Republican convention touts Trump, stokes fears if he loses

US Republicans launched their national convention Monday with a full-throated endorsement of President Donald Trump’s record and laid out a bleak vision of how American life would change for the worse under a Joe Biden administration. 

Trump, having claimed the party’s  unanimous nomination earlier in the day as he opened his bid for a  second term, was portrayed -- perhaps misleadingly -- as a president  whose response to the coronavirus pandemic saved thousands of lives and  ensured an economic recovery. 

Trump’s right-wing firebrand son Don  Jr, who like many spoke from an ornate theater in Washington, channeled  his father’s pugilistic style, throwing red meat to the party’s base  voters by framing the November election as a choice between “church,  work and school” and “rioting, looting and vandalism.” 

 But there was also a stream of dire warnings from participants who said Biden would bring “socialism” and danger to the nation. Trump himself meanwhile doubled down on  an increasingly familiar argument: that Democrats want to “steal” the  election that polls currently show him losing. . “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.” Opponents say Trump’s  increasingly extreme resistance to expanded mail-in voting -- a method  already used widely in the United States -- is an attempt to suppress  voter turnout, while setting up an excuse to challenge the result if he  is defeated.
CHARLOTTE AFP, 
25      Aug, 2020-