Republican speakers wrestle with a ‘unity’ theme

As one of the first speakers Monday at the Republican National Convention, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, struck a familiarly strident tone.

“Today’s Democrat agenda, their policies, are a clear and present threat to America, to our institutions, our values and our people,” Johnson said, attacking the transgender community and what he called “the sexualization and indoctrination of our children.”

Yet nearly as soon as he walked offstage, Johnson backtracked: He had been given the wrong speech.

“They loaded the first draft, rather than the revision made in light of Saturday,” Johnson said in a text to The New York Times.

Since a would-be assassin’s bullet tore through a part of his ear at a Pennsylvania rally Saturday, former President Donald Trump has been signing his emails and texts to supporters with two words: “Unity. Peace.” Republican leaders have tried to project a similarly toned-down approach, lowering the temperature and minimizing the savaging of Democrats. In an interview with CBS News on Tuesday morning, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, proclaimed, “This is going to be different.”

The result throughout the first day, however, was mixed, as evidenced by Johnson’s speech. Republican leaders and top surrogates were working through exactly how, and to what degree, they should project that unity and peace. And for a party animated for the past eight years by grievance and Trump’s dark promises of retribution and warnings about the existential threat posed by the “radical left,” efforts to turn down the temperature of their political rhetoric were halting. Messages about focusing on policy and Republican plans for the future were mixed with caustic rhetoric lambasting Democrats and criticizing the polices of President Joe Biden.

Trump, in an interview with The New York Post on Sunday, suggested that his near-death experience over the weekend had prompted him to alter his tone, saying he wanted to “try to unite our country” and that he had “prepared an extremely tough speech” about Biden but had thrown it out.

Still, at a time of deep partisan division, it was far from clear that an effort to promote unity, even one stemming from as brutal an event as an attempted assassination, would catch on in any substantive way — or that it would last for very long.

Indeed, in a prerecorded video played to convention attendees, Trump reprised his stolen election mantra, claiming that Democrats “cheat” to win elections.

And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the divisive Georgia lawmaker, said Democrats “ripped open our borders and allowed millions of illegal aliens to pour in.” (The remarks were tame by her standards: A day earlier, she had declared in a social media post that Democrats were “the party of pedophiles.”)

Other candidates appeared to have heard the message to moderate.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the businessperson and former presidential candidate known for his aggressive hyperbole, urged Republicans to accept those whose beliefs differ from their own.

“Our enemy is not the Democrats,” Ramaswamy said Monday morning at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, the nerve center for conservative policies. “Our enemy is an ideology, and our task ahead is how do we defeat that poisonous ideology while still viewing our fellow citizens as our citizens.”

In a brief speech Monday night, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, the candidate for governor known for his vitriolic language (last month, he said that “some folks need killing”) made not a single criticism of Democrats, instead simply praising the strength of the Republican platform.

On Tuesday, when the scheduled theme is immigration, Republicans may find themselves back on the attack. As with many issues in the Trump era, the politics and rhetoric surrounding the border crisis have escalated to an extreme, in which the debate is no longer simply about policy but about preventing mass murder, assault and other horrific crimes.

At the Heritage event Monday, where Ramaswamy and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah both referred to a need to lower the temperature, two former Trump administration immigration officials did not follow suit.

“Why am I pissed?” said Thomas Homan, an immigration official from the Trump administration. “Because this administration has unsecured the border. Deaths are skyrocketing. Rapes are skyrocketing. So come at me all you want, hate me all you want; I’m doing the right thing for the right reasons.”

And conservative media influencer Tucker Carlson, speaking at the Heritage event, remained as confrontational as ever.

“There are forces — and they’re very obvious now that they’ve decided, for whatever reason, to take off the mask — whose only goal is chaos, violence, destruction,” he said.

Yet later, in a question-and-answer session, Carlson warned against resorting to violence.

“There’s been so much whispering among the persecuted right about, ‘Wow, this is coming to a time where we have to physically fight back,’” Carlson said. “And I don’t think it takes that. It doesn’t. You don’t have to hurt anyone to save your country.”

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