree on every issue of course, not even in this room. We may disagree from time to time about how best to reinvigorate American industry and renew American family. That’s fine. In fact it's more than fine, it’s good."
• "We have a big tent on this party, on everything from national security to economic policy."

All of that, paired with a union boss giving a fiery speech to the entire convention, was both jarring and fascinating. Vance may be the first mainstream politician who is “socially conservative but fiscally liberal.” Some elements of his speech, and those delivered by other convention speakers, could easily have been heard at a Bernie Sanders rally. 

Some parts of the Republican Party’s transformation still concern me: I don’t think the U.S. should retreat from the world stage, and I fear the unintended consequences of isolationism (Vance is well known for opposing more support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia). But other parts of the party’s evolution exhilarate me: For decades, Republicans have been “business friendly” at the expense of many working class voters, and the country may be better off if they try to reverse that trend.

Whatever changes are happening in the GOP, and wherever they lead, it’s clear that the ground is shifting. Conservatives like Vance want to debate their policies on different turf than Republicans of the past did, and the GOP that tried so hard to reject Trump in 2016 appears to have been wholly remade by him. In both those ways, I think we’ll look back on the 2024 RNC as the week the party coalesced around its new image.

Take the survey: What did you think of the 2024 RNC? Let us know!

Disagree? That's okay. My opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we'll consider publishing your feedback.

Your questions, answered.

Q: In your “my take” how do you know that [Thomas Matthew Crooks] “certainly held right wing views”? What facts are you basing that on?

— Raymond from Harvey Cedars, NJ

Disclaimer: Tangle’s standard policy is not to name shooters because of the well known contagion effect, but we are making an exception in this case due to the historical nature of the assassination attempt.

Tangle: Let me start with a small, but important, clarification — I said that Crooks, the 20-year-old who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, “almost certainly held right-wing views.” That word choice was deliberate: I try to be very careful not to report something as absolute fact unless I know that it’s absolutely factual, and I don’t think anyone will ever be able to say with 100% certainty what political views Crooks held. Multiple sources describe him as a loner with no obvious outward political ideology, and unless the investigation into the shooting turns up a diary or some descriptive emails he sent, his true worldview will likely remain unknown.

However, we can draw some pretty strong conclusions. First, and as we reported last week, Crooks was registered to vote as a Republican. He did make a single donation to Democrats through ActBlue when he was 17, but there is good reason to read much less into that. It was a one-time, $15 donation made to a spammy email group that sent a note on the day of Biden’s inauguration. Based on the framing of the email itself, it’s unclear who Crooks was even supporting with his donation. 

On top of his registration, the Pittsburgh NPR affiliate reported that many of his high school classmates described him as holding some conservative views, and we know that his parents held some conservative beliefs as well. Additionally, neighbors claimed to remember Trump signs in his yard (this claim was disputed by other neighbors). Taken altogether, it’s fair to conclude that Crooks “almost certainly held right-wing views.” 

That is not to say Crooks’s entire ideology was right-wing. Obviously, Crooks’s politics are not well understood. As we got into a few times both on Monday last week and in our subscribers-only edition on Friday, we don’t know the shooter’s motives and definitely can’t ascribe his political outlook to his fateful decision. So while I do stand by the statement we published last week, I also want to caution readers against seeing that statement as the end-all be-all about Trump’s would-be assassin.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

On Thursday, The Washington Post placed editor's notes atop several opinion pieces written or co-authored by Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst and the wife of prominent Washington Post columnist Max Boot. Terry was charged last week with being an unregistered foreign agent for the South Korean government. She is accused of subverting foreign agent registration laws, providing South Korean intelligence officers with access, information, and advocacy; and offering her influence in exchange for handbags, expensive meals, and thousands of dollars of funding for her public policy program. Fox News has the story.

Numbers.

• 50,000. The approximate number of attendees at the 2024 Republican National Convention (RNC). 
• 92. The approximate length (in minutes) of former President Donald Trump’s speech at the RNC, the longest acceptance speech in convention history.
• 74. The approximate length (in minutes) of Trump’s acceptance speech at the RNC in 2016, the longest in convention history at the time.
• 19 million. The average television viewership across four nights of this year’s RNC, approximately a 22% decrease from 2016.
• 25 million. The approximate number of viewers for Trump’s acceptance speech on Thursday.
• 32 million. The approximate number of viewers for Trump’s acceptance speech in 2016.
• 5,000. The number of protestors that had been expected to participate in the March on the RNC 2024 rally on Monday, July 15. 
• 3,000. The approximate peak number of protestors at the rally.

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just written a Friday edition on how to win back trust in the news.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the fake Southwest Airlines tweet.
• Nothing to do with politics: Jeopardy! Host and champion Ken Jennings has a weekly trivia quiz called Kennections.
• Yesterday’s survey: 2,246 readers took our two-question survey yesterday asking about President Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race and who the Democratic nominee should be. 70% of respondents strongly support Biden dropping out, and 57% support Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee. “Harris may be able to win against Trump. Not sure though if the country is ready for a female president. We'll see,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

Arthur Watkins was a 20th-century British plant scientist whose collection of wheat may aid in current global food production needs. After serving as an agricultural officer in post-World War I France, Watkins collected 827 samples of wheat from across the globe. These samples have recently been DNA-sequenced as part of a U.K.-Chinese collaboration and could contribute to creating hardy varieties of wheat to feed the growing global population. Simon Griffiths, one of the project’s leaders, said the Watkins Collection “contains varieties that had been lost but which will be invaluable in creating wheat that can provide healthy yields in the harsh conditions that now threaten agriculture.” The Guardian has the story. 

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