What to see on Night 4

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump will accept his party’s nomination for the presidency Thursday night in the White House, concluding a week-long Republican National Convention marked by revisionist histories of the past four years.

Expect Trump to do more of this tonight – only, given that it’s Trump, the revisions are likely to be on an even larger scale.

The president knows that his power is to campaign as an outsider, in large part because it means he can blame someone else for the bad things he sees around him, while also making high promises, such as Mexico for the wall will pay or that production will return to the Rust Belt.

Herein lies Trump’s dilemma: How to campaign as an insurgent for president when he has been president for four years, and the nation suffers from widespread unemployment, intensifying racial strife and a pandemic that claims hundreds of lives every day.

Judging by the figures, Trump’s task seems almost insurmountable.

When Trump took the oath of office in January 2017, the unemployment rate was 4.9%. Today it is more than double that, with 10.2%, which means that twice as many Americans are out of work today as 3½ years ago.

In January 2017, more than 200,000 people, mostly women, demonstrated peacefully at the National Mall. Many Americans did not agree with them, but they were not gassed with tears or shot with rubber bullets. Today, incidents of police violence against Black people have called for mass demonstrations, but instead of trying to calm the unrest, the president has demonized Protestants as “thugs” and “criminals.”

Also in January 2017, in just six months, the United States had not lost 180,000 fathers and mothers, grandparents and children to a coronavirus pandemic that is largely under control in the rest of the world, but still always rages over the United States. To this day, thousands of Americans die from Covid-19 every 24 hours, and there is no federal plan to tackle the spread of the pandemic. Only pressure from the White House to test less, open companies more, and wait for the virus to “just disappear.”

Moreover, Trump still refuses to accept responsibility for the course taken by the pandemic in America, and prefers to blame China for its existence, while also blaming Democrats for the economic pain caused by closed businesses and schools. As for the death toll, he said, “It’s what it is.”

Given the state of the union, it’s no surprise then that Trump follows Democrat Joe Biden by more than 8 percentage points in national polls, according to the FiveThirtyEight average. Perhaps the better question is why Trump is not following Biden any more.

The answer has a lot to do with the message you will hear Trump deliver on Thursday night. It’s a one-two punch to rewrite the past and paint an apocalyptic vision of the future, should Biden win in November.

Trump will first try to convince Americans that Biden, a two-term career senator and former vice president, is the real resident of Washington, not Trump. Then he will try to distinguish the rules between being an “insider” and being the sitting president.

“We’ve been through the last four years of the damage Joe Biden has inflicted over the last 47 years,” Trump will say, according to a few lines from his speech released Thursday. In Trump’s revisionist history of the past four years, it will be Biden who has caused damage that needs to be repaired, not Trump.

What is more important to the Trump campaign effort than rewriting the past, however, is to paint a picture of a future under President Biden that looks even scarier than it does today.

Trump will say that the Democratic agenda is “the most extreme set of proposals ever proposed by a nominated party for a major party.” In reality, Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, are both considered moderate Democrats, to the point that their nomination was a disappointment to many progressives.

Expect Trump to also hammer home a phrase we heard repeatedly from Republicans this week, recently from Vice President Mike Pence: “You will not be safe in Biden’s America.”

This law-and-order pressure from the Trump campaign is a central feature of the president’s attempt to win over suburbs, white voters, especially women, who broke for Trump in 2016. These voters pay to Biden after four years of divisive rhetoric and administrative chaos under Trump.

Trump’s pitch relies entirely on convincing these voters, in every way necessary, that their personal safety is at stake.

As he has done all spring and summer, Trump expects to use the latest example of demonstrations in response to a shooting by police of a Black man – in this case Jacob Blake of Kenosha, Wisconsin – to claim that Black Lives Matter protesters, and the Democrats who support police reform, will turn America into a country hit by “radical leftist mobs.”

As with most of Trump’s speeches, there will be moments of language unification, though limited to those who want to unite with the Republican Party.

“The Republican Party is united, determined and ready to welcome millions of Democrats, Independents, and anyone who believes in the greatness of America and the righteous heart of the American people,” Trump will say, according to fragments that ‘ first obtained by Politico,

“This lofty American spirit has overcome every challenge and has lifted us to the pinnacle of human endeavor.”

Lines like these are fun to hear a politician say. But judging by every political speech Trump has delivered since he first announced he was running for president, they will be the icing on a cake made of many dark, divisive things.

Convention coverage on cable news channels and CNBC.com will begin at 8:30 p.m. ET. Coverage over network time begins at 10 p.m.

Correction: This article has been updated to indicate that Jacob Blake was shot by police.