The 2020 Republican National Convention this week began and ended with two performances by the man who designed it all, President Donald J. Trump.

Most of the attention went, of course, to the final night’s event, when a live audience saw him “profoundly accept” his re-nomination in an hour-long speech delivered on the South Lawn of the White House. Backed by a forest of American flags, the president looked out upon members of his family and staff, members of his Cabinet and members of his party in Congress.

They sat side-by-side in close rows of chairs. Few wore masks. There was little sign of the pandemic that had cost the president the big show he had originally planned for Charlotte, N.C., or in his backup venue in Jacksonville, Fla.

Unlike most of the speakers during the week, Trump did not ignore the disease that has killed 180,000 Americans or speak of it in the past tense. But he cast it as less than central to the moment, a kind of speed bump for his parade of triumphs: “We are meeting this challenge,” he said proudly, “delivering lifesaving therapies and we will produce a vaccine before the end of the year or maybe even sooner.”

Few experts have seen a realistic possibility of a vaccine that would be regarded as safe by year’s end, let alone sooner. But in recent weeks the White House has barred TV appearances by such figures as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s longtime leading immunologist, who has contradicted the president without criticizing him.

Trump displayed a portrait of three presidencies – his own, his predecessor’s and the one he said Democratic nominee Joe Biden would create if elected. Most of the attention focused on Trump’s own first four years, which he sketched as a montage of success upon success. He spoke of having conquered the vexing issues of taxes and trade, European allies and Middle East rivals, refugees and immigrants and most notably – the pandemic itself.

Uplifting or unloading?

The White House had promised a speech that would be “uplifting,” unbowed by the virus, the consequent recession or the widespread racial unrest following multiple killings of Black people by police. The speech was defiant, to be sure, but the inspirational elements were less salient than Trump’s relentless attack on his Democratic foe.

“Joe Biden is not a savior of America’s soul,” the president said. “He is the destroyer of America’s jobs, and if given the chance he will be the destroyer of America’s greatness.”

Overall, the speech sounded a great deal like an earlier acceptance speech by an angry outsider running for president four years ago at the Republican convention in Cleveland. That night, candidate Trump railed against the work of Democrats and Washington insiders, whom he would displace.

“Only I can fix it,” he said then. And four years later, the message was much the same, although he had been working for most of that time inside the building that served as the backdrop for his speech on Thursday.

[Throughout the week, government watchdogs and other critics of the administration noted the wanton disregard being shown for previous norms and regulations regarding the use of government officials or taxpayer property to promote a campaign for office. The Hatch Act, a century old law, prohibits such uses but has not been used to send anyone to jail. When asked about this during the week, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said: “No one outside of the Beltway really cares.”]

Trump’s case for himself may have been even sharper on Monday, when he made an unscheduled appearance in Charlotte. Here, instead of the 50,000 attendees originally anticipated, a remnant of 336 delegates had done the official business of renominating the incumbent. The unopposed incumbent had won every state, and in fact every vote from every state. Many states had canceled their primaries or caucuses on the Republican side.

As he followed Vice President Mike Pence on stage in Charlotte, Trump was greeted with chants of “four more years.” He replied: “If you want to really drive them crazy you say: ‘Twelve more years.’ ”

The president did not explain how a four-term presidency might happen, given the constitutional limit of two terms set by the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution halfway through the 20th century.

But the president did offer an hour’s worth of free-form, wide-ranging ruminations on everything from the state of the national economy to trade deals with China and South Korea and the kinds of people most likely to die from COVID-19 (“It affects older people, the elderly, people with problems, with heart, diabetes, other problems.”) By Friday, two attendees at the Charlotte event and two support staff had tested positive for the virus.

But in that hour in Charlotte, the president was loose and very much among friends. His language veered beyond informal to crude at times, but no one in the hall seemed to mind. The shouts of “we love you” and “thank you, Mr. President,” were recurrent, persistent and well-amplified to be clearly audible on TV.

Monday’s midday walk-on was not widely seen, but clips were great fodder for cable TV. And the primetime TV audience began tuning in that same night, when Trump was not featured but did make a cameo appearance. The same happened on the second and third nights, posing the president for pictures with Melania, his wife, or Pence, his vice president, just as the TV anchors were signing off.

A creature unto itself

This Republican gathering was sui generis, a creature unto itself, unlike any preceding convention either party held since such gatherings began in the 1830s. The Democrats the week before had met almost entirely online, but the Republicans managed to perform before live audiences that were small but vocal and highly enthusiastic.

The overnight reviews split along partisan lines as sharply, and predictably, as the votes on impeachment in Congress last winter. It is hard to remember now that President Trump is the only president ever to face the voters after being impeached (or forced from office under threat of impeachment).

But if that was any inhibition for him, it did not show. It was not in his prepared remarks, but he again asserted in his concluding speech that “Obama and Biden spied on me and got caught” – an allusion to his explanation for the investigation of his ties to Russian interference in the 2016 election. Multiple investigations have yet to find evidence to prove this accusation.

Trump did not mention his actual impeachment, but several other speakers from his retinue did during the week. It was noted that the Democrats, who impeached Trump in the House and pressed for his removal from office in the Senate, did not mention impeachment in their primetime speeches the previous week.

But sadly for the president, impeachment was only the first dire challenge to face in his re-election year. And it has proven more difficult to elide the facts and consequences of the others.

Despite the president’s assertions, the crisis over the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, with 180,000 dead and still nearly a thousand dying each day. The U.S. also adds thousands of new infections each day (leading the world with 5.8 million so far), while the administration responds by trying to limit the number of people getting tested and promoting various therapies that have not been shown to be helpful.

The president has repeatedly blamed the testing for the high numbers of new cases. He and others in his orbit have suggested only people showing symptoms of the disease should be tested at all. Still, flashing the bravado that characterized his business career, Trump has insisted his handling of the virus has been not only defensible but exemplary.

Recession the larger threat?

What has seemed to concern the president more is the dislocation the pandemic has caused in the economy, which crashed in March. The Gross Domestic Product for the second quarter fell by nearly a third (on an annualized basis) and unemployment soared to nearly 15%. Both measures were the worst since the Great Depression. Aggrieved by the shutdown of schools and workplaces, Trump began saying “the cure cannot be worse than the disease.”

Today, Trump can point to some bright spots. The stock market has rebounded to regain its previous highs. Partial reopening of many businesses has allowed many laid off workers to return to work. But the positive jobs trend at mid-summer has since reversed itself, and a million or more people are again filing for unemployment compensation each week.

At the scaled-down RNC this week, all talk of the economy this was spun to highlight the happier times of last winter and look forward to a snapback next winter. As he usually does, Trump took credit for the “strongest economy in history” and a record number of people with jobs. But both claims, while often repeated, are shaky. As was noted the previous week by the Democrats, there were more jobs created in the U.S. in the last three years under Obama than in the first three under Trump. More than a million more.

But whatever the validity of of Trump’s claims about the past, current reality for millions of the unemployed is dire. With the virus still far from controlled, the economic climb could get steeper as well.

Given all the strange and strained circumstances, no one can be surprised that this convention seemed so different from all its historic analogs. But the starkest contrast was with those past conventions staged by incumbent presidents seeing a second term — especially those in the era of TV coverage.

Looking just at GOP conventions renominating incumbents, the record is impressive. Four of the five incumbents in this era went on to win a second term (George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower). The latter three won re-election in landslides: Ike carried 41 of 48 states, Nixon and Reagan each carried 49 of 50.

Those campaigns featured supremely confident conventions with little or no controversy touching the candidate (other than health concerns following Eisenhower’s 1955 heart attack).

George W. Bush was renominated in 2004 in New York City to celebrate that city’s comeback from the Sept. 11 attacks of 2001. The stars of that show were the city’s former mayor Rudy Giuliani (also on the program Thursday night, although with far less starpower impact) and the movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, then a newly elected governor of California, who has since disappeared from Republican politics.

The one renominating GOP convention in these five that presaged a losing November was the 1992 event on behalf of President George H.W. Bush in his hometown of Houston. And a review of that episode turns up some similarities in rhetoric to what we heard this week. Rich Bond, the party’s national chairman, told the convention hall “We are America, they [the Democrats] are not America.” This week, Pence told the crowd at Ft. McHenry that “America is on the ballot.”

It has often been said that the elder Bush’s show fell flat for two reasons. First, it failed to address the big negative story hanging over the country – lagging recovery from a recession that had lingered in some swing states. But the other problem for the incumbent nominee was one Trump did not have: speakers whose performance overshadowed the nominee’s own. One was Reagan, then just four years out of office and still immensely popular. In the last major address of his career, Reagan reminded the audience he had chosen Bush as his vice president; but many in the audience were reminded how much they preferred Reagan.

A speech sets campaign tone

A larger problem was the indelible opening night speech by Patrick Buchanan, a former journalist and speechwriter both for Reagan and the previous Republican president Richard Nixon. Buchanan had run against Bush, his party’s incumbent president, in the GOP primaries that year. While he had just 18 delegates, the Bush team wanted his help with the party’s more populist, nationalist wing. (Buchanan would later run for president as a third-party candidate on the campaign slogan “America First.”)

Buchanan’s outsider campaign had been about reducing immigration and resisting social changes such as abortion rights, gay rights, women in combat units and multicultural education. In Houston he said these were “not the kind of change America wants and not the kind of change we can abide in a nation we still call God’s country.” He spoke of “a cultural war” in America and said that summer’s Democratic Convention had featured “20,000 radicals and liberals dressed up as moderates and centrists.”

Buchanan closed by paying tribute to National Guard troops sent to Los Angeles that summer to quell street riots after a jury acquitted police officers videotaped beating Rodney King, a black man. Buchanan said the soldiers, with bayonets fixed, were “taking back America, block by block.”

The speech lit up the Astrodome, unleashing a roar from the crowd that seemed to reverberate throughout the week and beyond. It would be widely criticized as incendiary and contradictory of Bush’s “kinder, gentler” conservatism. But it overshadowed the incumbent president’s own speech at week’s end, which lacked the force of his first acceptance speech four years earlier.

All conventions have their memorable moments, positive or otherwise, and their connection to either victory or defeat will always be subject to debate. This year’s versions, one online and one largely a hybrid, were both scaled way back from historic expectations. Their actual effect on the campaign’s outcome may be similarly reduced, perhaps even marginal.

In 2024, we may be eager to hold traditional conventions again, or we may have come to regard them as an anachronism. Much may depend on who is in the White House at that time, and on how much of a contribution that person believes the 2020 convention made to the November outcome.

President Trump on Friday struck a markedly different tone at a rally in New Hampshire as compared his address to the Republican National Convention the night before.

Speaking to a crowd of a few hundred supporters in Manchester, Trump returned to his trademark bombastic, free-wheeling campaign style as he echoed many of the same themes he broached during his convention acceptance speech — warning of a looming “socialist” threat and bashing his 2020 rival Joe Biden.

“I gave a big speech last night. I said ‘what am I doing tomorrow night?’ ‘You’re going to New Hampshire. But, sir,'” he said, recreating a supposed conversation with a member of his staff before being interrupted by cheers.

“‘But sir, we can cancel New Hampshire. Because, you know, you had a big night. We can —’ I said, ‘are you crazy? I don’t have that courage to cancel New Hampshire.’ I gotta win New Hampshire, and I love the people. And you’ve been very good to me,” he said.

During his remarks, Trump repeated attacks toward his opponent Biden, describing him as a far-left extremist, and stepped up criticism of Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris — the first Black woman and first Asian-American vice presidential nominee on a major party ticket — as incompetent.

“Joe Biden is running on the most extreme far-left platform of any nominee in American history. And if our foreign adversaries were devising a plan to destroy the United States from within, all they have to look is at Biden-Harris– how bout her? Is she a beauty? What a beauty that is,” he said as the crowd jeered.

“They pick a woman who starts off — she starts off sort of strong. She’s one of the favorites. Within a few months, she goes down, down,” he said.

“She was terrible. And this would be your president? Possibly? I don’t think so. You know, I want to see the first woman president also, but I don’t want to see a woman president get into that position the way she’d do it. And she’s not competent. She’s not competent,” Trump said.

Revving up his supporters with an image of a Democrat-led city overrun by “thugs,” Trump also criticized D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser for her handling of a peaceful protest outside of the White House last night that went on during Trump’s convention speech.

“What I didn’t like it — you saw this, right? When it was over? You saw when it was over? The thugs outside. Because the Democratic mayor of Washington, D.C. — it’s another Democrat that’s not believing in law and order. And you know we give Washington, D.C., a lot of money to run it. But they don’t do a good job of running it, the mayor. She doesn’t run anything. These incredible people from all over the country, all over the world that were there last night, they walked out to a bunch of thugs. And that wasn’t — remember this, that wasn’t friendly protesters. They were thugs. They were thugs,” he said.

Trump also exaggerated a situation involving Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who was approached by protesters while leaving Thursday night’s convention. Demonstrators demanded accountability from the police officers who shot and killed 26-year-old emergency medical technician Breonna Taylor in her Louisville home after they executed a no-knock warrant at the wrong apartment.

“When a senator like Rand Paul walks out — and thank God we had some good police around him, and they took tremendous abuse. And Rand Paul was in big trouble last night. He’s a good guy, he’s a friend of mine. And that shouldn’t happen to anybody,” Trump said.

Trump delivered remarks to a tightly packed crowd, many of whom were not wearing masks, despite the fact that the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus has exceeded 180,000. When attendees were told to put on face masks in an announcement, a requirement in New Hampshire for gatherings larger than 100 people, the crowd booed.

Timothy Parnell, an engineer who was in the crowd, says Democrats’ criticism of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus is absurd.

“The only way the President could have done better if he was psychic,” he said. “He took advice from the scientists he asked for advice. I don’t remember when time when he didn’t follow what they were asking him to do.”

Melissa Cote of Fitchburg, Mass., believes Trump’s patriotism alone warrants him getting another term in the White House.

“The world is not what it used to be but one thing I love about President Trump – he is all American, he loves our country,” she said. “Biden? He loves himself.”

NHPR Reporter Josh Rogers contributed to this report.

Josh Rogers contributed to this report.

Updated 1:33 p.m. ET

Thousands of demonstrators descend on the nation’s capital on Friday to demand an overhaul to the nation’s criminal justice system and push for racial equality at the same site Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. called for those same reforms decades ago in his iconic “I Have A Dream Speech.”

Like the 1963 March on Washington, organizers opened with a series of speeches before attendees plan to march through the streets of the city, this time ending at the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial.

This march – dubbed “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” — comes at a particularly tense time as frustration over police brutality and use of force have sparked national outrage following the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.

Watch the livestream below.

A common theme throughout the march was a call to action for attendees to register and to vote in the fall elections.

Several of the speakers led the crowds in chants of “No Justice! No Peace!” And repeated the refrain that “Black Lives Matter.” At one point some in the crowd could be overheard saying “hands up, don’t shoot.”

Addressing the crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, just as his father did on this day 57 years ago, Martin Luther King III said the civil rights struggle his father helped lead in the 1950s and 1960s is far from over.

“We’re taking a step forward on America’s rocky, but righteous journey towards justice,” King said.

He also touched on the killing of Emmett Till, the Black teenager who was killed on this day in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi.

“Sixty-five years later we still struggle for justice, demilitarizing the police, dismantling mass incarceration and declaring and determining indeterminately as we can that Black lives matter.”

King also encouraged the crowd to become the change they want and not wait on another icon, like his father, to help champion present-day challenges.

“If you’re looking for a savior, get up and find the mirror,” King said. “We must become the heroes of the history we’re making.”

Several Democratic members of Congress also spoke at the event, including Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., who told the crowd, “We are in unprecedented, uncertain times.”

She also painted a picture of America that she said is possible, but alludes many Americans of color.

“Yes, it is possible to legislate justice and accountability, people over profits, joy over trauma, freedom over fear. Yes, it is possible to write budgets that actually value black lives,” she said.

Gun control activist and 2018 Parkland, Fla., high school shooting survivor Aalayah Eastmond said gun violence is a scourge on black communities.

“Police violence is gun violence,” Eastmond said. “And gun violence is the leading cause of death for Black youth. We demand to live in peace. We demand to live in spaces where the best of Black culture can thrive.”

The event also featured family members of Black Americans who have been killed by police or in other racially-charged incidents, including Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and others whose names have become rallying cries during recent national protests demanding their killers be held accountable.

Civil Rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who represents many of the victims’ families, said “the problem isn’t de-escalation, the problem is racism.”

“Certainly as with all these tragedies you want accountability because we can’t get justice,” Crump said Friday on NPR’s Morning Edition.

“Justice would be George Floyd being able to take another breath today. Justice would be Breonna Taylor still being here. Justice would be Ahmaud Arbery still being here. So the only thing we can hope for right now is accountability.”

Racial justice and police reform is a hot-button political issue as election day draws near.

On Thursday as Donald Trump accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for president, he underscored his self-proclaimed moniker as the “law and order president,” while accusing Democratic challenger Joe Biden as someone who repeatedly tears down America. Meanwhile, hundreds of demonstrators gathered just outside on the White House’s South Lawn to decry racism and demand police accountability.

The march also comes on the heels of the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wis., on Sunday. Blake, a Black man, was shot seven times in the back at close range. He is now paralyzed from the waist down, according to his family’s lawyers.

That shooting was captured on video and went viral on social media, sparking days of demonstrations that turned deadly this week.

A 17-year-old from Illinois allegedly opened fired on protesters in Kenosha, killing two and injuring a third. The shooter, a white male, reportedly has ties to a militia and is a staunch supporter of law enforcement.

He is facing six criminal charges, including first-degree intentional homicide, in connection to the shooting.

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic also looms over the event.

Due to a requirement imposed by Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser that visitors to the district from high-risk states self-quarantine for 14 days, turnout for the march is expected to be lighter than organizers had originally anticipated.

Event organizers had planned for 100,000 attendees, but a permit issued by the National Park Service indicates about half that are expected, according to The Washington Post.