Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, vows to continue bussing migrants ‘until we finally secure our border’
In his speech to the Republican convention, Greg Abbott gave a strenuous and well-received defense of his state’s forays into immigration enforcement, and vowed to keep up his controversial practice of bussing migrants from the state to cities nationwide.
“When Biden took 50 acres of Texas border property to illegally process up to 5,000 illegal immigrants a day, I directed the Texas National Guard to take back our land and wire it shut,” Abbott said, in an apparent reference to a legal clash between the state government and the Biden administration earlier this year.
“Now there’s no longer 5,000 people crossing the border like there was under Joe Biden. Now that the National Guard wired that shut, on average, there is one illegal immigrant crossing the border at that location a day.”
Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have visited the US-Mexico border during their administration. Ignoring that fact, Abbott vowed:
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to even come to Texas and to see the border crisis that they created. I took the border to them. I began bussing illegal immigrants to Washington DC, and we have continued bussing migrants to sanctuary cities across the entire country, and those busses will continue to roll until we finally secure our border.
Key events
As soon as he came onstage, Donald Trump Jr declared: “Before I begin my remarks, I’m going to do something a little uncharacteristic: a Trump is going to give up the microphone.”
Out came his daughter, Kai Madison Trump, who described how the former president is “to me … just a normal, grandpa”.
“He gets us candy and soda when our parents aren’t looking. He always wants to know how we’re doing in school. When I made the high honor roll, he printed it out to show his friends how proud he was of me,” Madison Trump said.
“The media makes my grandpa seem like a different person, but I know him for who he is. He’s very caring and loving. He truly wants the best for this country, and he will fight every single day to make America great again.”
It’s a lot like the speech Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump gave last night, in which she described him as a caring father-in-law – perhaps a strategy by the campaign to better relate the former president to voters wary of his well-publicized antics.
Trump Jr is now back at the podium.
Donald Trump Jr to address Republican convention
Donald Trump Jr, the president’s son who is a bit of a bomb thrower, is up next at the Republican national convention.
We’ll let you know what he says.
Chants of “Bring them home!” broke out in the arena when Orna and Ronen Neutra, whose son, Omer Neutra, was kidnapped during the 7 October attack in Israel, addressed the convention.
“Omer is one of eight American hostages and one of 120 hostages. Still left in Gaza, citizens of 24 countries and five different religions, still held by Hamas, denied basic human needs, their lives threatened every day,” Ronen Neutra said.
“President Trump called us personally right after the attack, when Omer was taken captive. We know he stands with the American hostages. We need our beautiful son back and we need your support. We need your support to end this crisis and bring all the hostages back home.”
David Smith
Words that you are unlikely to hear often at this year’s Republican national convention: abortion, democracy and Project 2025.
Speakers have generally avoided touching on what are seen as Donald Trump’s biggest vulnerabilities after the 6 January 2021 insurrection and the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic party of Wisconsin, said: “It’s most striking what the Republicans are not talking about, that Donald Trump just blew his platform to smithereens by choosing a vice-president [JD Vance] who wants a national abortion ban. And yet I haven’t heard a single mention of abortion from the stage.
“Last time Trump was in Wisconsin, he kept repeating that he had won here and the election was stolen from him and there was widespread fraud and he needed to crack down on all these different forms of voting. It’s pretty clear that a Republican party that is still totally committed to suppressing votes and overturning elections is not making a show of that from the national stage.”
Republicans addressing the convention have repeatedly accused Joe Biden of throwing open the southern border and welcoming killers, rapists and other criminals. But studies show that immigrants commit fewer crimes than people born in the US.
Wikler, who is inside the convention hall, added: “They can tell that the biggest issues in this election are actually toxic for them and so they’re resorting to fear of immigrants and fear of crime and grisly stories to try to push the country into the arms of a strongman instead of addressing the elephant in the room.
“What that misses is that, at dinner tables across the country, people are talking about what they will do if the Republican Project 2025 actually becomes a reality and they’re not doing anything to assuage those concerns. They’re just pretending that they don’t exist.”
‘They have pushed us away and tried to silence us’ – families of US soldiers killed in Afghanistan condemn Biden
The Republican national convention just devoted a lengthy segment to recounting the messy US military withdrawal from Afghanistan under Joe Biden three years ago, and in particular the 13 soldiers killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack at Kabul airport.
It began with a video in which the families of the soldiers described their lost loved ones, then recounted how, when they met with Biden as their bodies arrived at a military base in Delaware, the president appeared to check his watch during the ceremony. The families then came onstage to encourage viewers to vote Biden out of office.
“Our son, Corporal Hunter Lopez, whose name Joe Biden has refused to say out loud, was killed on August 26, 2021,” said Lopez’s mother, Alicia Lopez. “He died during Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
Referring to the Biden administration, Lopez said:
Despite our pleas for answers and accountability, they have pushed us away and tried to silence us. The Biden administration has not owned up to the bad decisions, they have not been transparent about their failures and their so-called leaders work to protect themselves, rather than our sons and daughters who took the oath to defend our country.
Biden told Schumer and Jeffries ‘he is the nominee of the party’ – spokesperson
Responding to the Washington Post’s report that the Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries warned Joe Biden that his candidacy will imperil their efforts to control Congress, White House spokesman Andrew Bates indicated Biden had no intention of stepping aside.
“The President told both leaders he is the nominee of the party, he plans to win and looks forward to working with both of them to pass his 100 days agenda to help working families,” Bates said in a statement.
Top congressional Democrats warn Biden his candidacy jeopardizes their chances of retaking majority – report
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, warned Joe Biden that if he continues his bid for re-election, it will be difficult for his party to retake the majority in Congress’s lower chamber, the Washington Post reports.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, delivered a similarly dire message to Biden about Democrats’ chances of holding on to the majority in that chamber, the Post reported. The top lawmakers’ comments to the president are the latest sign of the pressure Biden is facing to reconsider his bid for another four years following his disastrous performance in his debate against Donald Trump.
Here’s more on the conversations, from the Post:
In a separate one-on-one conversation, a person close to Biden told the president directly that he should end his candidacy, saying that was the only way to preserve his legacy and save the country from another Trump term, the person said. Biden responded that he adamantly disagreed with that opinion and that he is the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
David Smith
A rare creature is roaming Milwaukee. It is the Lesser Spotted Establishment Republican, namely Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas.
At a Republican national convention that has gone full Maga, totally devoted to Donald Trump, the dissenting Hutchinson represents the last of a dying breed.
But even this hardened Trump critic, who ran a quixotic campaign against him in this year’s Republican primary election, praised the way the former US president reacted to an attempt on his life last Saturday.
“I very much admired what he did,” Hutchinson told the Guardian. “It was one of those moments where his reaction was others and what this means to America and our democracy.
“He showed strength and that impressed me, obviously, but also how he handled afterwards and said this is a time we’ve got to tone down the rhetoric some, the harshness. I applaud him for that and it’s to a certain extent demonstrated at the convention. But we’ll see how long that lasts.”
The former governor stopped short of backing Trump, however. “I’ll just keep my options open. I didn’t come here to endorse anyone. I haven’t been asked for it and so I’ll keep my powder dry.”
Hutchinson did have some advice for Democrats dithering over whether to ditch Joe Biden as their nominee, however. “You got to switch. You got to roll the dice. Take a chance on somebody else. It’s strength versus weakness. Strength wins every time.”
This evening, Republican convention attendees have been given a sign with a message we had not seen in the past two nights: “Mass deportation now!”
It’s an indication that Donald Trump believes campaigning on hardline immigration policies will get him to the White House. He has previously vowed that “on day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”. Here’s more about that:
Trump returns to Republican convention hall for third night
Donald Trump, his right ear still bandaged from the assassination attempt on Saturday, is back in the arena where the Republican national convention is being held.
The former president walked out and pumped his fist to the crowd, to rapturous cheers. It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World by James Brown is playing on the PA.
Republican delegates shrug off possibility of Biden stepping aside
Donald Trump up, Joe Biden down.
That, in a nutshell, has been the theme of this Republican national convention, where speakers have spent their time relentlessly attacking the Democratic president, and occasionally vice-president Kamala Harris.
But what if Biden bows to the pressure from his party to end his re-election bid after his uneven performance in the first debate against Trump, and makes way for a younger candidate, perhaps someone who has more luck rallying Democrats? Do the delegates gathered in Milwaukee for the convention fear that could make Trump’s road back to the White House more treacherous?
The Guardian’s US politics live blog took to the floor of the convention hall to hear their answers.
“The real problem Democrats are facing is there really is only one other candidate they can run, and that’s Kamala Harris,” said Blake Marnell, a California delegate. The San Diego resident was wearing an orange suit with a brick pattern, which he said was “a metaphor for strong borders, which he had under president Trump, and which Joe Biden reversed”.
Harris, a former senator from his home state, was “a disaster”, he said.
Clayton Manthorpe, a delegate from the president’s home state of Delaware, said the Democrats “don’t really have a strong candidate besides Joe Biden, and I’m not saying he’s a good candidate”.
“He’s a stubborn old man,” Manthorpe continued. “Nobody wants to be told: ‘You can’t be president of the United States.’”
But Manthorpe, a self-described “conspiracy theorist”, referred to the announcement this evening that the president had Covid-19 as potentially setting up a narrative Biden could use to step aside.
“If Trump’s not going out by the bullet, something has to change on the other side of the equation,” Manthorpe said.
Alice Herman
Donald Trump and his allies have increasingly flung accusations that they engage in authoritarian rhetoric and behavior back at Democrats.
“At home, Biden is acting like a dictator,” Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor, told the Republican convention on Wednesday.
Trump, who has said he would be a “dictator on day one” if re-elected has already tried to overturn a presidential election and has not committed to accepting the results of this year’s vote.
Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor, compares Trump to ‘a beautiful breeze at our back’
Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor who was on the shortlist to be Donald Trump’s running mate, took a metaphorical tone in his remarks to the convention.
“Serving as a governor with president Trump was like having a beautiful breeze at our back. He cut taxes, and cut red tape,” Burgum said. “Serving as a governor under Joe Biden has been like a gale force wind in our face. Biden’s war on energy hurts every American because the cost of energy is in everything we use or touch every day.”
Much like the East Palestine mayor Trent Conaway, who spoke right before him, Burgum argued that Trump was a fighter for the working class.
“President Trump cares deeply about every American, rig workers, truck drivers, roughnecks and yes, America’s great farmers and ranchers, President Trump cares deeply about you. We know that he’ll fight for us. He’ll fight for our families,” said Burgum.
In a reference to the ongoing conservative revolt against electric vehicles, Burgum added, “And we know one more thing: he’ll let all of you keep driving your gas powered cars.”
The saga of East Palestine, Ohio, where a Norfolk Southern train derailed and spread chemicals far and wide, gripped the country in early 2023.
More than a year later, the town’s mayor, Trent Conaway, strolled onstage at the Republican convention to describe the Biden administration as unconcerned with his town’s plight.
“The Biden administration’s federal response was much different. It consisted almost entirely of meetings and press events. They talked and talked, but they delivered little help,” Conaway told the crowd.
“For the longest time, the White House was silent and we never heard a word from vice-president Harris. I guess we weren’t their type of folks, no Hollywood elites or Wall Street billionaires live in East Palestine, just hard-working Americans.”
Conaway continued:
But Donald Trump cared. First, he called to ask permission to visit, not wanting to intrude and then he asked how he could help. When he arrived with fresh pales of drinking water, he met with everyone from first responders to local officials and residents. He toured the derailment site, he listened to us, and he shared a meal with volunteers at a local McDonald’s.
His presence was genuine. His concern was real. After a year of criticism, President Biden finally did show up. His appearance was brief, forced and scripted. He met with a select few, and then left. We needed so much, and he delivered so little.