On Night three of the Democratic National Convention, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance spoke at a rally in Asheboro. Trump’s speech included attacks on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. He laid the Afghanistan withdrawal and the border crisis at their feet.
He made the false claims he’s known for. Trump falsely claimed that the jobs report revisions that came out on August 21 were lies. The Labor Department reported that job growth was 28% lower than previously reported. That discovery came from a routine reconciliation of the survey data that created the initial figures and the state reports that come later.
However, the most significant sections of his speech revealed a fact that gets lost on many political observers. Trump revealed how different MAGA Republicans are from conservatives.
Trump Criticized One Big Former Republican
Trump recounted how he threatened to withhold military support for NATO members if they failed to meet military spending obligations. He compared himself to Presidents Biden, Obama, and Bush:
“If you remember, President Bush would go and he’d make a speech. Obama would go, he’d make a speech. They all made speeches. This one didn’t even make a speech, this last one. But I went, I said, ‘Nobody is paying. You got to pay.’ And they did pay hundreds of billions of dollars.”
NATO spending increased in the last two years of Obama’s second term and during each of Trump’s four years in office. So, Trump was wrong when he claimed that NATO spent nothing on defense before his presidency.
It’s worth noticing how willing Trump was to criticize the last Republican president, George W. Bush. Under Trump, the Republican Party has become more isolationist. For example, a 2023 Pew Survey found that 48% of Republicans believed the United States was spending too much on supporting the war in Ukraine. Only 16% of Democrats felt the same.
That’s a sharp reversal from Bush’s policy of engaging with the world. Bush launched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he also launched a program that fought HIV/AIDS in Africa. Trump’s open disdain for Bush’s policies show how completely he has taken over the Republican Party and how far the Republican base has moved away from its former icons.
