MILWAUKEE \u2014 Eric Trump made somewhat dismissive comments this week about the Republican Party watering down its platform on abortion and same-sex marriage.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis country has real holes in the roof, and you\u2019ve got to fix those holes, and you\u2019ve got to stop worrying about the little spot on the wall in the basement,\u201d former president Donald Trump\u2019s middle son told NBC News.<\/p>\n
Imagine a big-name Republican likening abortion to a \u201cspot on the wall\u201d even four years ago. The backlash would have been swift. They might well have been excommunicated from the party.<\/p>\n
But abortion has indeed been little more than a spot on the wall at the 2024 Republican National Convention \u2014 or at least the version of it being conveyed to the American public. Despite years of rhetoric likening abortion to mass murder, the party hasn\u2019t seen fit to say much of anything about it.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s got company in other fixtures of the party\u2019s rhetoric.<\/p>\n
Through three nights at the GOP convention, the word \u201cabortion\u201d didn\u2019t appear to have been uttered once onstage. That\u2019s compared with 18 times in a single night of the 2020 convention, according to a transcript.<\/p>\n
While Trump has hailed the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade and allowing states to decide the issue \u2014 an outcome he often falsely claims virtually \u201ceveryone\u201d desired \u2014 speakers aren\u2019t even promoting that talking point. Roe hasn\u2019t come up.<\/p>\n
There have been passing references to the issue. But that comes with a strong emphasis on \u201cpassing.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Catholic archbishop opened Monday\u2019s events with a prayer citing \u201cthe dignity of every life from conception to natural death.\u201d But since then, nothing abortion-related has approached a real point of emphasis. Trump adviser Peter Navarro cited supposed government persecution of \u201cpro-life activists,\u201d while fellow Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway briefly cited \u201cprotecting life\u201d in a list of priorities, not even pausing before mentioning the next one.<\/p>\n
Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP\u2019s new vice-presidential nominee, are among the most antiabortion members of that chamber. Rubio has said he supports no abortion exceptions, while Vance has said he wants to make abortion illegal nationally, with some exceptions. But neither mentioned the issue.<\/p>\n
(Rubio did open by mentioning that the \u201clife of every living thing and the breath of all mankind is in the hands of God,\u201d but it was more a reference to the assassination attempt on Trump this past weekend.)<\/p>\n
Another, possibly even more surprising, absence has been any real emphasis or mention of gun rights, in the days since that assassination attempt.<\/p>\n
Vance in his speech earned roars from the crowd for mentioning how, upon his grandmother\u2019s death two decades ago, \u201cwe found 19 loaded handguns\u201d among her possessions. But despite that crowd-pleaser of a line, almost no speakers have approvingly mentioned guns or even merely protecting the Second Amendment.<\/p>\n
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) briefly claimed Tuesday night that Democrats want to \u201celiminate Second Amendment rights\u201d \u2014 again, as part of a laundry list of issues \u2014 but that\u2019s about it.<\/p>\n
When guns have come up, it has more often been in the context of crime, such as Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) mentioning how the \u201cdevil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle\u201d to shoot at Trump.<\/p>\n
A final conspicuous absence has been the name of the man who, before Trump at least, defined the Republican Party more than any other: Ronald Reagan.<\/p>\n
Reagan got three mentions Monday, the convention\u2019s first night, but only one identifying the party with Reagan. Scott said, \u201cWe are the Republican Party of Frederick Douglass and of Abraham Lincoln, of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reagan wasn\u2019t mentioned again until Thursday night, when the convention played a brief video featuring his voice.<\/p>\n
The video played up not Reagan\u2019s muscular foreign policy or his iconic status in the party, but rather his famous question asking voters whether they were better off now than they were four years ago.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
MILWAUKEE \u2014 Eric Trump made somewhat dismissive comments this week about the Republican Party watering down its platform on abortion and same-sex marriage. \u201cThis country has real holes in the roof, and you\u2019ve got to fix those holes, and you\u2019ve got to stop worrying about the little spot on the wall in the basement,\u201d former […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6368,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}