Night three of the Republican National Convention was, by far, the most compelling night.
U.S. Army captain Humayun Khan was just 27 when he was killed by a car bomb in Iraq in 2004. He died heroically attempting to save his comrades in arms, and he received the Purple Heart and Bronze Star medals after his death. Twelve years later, Khan’s mother and father — a grieving Gold Star family — appeared at the Democratic National Convention. There, they denounced Donald Trump over what they said was his prejudicial outlook toward Muslim Americans.
Trump ill-advisedly took the bait, lashing out at the family and implying that Khizr Khan, Humayun’s father, fit an ugly stereotype insofar as he would not allow his wife to speak at the event. Democrats and the anti-Trump press got more than their expected mileage out of the Khans’ appearance at the DNC over the following weeks as they fumed over the cruelty that animated Trump to attack a bereaved family. Last night, the GOP turned the tables, perfecting the political trap their opponents pioneered.
Night three of the Republican National Convention was, by far, the most compelling night. But what made it so affecting wasn’t the speeches by politicians and their families or the energy provided by a unified party convinced that its ascension to power is all but assured. It was the decision to spend nearly 90 minutes of proceedings featuring the families who lost loved ones — American men and women in uniform — in Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The most powerful moment of the RNC so far opened with a masterfully produced video package featuring some of the 13 service members who lost their lives in the attack on Kabul Airport’s Abbey Gate and their survivors. It continued when those survivors took the stage. Wracked with grief, they mourned Biden’s lackadaisical execution of the withdrawal operation and his callous attempts to ignore the fallout.
The display was so powerful because, unlike much of the programming at the RNC so far, the emotion on display was not anger. There was no bombast or table-pounding. It was bereft of the apocalyptic hyperbole that opens the wallets of small-dollar donors. The sentiments expressed were sadness, bitterness over the president’s conspicuous refusal to name and honor the fallen, and disappointment in a country to which they gave so much but had failed to reciprocate. It was the quietest moment of an otherwise boisterous convention. That reserve spoke louder than any activist or politician ever could.
The Gold Star families were followed with appearances from veterans of America’s foreign wars, the revered and neglected alike, and the victims of terroristic violence Joe Biden would prefer to forget. Ronen and Orna Neutra, the parents of Omer Neutra, charged the president with forgetting the fact that their son is still in the custody of Hamas after that terrorist group took the lives of over 30 Americans on October 7. Sergeant William Pekrul, a 98-year-old veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, brought down the house with his unalloyed expressions of affection for his country to which, he insisted, even his own extraordinary contributions in the services were not enough. Despite the “dark” present, Afghan combat veteran Scott Neil maintained that America remains a “good” country. “We’re still the shining city on the hill that everybody wants to come to,” he said.
Through it all, the audience was rapt. Heart-rending monologues from mothers who lost their children were leavened by expressions of stalwart patriotism, noble self-sacrifice, and optimism over the future America’s men and women in uniform fought for and secured. There was humor and sadness, despair and optimism, pathos and ebullience — sometimes within the same speech. As theater, it was magisterial.
Democratic partisans seemed flummoxed by this poignant and moving exhibition. The president’s allies took the prudent course and simply ignored these proceedings in favor of a circular, repetitive conversation about Biden’s uncertain future in electoral politics. What else can they do? How are they to explain the decision-making that led Biden to abandon Bagram Airbase, falsely retail the notion that the U.S. embassy would remain open even as diplomatic personnel fled, and evacuate U.S. soldiers before civilians and our Afghan allies? How can they defend the process that led the White House and the Pentagon to insist that the Taliban would provide security for Americans beset by a human tide at Kabul’s civilian airport? What justifies the president’s indifference toward the pain endured by these Gold Star families such that he seemed to hope they would just go away — ceding their cause to Republicans and Trump, who Axios’s Alex Thomson notes “had been reaching out” to them “since September of 2021.” There is no defense.
Democrats are unlikely to repeat Trump’s mistake in precisely the same way. Yet, in having no answer to the charges levied against Biden last night, they all but concede their guilt. This wasn’t just a stirring moment — it was a savvy one. The president’s job-approval rating flipped from positive to negative territory in August 2021 as Americans were forced to witness our prolonged national humiliation, and Biden’s image never recovered. In reminding voters of the human cost associated with incompetence in the commander in chief, the RNC scored a direct hit on the Democratic Party and demolished its self-professed claim to competent, managerial governance. But it wasn’t hollow rhetorical pugilism that delivered this devastating blow. The shiv was skillfully administered through tears.