By Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin

President Donald Trump’s unchallenged grip on the Republican Party and his fondness for pushing the boundaries of presidential politics were on vivid display Tuesday (25), with the second night of his party’s convention unfolding as a showy pageant led by Trump’s family members and featuring segments that leveraged government resources for the benefit of his campaign.

By the end of the night, Trump had issued a pardon for a Nevada man convicted in a 2004 bank robbery, using one of his unrestricted presidential powers in a nearly Roman display of executive mercy. The country’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, was to give a speech promoting Trump’s candidacy from the roof of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, flouting a norm that State Department officials shun electoral politics.

And three members of Trump’s family — his wife, Melania, and two of his children, Eric and Tiffany — were to address the conference, with the first lady speaking from a redesigned White House Rose Garden. Their remarks would further infuse the gathering of a 166-year-old political party with an atmosphere of dynastic ambition, after Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, both spoke in prime time Monday (24) night. Trump’s daughter Ivanka will introduce him Thursday (27) night when he accepts the party’s nomination.

Had there been any doubt about the dimensions of Trump’s political persona, the first two nights of the Republican convention would have dispensed with it. Pompeo’s appearance, the pardon and the parade of family members who would pay tribute to the president were stark reminders of Trump’s ability to impose his will on the party’s signature event of the election cycle.

Still, it was not clear from the early stages of the convention that the party had a plan for appealing to voters outside Trump’s core political coalition.

The political message that defined the program Monday appeared nearly certain to remain intact: giving a full-throated and heavily embellished defence of Trump’s governing record; largely ignoring or minimizing the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic; and branding Democrats as an ideologically radical party that would usher in an age of economic repression and urban warfare.

The combination of personal tributes and slashing attacks planned for Tuesday reflected the duality of both the convention and Trump’s Republican Party.

There was still a place for convention staples — family members, real-life stories and up-and-coming party figures. But figures like Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, the first female governor of her Midwestern swing state, who spoke Tuesday night, must fully embrace a polarizing president as a close ally and appear on the same stage, or at least in the same program, with conservative provocateurs.

Much like the first night, the presentations Tuesday veered between trumpeting Trump’s law-and-order mantra and promoting his support for some criminal justice reforms. The recipient of Trump’s pardon was Jon Ponder, who served time for several crimes including bank robbery, two people briefed on the plans said. Ponder, who previously appeared with Trump at a White House event in 2018, had already been granted clemency by a Nevada board for state-level crimes. After his release, he founded an organization to help former prisoners re-enter society.

It is unclear whether this approach will appeal to voters who are not already backing Trump in his race against Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, or whether it is likelier to fire up Trump’s core supporters without broadening his appeal. The early television ratings released for the Monday programming showed that the convention had drawn a smaller audience — about 15.8 million from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m., according to Nielsen — than the equivalent night of the Democratic convention last week (roughly 19 million), and that a huge share of the viewership had been concentrated on the conservative-leaning Fox News.

Events overnight Monday might further stoke Republicans’ message that Democrats would preside over a total breakdown of domestic security. In the Wisconsin suburb of Kenosha, protests erupted in violence and arson after a white police officer shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back in an encounter Sunday that was captured on video. Such scenes of destruction in a crucial swing state could play into Trump’s hands, even as polls show most voters disapprove of how the president has handled race relations and matters of law enforcement.

Democrats have largely ignored the vandalism linked to the unrest, and Tuesday they kept hammering Trump on his response to the coronavirus crisis, the issue on which they believe he is most vulnerable.

“We haven’t even regained half of the jobs lost during the pandemic,” said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. “The economy has lost more than six million jobs since Trump took the wheel, including more than 250,000 factory jobs.”

During the first night of the convention Monday, Republicans made caustic characterizations of demonstrators and issued warnings about the risks of electing Democrats who would empower them. The admonitions came from both Republican lawmakers and more obscure personalities, like Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who face felony charges after brandishing guns at peaceful protesters in their neighbourhood this summer.

Several law enforcement officials were scheduled to speak Tuesday, including Kentucky’s attorney general, Daniel Cameron, who is the first Black man elected to statewide office there, and Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida, who has been a loyal Trump surrogate for years.

Pompeo’s appearance from Israel drew the most attention heading into the evening. Trump has made his support for Israel a major selling point of his candidacy, though he has acknowledged that some steps — like relocating the US Embassy to Jerusalem — have earned him more goodwill with conservative evangelical voters than with American Jews.

Based on his choice of venue, Pompeo seemed certain to make Trump’s record of unflagging support for Israel and its right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a theme of his comments. But the secretary of state was also positioned to speak more broadly about Trump’s approach to the world, and to lay out the case that his confrontational America-first ethos had yielded positive results.

Pompeo’s appearance could serve as something of a rebuttal to the Democratic convention, during which numerous speakers accused Trump of demolishing the global stature of the United States and imperiling American national security.

-New York Times