As the Republican National Convention continues and former President Trump prepares to speak on Thursday, we take a look back at his two previous speeches, at the convention in 2016 and 2020.
After his surprise defeat in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Trump attended his first Republican National Convention in Cleveland. In his speech, he denounced political correctness, telling the crowd, “It’s finally time for an honest assessment of the state of our country. I will present the facts plainly and honestly. … We can no longer afford to be politically correct.”
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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends the second day of the Republican National Convention at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee on July 16, 2024. (Reuters/Andrew Kelly)
Many of his remarks emphasized his vision for leading the United States toward a restoration of law and order, particularly as it relates to crime and the southern border.
“Progress made over decades in reducing crime is now being reversed by the current administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement,” he said at the time.
President Trump has spoken about crimes committed by illegal immigrants as he calls for increased border security, continuing a trend among Republicans to highlight violent crimes allegedly committed by people who enter the country illegally.
“One of those border crossers was released and made his way to Nebraska, where he took the life of an innocent girl named Sarah Root. She was 21 years old and the day after she graduated from college with a 4.0 grade point average and first place in her class,” he told the audience.
“Her killer has since been released a second time and is currently at large. I have met Sarah’s beautiful family, but to this administration, their amazing daughter was just another American life not worth protecting, just another child to be sacrificed on the altar of open borders.”
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Hundreds of migrants, mostly from Venezuela, cross the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on December 5, 2023. (David Peinado/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Trump’s 2016 comments foreshadowed what would become of much of his presidency, which focused on illegal immigration.
In 2020, after several years as commander in chief, President Trump began to shift his public speaking focus to other topics. At this point, the country was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a vaccine had not yet become available. Many speeches were delivered remotely due to the pandemic.
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This illustrated photo taken on March 19, 2021, shows labeled vials of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File)
“In recent months, our nation and our entire planet have been assailed by a new and powerful invisible enemy. Like the brave Americans who came before us, we are rising to this challenge,” Trump said at the time. “We are delivering life-saving treatments, and we are on track to have a vaccine by the end of the year, maybe sooner. We will defeat the virus, end the pandemic, and emerge stronger than ever.”
Trump spent much of his speech reviewing the accomplishments of the past few years, listing just a few of them: “We withdrew from the last Administration’s job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. We then approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. We ended the unfair and costly Paris Climate Agreement and ensured American energy independence for the first time. We passed record tax cuts and regulatory reductions at a speed no one has ever seen before,” he explained.
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“In just three years, we’ve built the greatest economy in the history of the world,” Trump said.
Trump’s rhetoric in 2020 was peppered with warnings to voters that all the progress he had made toward his presidential goals could be for naught if he did not win again on Election Day.
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Trump’s 2024 speech will likely touch on some of these same themes, but the former president made it clear his speech will do one thing in particular: bring unity. After Trump was assassinated at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, leaving him bloodied and with a wound in his right ear, the former president said he tore up his planned convention speech.
“This is an opportunity to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be completely different than it was two days ago,” he said in an interview after the shooting.
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