The speakers on the third night of the Republican National Convention described a dark and dangerous America, where the government can throw you in jail for posting on social media and immigrants cross the border only to commit violent crimes.
Almost every speech during Wednesday’s prime-time programming — billed as Make America Strong Again night — took a tone of doom.
“I have never in my lifetime seen the world falling apart like it is under Joe Biden,” Rep. Mike Waltz said.
Kimberly Guilfoyle described the country on the brink of World War III.
“Insanity spreads like a cancer in our schools. We are closer to World War III than any time in my life,” she said. “This is not just a choice between Republicans and Democrats. This is a choice between safety or chaos, wealth or poverty, national sovereignty or open borders.”
Several proudly reiterated one of Donald Trump’s earliest lines about the southern border: that those crossing were “murderers and rapists.”
“This is national suicide,” Tom Homan, the former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said of the Biden administration’s policies at the southern border.
And speaker after speaker circled back to one of the darkest moments in Biden’s presidency: the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the military casualties at Abbey Gate.
Biden himself has struggled to speak about the toll of the withdrawal. At the debate, he misstated: “I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any — this, this decade — doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did.”
Thirteen U.S. soldiers died during a suicide bombing while leaving Afghanistan; three were killed by drone strikes in Jordan and two Navy SEALs died in the Red Sea — tragedies Republicans reiterated Wednesday night.
“We have another son serving in the Army, and we do not trust Joe Biden with his life,” a mother of one of the Marines who died in the withdrawal said.
Among a spectacle of red, white and blue, screens all around the stage showed images of civilians clinging to the side of military aircraft as they took off from Hamid Kazi International Airport.
Waltz’s fellow Green Beret, Scott Neil, painted a bleak picture. “This moral injury caused many of us to ask, ‘Why do we serve if this was the outcome?’”
Neil described the Afghanistan withdrawal as “bloody anarchy.”
The tenor of the night — a clear departure from the message of “unity” that Republicans had called for in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump — was more than a critique of Biden’s record.
Republicans’ aim was to incite fear that Biden was targeting everyday Americans. Biden could throw you in jail, several speakers baselessly claimed.
“On one hand, they think that free speech protects their right to expose your children to explicit drag shows. On the other hand, they want to put you in jail for making a meme,” Donald Trump Jr. said. “We don’t make you choose between picking a party or picking a jail cell.”
Peter Navarro said it even more explicitly: “Be careful: They can come for you,” he warned.
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John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.