In show of unity, Haley, DeSantis and Ramaswamy tell Americans: Vote Donald Trump

MILWAUKEE: “Donald Trump asked me to speak to this convention in the name of unity. It was a gracious invitation I was happy to accept. I will start by making one thing perfectly clear. Donald Trump has my strong endorsement. Period,” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, the US ambassador to UN under Trump, and the Indian-American Republican who challenged Trump in party’s the primaries till the very end, said at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Tuesday night.

With Trump in attendance, and applauding, Haley went on to explain the logic of her endorsement by drawing a sharp contrast between the Trump and President Joe Biden’s foreign policy.

But what stood out in her speech, which was well received by the Republican delegates who had voted against her and for Trump in the primaries, was her appeal to the moderates within the party and independent voters she had drawn.

“You don’t have to agree with Trump 100% of the time to vote for him. I haven’t always agreed with Trump. But we agree more than disagree, on making America strong again, safe again. And we agree that Democrats have moved so far to the Left that our freedoms are in danger,” Haley said, declaring that she was at the convention because they had a country to save, and only a unified Republican Party could do that.

Moving beyond the unity of the party, in what was clearly a message to Trump’s own radical base, Haley also spoke of expanding the tent and welcoming others. “We are much better when we are bigger. We are stronger when we welcome those with different backgrounds and experiences.”

A day after the convention officially nominated Trump as their nominee for presidential elections this November, it was a show of unity at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee. Former primary rivals from the 2024 cycle - Nikki Haley, Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, the Indian-origin entrepreneur from Ohio and a rising star of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement — and Trump’s former primary rivals from the 2016 cycle — Senator Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — came together to back the nominee. It was a sign of his complete takeover of the Republican Party and the total marginalisation of the older Republican establishment, the face of which Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell was booed on the floor on Monday even as he represented his state, Kentucky, to back Trump.

Haley’s message on foreign policy

Haley began by taking a dig at the Democratic ticket, “For a year, I have said a vote for Joe Biden is a vote for Kamala Harris. After the debate, everyone knows it to be true. Four more years of Biden, or a single day of Harris, we will be badly worse-off. We have to go with Donald Trump for the sake of the nation”.

But for someone who Trump and his supporters have repeatedly dismissed as a “globalist” because she has championed continued American role in the world — including support for Ukraine — it was striking that Haley choose to back Trump over foreign policy by drawing a contrast with Biden’s record. As someone who served in Trump’s cabinet as the US ambassador to UN, Haley said she had a front row seat to Trump’s national security policies and wanted to focus on that.

On Russia, Haley said, “When Barack Obama was President, Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea. When Joe Biden was President, Putin invaded all of Ukraine. When Trump was President, Putin did nothing - no invasion, no wars. And that was no accident. Putin knew Trump was tough. A strong president doesn’t start wars, he prevents them.”

On West Asia, Haley said that all the problems in the region could be squarely traced back to Iran’s regime. “Trump got us out of the insane Iran nuclear deal. He imposed the toughest sanctions ever on Iran..It was too weak to start wars. They knew Trump was tough”. By contrast, she blamed Biden for lifting the sanctions, “begging” Iran for the nuclear deal, surrendering in Afghanistan and sending a signal of weakness, and despite Hamas holding American hostages, “pressuring Israel instead of the terrorists”. “Between Israel and Hamas, Trump is clear who is our friend and who is our enemy,” Haley said. Her criticism of Biden for being too tough on Israel finds wide echo on the Republican side, even as he has faced relentless pressure from the Left on being too supportive of Israel.

And then Haley spoke about the border, a constant issue through the speeches on Tuesday’s night given the theme was “making America safe again”. She claimed that under Biden, thousands of illegal immigrants entered America everyday and they did not know who these people were, where they went, and what they intended to do. “Kamala had one job, one job, and that was to secure the border. Imagine her in charge of the whole country,” Haley said, as delegates booed the vice president who had been delegated to address the root cause of the border crisis early in Biden’s term.

Introducing a personal touch, and seeking to dispel the impression of Trump as an autocrat, Haley said that her experience was Trump listened to advice and inputs. “America was well served by his presidency.”

The Ramaswamy message - Ignore tweets, focus on policies

Welcomed with thunderous applause, Ramaswamy, who has in quick time has established himself as an articulate spokesperson of the “America first” and MAGA movement and gained tremendous name recognition among Republicans, began by making a joke about how, in the past year, he had achieved the impossible as everyone had learnt to say his name.

The Harvard and Yale graduate, who incidentally went to law school with Trump’s VP pick JD Vance and his wife, Usha, claimed that America was in the middle of a “national identity crisis” where “race, gender, climate and sexuality” had replaced faith, identity and patriotism. The solution was prioritising merit, rule of law, and getting elected officials, rather than unelected bureaucrats and the “deep state”, to determine policy.

“If you want to seal the border, vote Trump. If you want to restore law and order, vote Trump. If you want to reignite the economy, vote Trump. If you want national pride, vote Trump. If you want to make America great again, vote Trump,” Ramaswamy said, as delegates joined along to echo his punch line.

But going beyond the base, just as Haley had done, Ramaswamy addressed specific constituencies that remain suspicious of Trump and Republican platform. To Black Americans, the young Republican leader said that while the media had tried to convince them that the party didn’t care, Republicans stood for safe neighbourhoods, clean streets, jobs and a criminal justice system that treated everyone equally “irrespective of the colour of your skin and political affiliations”. To legal migrants, Ramaswamy said, “You are like my parents.” But to illegal immigrants, after having repeated Trump’s promise to “seal the border on day 1”; Ramaswamy said; “We will return you to your country of origin. Not because you are bad. But because you broke the rule of law.”

To millennials, Ramaswamy said that as one himself, he knew that the government had sold them falsehoods, from the Iraq War (which the MAGA stream of the party slams the older Republicans for) to the global financial crisis to crushing student debts. “But we can’t be cynical and we need a leader who tells the truth, even if it comes with mean tweets from time to time,” Ramaswamy said, in a reference to Trump’s political rhetoric on the social medium platform that was widely seen as putting off many moderate voters. And to Gen Z, Ramaswamy’s pitch was different. He told them if they wanted to be rebels and different, they should declare they were conservatives, they loved America, get married and have children.

And to prove they were democratic and open, Ramaswamy said that even if those who heard him disagreed with everything he had said, he would still protect their right to say it. With a call for American exceptionalism, and a rejection of group identities, victimhood and politics of grievance, Ramaswamy returned to his personal story of how no matter where you come from, or “how long your last name is”, US offered an opportunity to rise with hard work.

The DeSantis brand of cultural conservatism

Once seen as the most promising challenger to Trump, Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s primary run collapsed right after the first battle in Iowa. Having retreated to state politics, DeSantis clearly continued to have a degree of appeal among the radical cultural base and re-emerged at the convention to make amends with Trump, a resident of his home state.

DeSantis claimed that under Trump, “life was affordable, the country was respected, and the border was secure”, in an acknowledgement of the trifecta of inflation, immigration and America’s entanglements in foreign wars that is driving Trump’s campaign. DeSantis slammed Biden for “dereliction of duty” in Afghanistan and mocked his fitness levels. “He lacks the capacity to do the job. Our enemies don’t confine their designs between 10am and 4pm,” a reference to a news report that Biden functioned most effectively in those hours. The governor claimed Biden was just a “figurehead” for imposing a “left agenda” of supporting open borders and the entry of illegal aliens” and ridiculed the Left for supporting this until the immigrants are sent to Martha’s Vineyard, a reference to DeSantis’s decision to send busloads of immigrants to Democratic cities and rich enclaves in America’s northeast to drive home the consequences of the influx.

But the core of DeSantis’s appeal to Republicans, which he referred to in the speech, is his battle against the “woke virus” and “gender ideology” in Florida, which has taken the form of a crackdown on LGBTQI rights and pedagogy around sexuality. He mocked liberals for mandating Covid vaccines to enter restaurants, while opposing the need to show proof of citizenship to vote, in a conspiratorial allusion to how Democrats planned to get illegal immigrants to vote.

And he used this campaign rhetoric to back Trump with a fervent appeal. “Trump stands in their way. He was demonised. He was sued. He was prosecuted. He almost lost his life. We can’t let him down. We can’t let America down.”