Takeaways From Day 3 of the Republican Convention (2024)

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Catch up on what happened at the Republican National Convention.

It was a relatively low-key address from the 39-year-old Ohio senator, who laid out his remarkable biography and economic vision without much passion. Viewers heard a diagnosis of America’s ills that often blamed policies that Republicans have embraced for decades, and many prescriptions that would break from the party’s orthodoxy.

Here are five highlights from Night 3:

Vance, not always coherently, pushed a nationalist vision.

Listeners might have been forgiven for thinking that President Biden was the architect of economic and foreign policies dating to George H.W. Bush, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the opening of China to international trade and the war in Iraq.

But between partisan jabs and misplaced responsibility, Mr. Vance laid out an economic vision that in fact blamed his own party and its Wall Street and corporate patrons for the struggles of working Americans. He mentioned policies that might hearten blue-collar voters but would give Republican donors heartburn.

“Wall Street barons crashed the economy,” he said, then accused undocumented immigrants of suppressing wages and saddling the economy with a housing crisis.

“We won’t cater to Wall Street,” he promised. “We’ll commit to the working man.”

“We won’t sacrifice our supply chains to unlimited global trade. We’ll stamp every product ‘Made in the U.S.A.,’” he said. “We will build factories again, put people to work making real products for American families, made with the hands of American workers.”

If those promises sound familiar, they actually echo Mr. Biden’s. And the Biden campaign was quick to note the resurgence of manufacturing that has come since the enactment of the president’s signature domestic laws, all of which included “made in America” provisions.

But with his dry delivery, Mr. Vance did show why former President Donald J. Trump tapped him as his running mate to articulate his own vision of nationalist isolationism.

Republicans took the gloves off.

For the first two nights of the Republican convention, speakers tried imperfectly to show some restraint, holding back their rhetorical attacks on Mr. Biden amid calls for unity and appeals to broaden the pro-Trump coalition.

On Night 3, they let loose, and the tone turned, well, positively Trumpian. Placards proclaimed “Mass Deportation Now.” And Thomas D. Homan, who was Mr. Trump’s head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told undocumented immigrants, “You better start packing — you’re damned right.”

It might have been impossible to restrain the nominee’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who deployed his signature bombast.

“All hell has broken out in America,” he told a crowd that lapped it up, “and it’s impossible to hide anymore.”

Peter Navarro, a former economic adviser in the Trump White House who was fresh from prison, where he had been sent for defying a congressional subpoena, spoke apocalyptically of the consequences for Trump supporters if they did not capture all branches of government in November.

“They stripped me of every possible defense and, just as they did to Donald J. Trump in New York, they threw me to the wolves of an anti-Trump jury,” he said, warning, “Make no mistake, they’re already coming for you.”

Military families questioned the commander in chief.

Portraying Mr. Biden as weak of spirit, soft on crime and lax on immigration has been a central mission of the G.O.P. in the past three days, but on Wednesday night, the convention turned to harsh attacks on his military leadership.

Military veterans questioned the president’s command of the armed forces. Elected Republicans took up Mr. Trump’s line that Russia invaded Ukraine and Hamas attacked Israel only because Mr. Biden was f*ckless.

But the emotional punch came from the Gold Star families of the Marines killed in a tragic bombing during the evacuation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

In a heart-wrenching video, the families of the fallen Marines recounted the day they were informed their loved ones had died. They spoke of meeting Mr. Biden at the air base in Dover, Del., where repatriated military remains are returned; they said he had been distracted.

Then the families were invited onto the convention stage to make the matter personal, and to lay responsibility for their children’s deaths at the president’s feet.

“Joe Biden has refused to recognize their sacrifice,” one Gold Star mother, Christy Shamblin, told the convention.

Republicans lined up behind Israel.

Hamas’s massacre in Israel and Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza crashed into the convention in prime time on Wednesday, as the Republican Party tried to make Israel’s fight its own — and to further fracture the Democratic Party’s longstanding bond with American Jews.

A coterie of fresh-faced fraternity brothers from the University of North Carolina was invited onstage and celebrated for defending the American flag from pro-Palestinian protesters who had tried to take it down. An Orthodox Jewish student from Harvard, Shabbos Kestenbaum, castigated the Democratic Party he once supported as “ideologically poisoned” by “far-left antisemitic extremism.”

And Orna and Ronen Neutra, the parents of an American citizen still held by Hamas in Gaza, led the crowd in a chant of “bring them home,” after recounting how Mr. Trump had called them after their son was taken hostage.

It was a tricky two-step for a party whose nominee dined in 2022 with an outspoken antisemite, Nick Fuentes, and who has long perpetuated stereotypes about Jews himself.

But it underscored how the war in Gaza has badly strained a Democratic Party that is struggling to balance its ties with American Jewry and its support from American Muslims, even as Mr. Biden has staunchly backed Israel and its right to defend itself. The Republicans let it be known no such strains were afflicting their position. They were standing with Israel, regardless.

Democrats revive questions about Biden.

Mr. Biden has had the worst three weeks of his long political career, but Wednesday felt like salt in the wounds. First, Representative Adam B. Schiff, the likely next senator from California, became perhaps the most prominent elected Democrat to publicly call for him to step aside.

Then, in yet another twist in the 2024 campaign, Mr. Biden came down with Covid, which forced him to cancel a campaign appearance in Nevada and retreat to his beach house in Delaware to self-isolate.

Also on Wednesday, it emerged that Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the two top Democrats in Congress, were said to have each told Mr. Biden privately over the past week that their members were deeply concerned about his chances and the party’s if he remained in the race.

The Democratic National Committee considered holding a “virtual” roll call of states as early as next week to officially make Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris its ticket for 2024. Loud protests from House Democrats not ready to see that happen forced the party to push it back.

And with the president leaving the campaign trail, his political future is once again in question.

Here is a transcript of J.D. Vance’s convention speech.

O-H-I-O.

You guys, we gotta chill with the Ohio love. We gotta win Michigan too here, so.

My friends, tonight is a night of hope. A celebration of what America once was, and with God’s grace, what it will soon be again. And it is a reminder of the sacred duty we have to preserve the American experiment, to choose a new path for our children and grandchildren.

But as we meet tonight, we cannot forget that this evening could have been so much different. Instead of a day of celebration, this could have been a day of heartache and mourning. For the last eight years, President Trump has given everything he has to fight for the people of our country. He didn’t need politics, but the country needed him.

Now, prior to running for president, he was one of the most successful businessmen in the world. He had everything anyone could ever want in a life. And yet, instead of choosing the easy path, he chose to endure abuse, slander and persecution. And he did it because he loves this country. I want all Americans to watch the video of a would-be assassin coming a quarter of an inch from taking his life. Consider the lies they told you about Donald Trump. And then look at that photo of him defiant — fist in the air. When Donald Trump rose to his feet in that Pennsylvania field — all of America stood with him. And what did he call for us to do for his country? To fight. To fight for America.

Even in his most perilous moment we were on his mind. His instinct was for us, for our country. To call us to something higher. To something greater. To once again be citizens who ask what our country needs of us. Now consider what they said. They said he was a tyrant. They said he must be stopped at all costs. But how did he respond? He called for national unity, for national calm literally right after an assassin nearly took his life. He remembered the victims of the terrible attack, especially the brave Corey Comperatore, who gave his life to protect his family. God bless him.

And then President Trump flew to Milwaukee and got back to work.

Now that’s the man I’ve gotten to know personally over the last few years. He is tough, and he is, but he cares about people. He can stand defiant against an assassin one moment and call for national healing the next. He is a beloved father and grandfather, and, of course, a once-in-a-generation business leader. He’s the man who’s feared by America’s adversaries, but two nights ago, and I’ll share a moment, said good night to his two boys, told them he loved them, and made sure to give each of them a kiss on the cheek. And I will say, Don and Eric squirmed the same way my 4-year-old does when his daddy tries to give him a kiss on the cheek. Sorry, guys.

He is all those things, but tonight, we celebrate. He is our once and future president of the United States of America.

Now, I want to respond to his call for unity myself. We have a big tent on this party, on everything from national security to economic policy.

But my message to you, my fellow Republicans, is — we love this country and we are united to win.

Now I think our disagreements actually make us stronger. That’s what I’ve learned in my time in the United States Senate, where sometimes I persuade my colleagues and sometimes they persuade me. And my message to my fellow Americans, those watching from across the country, is shouldn’t we be governed by a party that is unafraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution?

That’s the Republican Party of the next four years: united in our love for this country, and committed to free speech and the open exchange of ideas.

And so tonight, Mr. Chairman, I stand here humbled, and I’m overwhelmed with gratitude to say I officially accept your nomination to be vice president of the United States of America.

Now, never in my wildest imagination could I have believed that I could be standing here tonight.

I grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community and their country with their whole hearts.

But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington.

When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico.

When I was a sophom*ore in high school, that same career politician named Joe Biden gave China a sweetheart trade deal that destroyed even more good American middle-class manufacturing jobs.

When I was a senior in high school, that same Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

And at each step of the way, in small towns like mine in Ohio, or next door in Pennsylvania or Michigan, in other states across our country, jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war.

[Crowd chants “Joe must go.”]

I agree.

And somehow, a real estate developer from New York City by the name of Donald J. Trump was right on all of these issues while Biden was wrong. President Trump knew, even then, that we needed leaders who would put America first.

Now, thanks to these policies that Biden and other out-of-touch politicians in Washington gave us, our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, with cheap foreign labor— and in the decades to come, deadly Chinese fentanyl.

Joe Biden screwed up, and my community paid the price. Now, I was lucky. Despite the closing factories and the growing addiction in towns like mine, in my life, I had a guardian angel by my side. She was an old woman who could barely walk but she was tough as nails.

I called her “Mamaw,” the name we hillbillies gave to our grandmothers.

Mamaw raised me as her own — excuse me —

Mamaw raised me as my mother struggled with addiction. Mamaw was in so many ways a woman of contradictions. She loved the Lord, ladies and gentleman. She was a woman of very deep Christian faith.

But she also loved the F word. I’m not kidding. She could make a sailor blush.

Now, she once told me, when she found out that I was spending too much time with a local kid who was known for dealing drugs, that if I ever hung out with that kid again, she would run him over with her car.

That’s true. And she said, “J.D., no one will ever find out about it.”

Now, now thanks to that Mamaw, things worked out for me.

After 9/11, I did what thousands of other young men my age did in that time of soaring patriotism and love of country: I enlisted in the United States Marines. Semper Fi to my fellow Marines.

Now I left the Marines after four years and went to The Ohio State University. I’m sorry Michigan, I had to get that in there.

Come on, come on. We’ve had enough political violence. Let’s —

Now after Ohio State I went to Yale Law School, where I met my beautiful wife, and I then started businesses to create jobs in the kinds of places I grew up in.

Now, my work taught me that there is still so much talent and grit in the American heartland. There really is. But for these places to thrive, we need a leader who fights for the people who built this country.

We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike. A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American companies and American industry. A leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Green New Scam and fights to bring back our great American factories.

We need President Donald J. Trump.

Some people tell me I’ve lived the American dream, and of course they’re right. And I’m so grateful for it.

But the American dream that always counted most was not starting a business or becoming a senator or even being here with you fine people, though it’s pretty awesome. My most important American dream was becoming a good husband and a good dad. Of being able to give —

I wanted to give my kids the things that I didn’t have when I was growing up.

And that’s the accomplishment that I’m proudest of.

That tonight I’m joined by my beautiful wife, Usha, an incredible lawyer and a better mom. And our three beautiful kids, Ewan who’s 7, Vivek who’s 4, Mirabel who’s 2.

Now they’re back at the hotel, and kids, if you’re watching, Daddy loves you very much but get your butts in bed. It’s 10 o’clock.

But, my friends, things did not work out well for a lot of kids I grew up with. Every now and then I will get a call from a relative back home who asks, “Did you know so-and-so?”

And I’ll remember a face from years ago, and then I’ll hear, “They died of an overdose.”

As always, America’s ruling class wrote the checks. Communities like mine paid the price.

For decades, that divide between the few, with their power and comfort in Washington, and the rest of us only widened.

From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again.

That is, of course, until a guy named President Donald J. Trump came along.

President Trump represents America’s last best hope to restore what — if lost — may never be found again. A country where a working-class boy born far from the halls of power can stand on this stage as the next vice president of the United States of America.

But, my fellow Americans, here in this stage and watching at home, this moment is not about me; it’s about all of us, and it’s about who we’re fighting for.

It’s about the auto worker in Michigan, wondering why out-of-touch politicians are destroying their jobs.

It’s about the factory worker in Wisconsin who makes things with their hands and is proud of American craftsmanship.

It’s about the energy worker in Pennsylvania and Ohio who doesn’t understand why Joe Biden is willing to buy energy from tinpot dictators across the world, when he could buy it from his own citizens right here in our own country.

You guys are a great crowd. Wow.

And, it’s about, our movement is about single moms like mine, who struggled with money and addiction but never gave up.

And I’m proud to say that tonight my mom is here, 10 years clean and sober.

I love you, Mom.

And, you know, Mom, I was thinking. It’ll be 10 years officially in January of 2025, and if President Trump’s OK with it, let’s have the celebration in the White House.

And our movement, ladies and gentlemen, it’s about grandparents all across this country, who are living on Social Security and raising grandchildren they didn’t expect to raise.

And while we’re on the topic of grandparents, let me tell you another Mamaw story. Now, my Mamaw died shortly before I left for Iraq, in 2005. And when we went through her things, we found 19 loaded handguns. They were —

Now, the thing is, they were stashed all over her house. Under her bed, in her closet. In the silverware drawer. And we wondered what was going on, and it occurred to us that towards the end of her life, Mamaw couldn’t get around very well. And so this frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arms’ length of whatever she needed to protect her family. That’s who we fight for. That’s American spirit.

Now, Joe Biden has been a politician in Washington for longer than I’ve been alive. Thirty-nine years old. Kamala Harris is not much further behind.

For half-a-century, he’s been the champion of every major policy initiative to make America weaker and poorer.

And in four short years, Donald Trump reversed decades of betrayals inflicted by Joe Biden and the rest of the corrupt Washington insiders.

He created the greatest economy in history for workers. It really was amazing. There’s, there’s this chart that shows worker wages. And they stagnated for pretty much my entire life, until President Donald J. Trump came along. Workers’ wages went through the roof. And just imagine what he can do with four more years in the White House.

Months ago, I heard some young family member observe that their parents’ generation — the baby boomers — could afford to buy a home when they first entered the work force. “But I don’t know,” this person observed, “if I’ll ever be able to afford a home.”

The absurd cost of housing is the result of so many failures. And it reveals so much about what’s broken in Washington. I can tell you exactly how it happened.

Wall Street barons crashed the economy and American builders went out of business.

As tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built.

The lack of good jobs, of course, led to stagnant wages.

And then the Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens.

So citizens had to compete — with people who shouldn’t even be here — for precious housing.

Joe Biden’s inflation crisis, my friends, is really an affordability crisis.

And many of the people that I grew up with can’t afford to pay more for groceries, more for gas, more for rent, and that’s exactly what Joe Biden’s economy has given them. So prices soared, dreams were shattered.

And China and the cartels sent fentanyl across the border, adding addiction to the heartache.

But ladies and gentlemen, that is not the end of our story.

We’ve heard about the villains and their victims; I’ve talked a lot about that. I’ve talked a lot about that. But let me tell you about the future.

President Trump’s vision is so simple and yet so powerful. We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man.

We’re done importing foreign labor, we’re going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages.

We’re done buying energy from countries that hate us; we’re going to get it right here, from American workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio and across the country.

We’re done sacrificing supply chains to unlimited global trade, and we’re going to stamp more and more products with that beautiful label, “Made in the U.S.A.”

We’re going to build factories again, put people to work making real products for American families, made with the hands of American workers.

Together, we will protect the wages of American workers — and stop the Chinese Communist Party from building their middle class on the backs of American citizens.

Together, we will make sure our allies share in the burden of securing world peace. No more free rides for nations that betray the generosity of the American taxpayer.

Together, we will send our kids to war only when we must.But as President Trump showed with the elimination of ISIS and so much more, when we punch, we’re going to punch hard.

Together, we will put the citizens of America first, whatever the color of their skin.

We will, in short, make America great again.

You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future. And let me illustrate this with a story, if I may.

I am, of course, married to the daughter of South Asian immigrants to this country. Incredible people. People who genuinely have enriched this country in so many ways.

And, of course, I’m biased, because I love my wife and her family, but I it’s true.

Now when I proposed to my wife, we were in law school, and I said, “Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt, and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky.”

And I guess standing here tonight it’s just gotten weirder and weirder, honey. But that’s what she was getting. Now that cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky is near my family’s ancestral home. And like a lot of people, we came from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Now that’s Kentucky coal country, one of the 10 —

Now, it’s one of the 10 poorest counties in the entire United States of America.

They’re very hardworking people, and they’re very good people. They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat.

And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them.

But they love this country, not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home, and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it.

That is the source of America’s greatness.

As a United States senator, I get to represent millions of people in the great state of Ohio with similar stories, and it is the great honor of my life.

Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now. Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principle. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home. And if this movement of ours is going to succeed, and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first.

Now we won’t agree on every issue of course, not even in this room. We may disagree from time to time about how best to reinvigorate American industry and renew American family. That’s fine. In fact its more than fine, it’s good.

But never forget that the reason why this united Republican Party exists, why we do this, why we care about those great ideas and that great history, is that we want this nation to thrive for centuries to come.

Now eventually, in that mountain cemetery, my children will lay me to rest.

And when they do, I would like them to know that thanks to the work of this Republican Party, the United States of America, it is strong, and as proud and as great as ever.

That is who we serve, my friends. That is who we fight for. And the only thing that we need to do right now, the most important thing that we can do for those people, for that American nation that we all love, is to re-elect Donald J. Trump president of the United States.

Mr. President, I will never take for granted the trust you have put in me.

And what an honor it is to help achieve the extraordinary vision that you have for this country.

Now I pledge to every American, no matter your party, I will give you everything I have. To serve you and to make this country a place where every dream you have for yourself, your family and your country will be possible once again.

And I promise you one more thing. To the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and every corner of our nation:

I promise you this — I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.

And every single day for the next four years, when I walk into that White House to help President Trump, I will be doing it for you. For your family, for your future and for this great country.

Thank you, God bless all of you, and God bless our great country.

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Usha Vance introduced herself to the nation.

“When J.D. met me, he approached our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm,” Ms. Vance said. “He wanted to know everything about me, where I came from, what my life had been like.”

The couple met at Yale Law School, where Ms. Vance helped Mr. Vance organize his ideas about social decline in rural white America, the basis of his breakout memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” They were married in 2014 in Kentucky and have three children. She is the daughter of Indian immigrants.

Ms. Vance, 38, has shied away from the spotlight during her husband’s quick political ascent, which began during the midterm elections in 2022 when he was elected to the Senate in an open race.

Ms. Vance preceded her husband onstage. During his speech, the last of the night, he formally accepted the party’s nomination to be Donald J. Trump’s running mate.

She cast Mr. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, as “a working-class guy” who had overcome childhood traumas that she could barely fathom.

“It’s hard to imagine a more powerful example of the American dream, a boy from Middletown, Ohio,” Ms. Vance said, explaining that she came from a very different background and grew up in a middle-class neighborhood of San Diego. As of 2014, she was a registered Democrat, though she is a registered Republican now.

She praised Mr. Vance for embracing her background and customs.

“Although he’s a meat and potatoes kind of guy, he adapted to my vegetarian diet and learned to cook food for my mother, Indian food,” she said.

Ms. Vance also received her bachelor’s degree from Yale and was selected for a Gates Fellowship at Cambridge, springboards to a career as a corporate lawyer with a prestigious San Francisco law firm.

She clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge.

Ms. Vance spoke for about five minutes, telling the delegates that her husband’s focus in the Senate — keeping people safe and creating opportunities — would continue as vice president if he is elected in November.

She said that Mr. Vance had not changed since they first met.

“Except for that beard,” she said.

Joseph Bernstein contributed reporting.

Republicans seek to remind R.N.C. viewers about deadly Afghanistan withdrawal.

And in an anguished tribute onstage, relatives of several service members who were killed when a suicide bomb exploded at a gate to the airport in Kabul in August 2021 blamed Mr. Biden for the situation. The families held photographs of their fallen loved ones and received a standing ovation from former President Donald J. Trump and thousands of G.O.P. delegates.

Mr. Biden has repeatedly expressed heartbreak over the deaths of those troops. He also traveled to Dover Air Force Base to receive their remains, and met privately with their family members beforehand.

Mr. Trump has frequently criticized Mr. Biden over how he handled the situation in Afghanistan, after Mr. Biden made the final decision in 2021 to withdraw America’s military from Afghanistan, ending an occupation of nearly 20 years. But it was Mr. Trump who clinched a deal with the Afghan Taliban, setting a timeline for America’s exit.

Still, on a night focused on foreign policy, Afghanistan repeatedly came up. And it was used it to assail Mr. Biden and cast him as weak and mismanaging military operations.

The Biden campaign referred requests for comment on Wednesday night to Adrienne Watson, a National Security Council spokeswoman.

“President Biden cares deeply about our service members, their families, and the immense sacrifices they have made,” Ms. Watson said in a statement. She added: “As he said then and continues to believe now: Our country owes them a great deal of gratitude and a debt that we can never repay, and we will continue to honor their ultimate sacrifice.”

Christy Shamblin, Sergeant Gee’s mother-in-law, told delegates on Wednesday night that Mr. Trump had spent six hours with her and other family members of troops killed in Afghanistan at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

“I had expected to meet an arrogant politician,” she said. “Instead, I met a man who had empathy for us.”

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The G.O.P. puts Israel and antisemitism front and center, courting U.S. Jews.

And Orna and Ronen Neutra, the parents of an American citizen still held by Hamas in Gaza, led the crowd in a chant of “bring them home,” after recounting how Mr. Trump had called them after their son was taken hostage.

Then Lee Zeldin, once one of two Jewish Republicans in the House before running unsuccessfully to be New York’s governor, accused President Biden of pandering to antisemitic protesters.

It was a tricky two-step for a party whose nominee dined in 2022 with an outright and outspoken antisemite, Nick Fuentes, and for a convention that had also featured Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, who has spouted Holocaust denial, and Charlie Kirk, the youthful conservative leader who stirred controversy last fall by defending Elon Musk’s endorsem*nt of an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

But it underscored how the brutal war in Gaza has badly strained a Democratic Party that is struggling to balance its long ties with American Jewry and its support from American Muslims.

The Republicans let it be known no such strains were afflicting their position. They were standing with Israel, regardless.

Kai Trump tells convention crowd: ‘He’s just a normal grandpa.’

“I am honored to be speaking at the R.N.C.,” Kai said in a post on social media.

Her speech in front of thousands of delegates uniquely focused on her personal relationship with former President Donald J. Trump, her grandfather. Unlike the many speeches that portrayed Mr. Trump as a fighter and a hero of the conservative cause, Kai instead characterized him as a sweet and supportive grandparent.

“To me, he’s just a normal grandpa,” Kai said. “He gives us candy and soda when our parents are not looking. He always wants to know how we’re doing in school.”

Kai has occasionally made public appearances alongside her family. In her speech in front of the main session of the convention on Wednesday night, she spoke about having taken up golf, a hobby she shares with her grandfather.

Two years ago, she won a women’s club golf championship held at Mr. Trump’s golf resort in West Palm Beach, Fla.

She was spotted at an Ultimate Fighting Championship match last month and posed for photos with Dana White, U.F.C.’s chief executive, who is a Trump ally. She also attended a conference hosted by the youth-focused conservative group Turning Point Action alongside the former president in Detroit in June.

On social media, her posts are scarcely political, though she often posts photos with her grandfather. After his attempted assassination on Saturday, she said in a post: “We love you Grandpa. Never stop fighting!”

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This is why Republicans keep calling Kamala Harris the ‘border czar'.

But perhaps no phrase has been deployed more than this one: “border czar.”

“Kamala Harris isn’t able to do any job. She was appointed border czar,” said Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida on Wednesday to a couple of snickers in the audience. “Appointing Kamala Harris to oversee the border is like appointing Bernie Madoff to oversee your retirement plan.”

But Ms. Harris was not, in fact, appointed border czar, nor was she tasked with addressing the broader problems plaguing the border itself, where minors have at times slept on the floors of overcrowded facilities for days beyond the legal limit. Rather she was deputized by President Biden with the diplomatic mission of solving the “root causes” of migration from countries like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, tackling the issues that spur people to flee in the first place, like drug violence and lack of economic opportunity.

It was the same politically unsavory task that former President Barack Obama delegated to Mr. Biden when he served as Mr. Obama’s vice president. And it’s a task that has only become harder — and more politically polarized — since then, becoming perhaps the thornie*st issue facing the Biden-Harris administration.

Brian Fallon, campaign spokesman for Ms. Harris, said former President Donald J. Trump and his party have “resorted to lying about the vice president’s record,” after Mr. Trump tanked a bipartisan border deal earlier this year.

“As a former district attorney and attorney general, she has stood up to fraudsters and felons like Trump her entire career,” he said. “Trump’s lies won’t stop her from continuing to prosecute the case against him on the biggest issues in this race.”

But attacking Ms. Harris serves several functions, Republican and Democratic strategists said. Republicans see her as a possible alternative to lead the Democratic ticket if Mr. Biden steps aside, with his campaign under pressure over concerns about his re-election bid. And if that does not happen, as Mr. Biden has vowed to stay in the race, she remains a powerful figure with the potential to energize the parts of the coalition seen as up for grabs: women, young people and voters of color.

Some speakers like Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s one-time presidential rival, have long sought to convince Republicans that a vote for Mr. Biden will be a vote for Ms. Harris, arguing that Mr. Biden is too old to finish his second term even if he is re-elected.

“You never want to miss an opportunity to lay out the case that the Biden-Harris administration has been a disaster,” said Dave Carney, a Republican political strategist at the convention.

So the calls of “border czar” from the stage have continued.

On Monday, Bob Unanue, the president of Goya Foods and chairman of the Hispanic Leadership Coalition, insulted Ms. Harris by riffing on the pronunciation of her name in Spanish to denigrate her as ineffective. “Our border czar, ‘Que-mala’ Harris — that means ‘so bad’ — and we have enough bad, we need some goodness — was missing in action,” he said.

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At the Republican convention, senators berate the Secret Service director.

The video, which Ms. Blackburn also posted on X, shows Mr. Barrasso berating Ms. Cheatle over why Mr. Trump was allowed to go onstage for his Saturday evening rally in Butler, Pa., when authorities had already identified as suspicious a man who turned out to be the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks.

“You put him within less than an inch of his life,” Mr. Barrasso said to Ms. Cheatle, almost yelling. “So resignation or full explanation.”

Ms. Cheatle declined to answer their questions and instead walked out of the suite. Mr. Barrasso and Ms. Blackburn followed her down a corridor inside the arena and up a flight of stairs, continuing to yell questions at her and telling her she owed them answers.

Ms. Cheatle is in Milwaukee as the senior security official at the event. The Republican National Convention is a “national special security event,” the highest threat profile given by the federal government, because of its size and scope. Both Mr. Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, are under Secret Service protection.

In a joint interview after the encounter, Mr. Barrasso and Ms. Blackburn said they had been on a briefing call with Ms. Cheatle and the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, earlier on Wednesday. The senators complained that they had been waiting in the queue for questions when the call ended and said the briefing had been inadequate.

“We were trying to get to the root of what had happened, how the shooter was on the roof by himself and able to get off the shots,” Mr. Barrasso said. He dismissed the briefing as a “cover-your-ass call.”

Both senators said that when they heard that Ms. Cheatle was in the arena, they decided to confront her. Mr. Barrasso said that they were joined by Senators James Lankford of Oklahoma and Kevin Cramer of North Dakota.

Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, did not directly respond to questions about the incident. But he issued a statement saying that “continuity of operations is paramount during a critical incident” and that Ms. Cheatle “has no intentions to step down.”

“She deeply respects members of Congress,” Mr. Guglielmi continued, “and is fiercely committed to transparency in leading the Secret Service through the internal investigation and strengthening the agency through lessons learned in these important internal and external reviews.”

Interviewed inside the convention arena, Mr. Barrasso said that he and Ms. Blackburn only gave up their pursuit of Ms. Cheatle after she fled into a restroom. “She ran up a flight of steps, and we were up with her,” he said. “And it looked like she then went into a ladies’ room and her own security closed the door and blocked the door.”

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“Joe Biden is willing to buy energy from tinpot dictators but not hard-working Americans right here at home.”

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“Somehow, a real estate developer from New York City by the name of Donald J. Trump was right on all of these issues while Biden was wrong.”

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“Meanwhile pro-crime district attorneys have turned our cities into giant crime zones.”