RNC 2024 Day 4 updates: Trump pitches unity, but revives old grievances in longest acceptance speech in history
Trump leaned into his usual talking points during his RNC speech.
On the fourth and final day of the Republican National Convention, former President Donald Trump gave a highly anticipated speech, which he said beforehand would call for unity following his assassination attempt.
However in his first speech since the incident, Trump leaned into his usual talking points, slamming President Joe Biden, Democrats and other critics on a wide variety of issues from the economy, immigration and crime.
For over an hour, Trump went off script much to the crowd's delight. The former president told them he was grateful for their support after his brush with death but argued that the country needed to be fixed due to Biden's policies.
The night also included wild speeches from guests such as Hulk Hogan and Eric Trump, who echoed some of the former president's rhetoric bashing Biden and the Democrats.
Latest headlines:
Eric Trump brings red-meat rhetoric to primetime
Eric Trump's speech included a couple lines designed to get a reaction out of this Republican base crowd. First, he decried "guys my height — 6' 5" — swimming in women's sports." And he claimed, falsely, that Democrats are letting immigrants into the country so they can vote in U.S. elections.
He's not the first speaker at this RNC to invoke these favorite conservative talking points, but he is the first to do so in primetime. Up until now, the RNC has kept the red-meat rhetoric confined to earlier in the evening, while primetime has been more focused on reaching out to swing voters.
—538's Nathaniel Rakich
'We no longer trust our elections': Eric Trump slams father's critics
Eric Trump, the former president's second oldest son, took the stage and went after his father's critics and Democrats.
He cited the "made up Russia hoax, sham impeachments" and "the efforts to cancel us, to silence him, to gag his free speech, and to drag him through every radical left courthouse in America," and last week's assassination attempt as examples of how his father was attacked.
"The swamp is terrified of this movement," Eric Trump said.
Eric Trump did not directly name President Joe Biden or former President Barack Obama in his speech.
Eric Trump argued that his father was "censured" and "persecuted" referencing his removal from social media platforms following the Jan. 6 attacks.
"We no longer trust our elections. We no longer trust our judicial system, and we no longer believe that our government is working in our best interest," he claimed.
"The greatest retribution will be our success," Eric Trump added.
Fact-checking the repeated economic comparisons during the RNC
It’s been a frequent theme over four days in Milwaukee: The economy was roaring in the Trump years, and is flailing today. But the facts aren’t so simple.
Here are few examples.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said: "They claim that our economy is thriving, yet hundreds of thousands of American-born workers lost their jobs these past few years."
PolitiFact rates that Mostly False.
People are constantly leaving jobs and taking new ones. But the average monthly number of layoffs was higher under Trump than it’s been under Biden. Leaving out the coronavirus pandemic months of March 2020 to December 2021, the number of monthly layoffs under Trump averaged 1.81 million. Under Biden, that number has been 1.52 million.
GOP vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance said: "There’s this chart that shows worker wages, and they stagnated for pretty much my entire life until President Donald J. Trump came along. Workers’ wages went through the roof."
This is exaggerated; while wages were stagnant for much of Vance’s life, there was no sharp divide after Trump’s election when wages skyrocketed.
A key metric for inflation-adjusted worker pay — median usual weekly inflation adjusted earnings for full-time wage and salary workers — shows that this figure stagnated from 1984, when Vance was born, until the mid-2010s.
Then, after about 2014, when Democrat Barack Obama was president and Vance was in his early 30s, they started rising, by about 4% for the final three years of his term. From the roughly three years between Trump’s inauguration to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, this figure also rose about 4%.
Vance also said that Trump "created the greatest economy in history for workers."
That’s False.
The strongest evidence in favor of Vance’s claim is the unemployment rate. During Trump’s presidency, the unemployment rate fell to levels untouched in five decades. But his successor, Biden, matched or exceeded those levels. The annual increases in gross domestic product — the sum of a country’s economic activity — were broadly similar under Trump to what they were during the final six years under his predecessor, Obama. And GDP growth under Trump was well below that of previous presidents.
—PolitiFact’s Aaron Sharockman and Louis Jacobson
Trump sitting with Eric’s family, granddaughter on lap
As Eric Trump speaks, Trump is sitting with his son’s wife Lara Trump and his grandchildren.
Carolina Trump, the youngest child of Eric and Lara, is sitting on her grandfather's lap.
Many members of the Trump family -- including his oldest granddaughter Kai -- have spoken about his softer side this convention.