Following Cruz' "career-ending speech" last night, the moment everyone has been waiting for has arrived. A year after after announcing his run for president, billionaire Donald Trump takes the stage Thursday night to deliver what few pundits thought would ever happen: His acceptance speech for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party. While many will be interested in Peter Thiel and Tom Barrack, Ivanka Trump will introduce her dad whose theme – “Make America One Again” – centers on unity.
Live Feed (Trump is expected to speak at around 10pmET):
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Here’s what The Hill believes are the most important things to watch for during the final Republican National Convention session, which starts at 7 p.m. Eastern Time, as the real estate mogul takes hold of the party’s banner for the general election.
Will the Donald deliver?
All eyes will be on Trump’s keynote address, the climax of the weeklong event. Even for a man who has dominated media coverage for the greater part of a year, Trump’s Thursday speech will almost certainly be his most watched. He has sworn off his preferred free-wheeling style for a safer scripted address, a decision that will please the party’s wary establishment but could limit the opportunity for both viral moments and potentially damaging ones. Expect Trump to speak to both wings of the party—enthusiastic members of the Trump train as well as those who refuse to leave the station. He’ll need both if he wants to overtake Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls and win the Oval Office.
Ivanka testifies for her father
Thursday also marks a major moment for Ivanka Trump, the eldest Trump daughter who is poised to emerge from this presidential cycle as a potent force. Ivanka has already served a key role in the campaign—she’s often deployed to soften her controversial father’s rough edges and has been called upon as his close adviser. Trump has already previewed the theme of his daughter’s speech—gender equality. As it stands in the polls, he could use a lifeline with female voters who have fled him in droves. It’s a tough mountain to climb, but Ivanka will be tasked with flipping the common perception of her father on its head and selling him as a compassionate father and, in her words earlier this month, a “feminist.” Even if she fails to stop a mass exodus of female support, a strong speech will reinforce her strong performance as a surrogate and potentially stoke the rumors of her potential political future.
Make America One Again
The final spin on Trump’s theme, “Make America One Again” centers on unity. That’s no surprise considering the handful of notable Republicans reluctant to support Trump’s candidacy. While many of the party’s standard-bearers won’t be in attendance, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus will take to the stage in the hopes of convincing delegates and Republicans across the country to fall in line, no matter their view on Trump. It’s a role Priebus has played for months—declaring Trump the party’s presumptive nominee back in May and working both in public and private to get Republicans on board. And it's a role that becomes even more important after Ted Cruz stunned the convention crowd on Wednesday by not endorsing Trump, a decision that dominated the night. Look for a healthy reliance on one thing bound to resonate with every delegate and attendee—an aggressive critique of Hillary Clinton. This week’s best-received speeches hammered home the case against Clinton—notably Chris Christie’s “indictment” of the presumptive Democratic nominee. So as he looks to motivate the party’s loyalists around the country, he’ll likely find no greater force than distaste for Clinton.
GOP looks to expand its appeal
Trump’s precarious favorability numbers with women and minorities has prompted worries that he needs to expand his appeal or else he may lose the White House and take down-ticket Republicans with him. Thursday’s schedule of speakers is engineered to fight back and includes a handful speakers meant to shore up support among different constituencies. Along with Ivanka Trump, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Gov. Fallin (Okla.) will likely speak to discontented female voters and look to draw them back into the arms of the Grand Old Party. Jerry Falwell Jr. aims to rally Christian conservatives who may feel lukewarm about their nominee’s commitment to issues like abortion and gay rights. And Lisa Shin, a New Mexico small business owner and member of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, will try to tell minority voters who have largely steered clear of Trump why he can “Make America Great Again” for them too.
Billionaires for Trump
The speaking roster will also include two of Trump’s supporters from the business world—venture capitalist Peter Thiel and investor Tom Barrack. Thiel is best known as one of Facebook’s earliest outside investors and the head of security software firm Palantir Technologies. An openly gay man, he’s received some criticism from the liberal tech bubble for his support of Trump and the GOP despite the party’s stance against gay marriage. But Trump has been much more accepting of the LGBT community in his rhetoric, despite calling for the court to overturn the Supreme Court decision supporting gay marriage, so Thiel’s speech could shine an interesting light on how the party plans to reconcile the differences.
Barrack’s relationship with Trump apparently dates back to before his political bid and to his real estate career. He also served as Deputy Undersecretary in President Ronald Reagan’s Department of Interior, giving him additional credibility at an event where Reagan is revered. He hosted Trump’s first major fundraiser in May, and recently released his own economic treatise… "Opaque global monetary policies combined with unfocused, poorly negotiated international trade agreements are undermining the entire project of globalization as proponents of these policies face a growing backlash among voters," he writes.
Citizens everywhere are unhappy with their governments and angry with their leaders. They are no longer interested in a political rhetoric that they do not understand and that has no value in their lives. Monetary policy, trade policy technological disruption and the array of issues that make up globalization are simply a parade of unintelligible horribles to the average working class citizen.
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Until recent times, central bank activities were mostly technical, marginal, and unreported. Today central bankers utilize exotic new tools such as Quantitative Easing (“QE”) and massive asset purchases to manipulate markets to conform to macroeconomic mandates and political leaders' preferences. The driving force behind US economic policy is no longer the Secretary of the Treasury or Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors; it is the new breed of central banker on steroids. Foreign exchange, QE, asset purchases and the printing of money unanchored to any external standard, and other technical monetary tools are today’s “super trade weapons.”
In the early stages of the financial crisis, central banks acted quickly, decisively and effectively to provide liquidity and help avert another Great Depression. These actions reinvigorated the payments and settlements system, established a floor on value and forced banks to restructure. Yet instead of curtailing emergency policies as economies recovered, central banks have all but monopolized the economy policies of many nations. As a result, investment has stalled and savings rates are pressing historic lows. Middle- and lower-income workers see no benefits from these policies, while the holders of capital, just as with globalization, enjoy burgeoning investment portfolios and bank accounts. At this point, central bank actions seem mainly to impact asset prices while only marginally influencing the true drivers of the economy, such as real investment, productivity expansion and job growth. We have reached the point where central banks – which are a lot better at emergency responses than steering long-term policy – have become the problem, not the solution.
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The dramatic swelling of Wall Street asset prices has not been accompanied by a revival of the real economy or rising middle class incomes. Unconventional monetary policy is not a reliable force for robust growth in a time of economic stagnation. Instead, it encourages riskier investment, compounding the rising wealth effects from expanding equity markets and real estate prices, which primarily benefit the affluent.
Policies like QE also favor net borrowers over net savers, again benefitting debt-burdened governments and corporations that have the ability to borrow, while middle-class workers with limited borrowing capacity stagnate. This is the primary reason why corporate profit margins and equity markets are at historic highs, while real wage growth remains historically low. Employment data show a resentful workforce feeling despair and doomed to irrelevance in a technologically advanced global marketplace, even as investors enjoy the bull run of the century.
In today’s globalized economy, elected leaders who decide fiscal policy, on which long-term economic growth is predicated, make little sustained effort to reform outdated personal or business tax policies or exercise spending restraints needed to reduce government debt. Monetary policy, for which elected leaders disclaim responsibility, leaving it to unelected central bankers, is king. Central banks are frantically seeking market share through currency devaluations, desperately hoping that lower nominal exchange rates will boost exports and reduce imports – part of a zero-sum rush-to-the-bottom.
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As the central bankers continue down their road without a GPS, no one knows what the effects will be: financial bubbles, a debt bust, an equity bust, a disorderly exit from the sale of trillions of dollars sitting on central bank balance sheets, emerging market capital outflows or increased inequality and disenchantment. Financial engineering by itself cannot achieve the kind of sustainable, inclusive growth that will extend economic benefits to America’s hard-pressed middle class. Opaque global monetary policies combined with unfocused, poorly negotiated international trade agreements are undermining the entire project of globalization as proponents of these policies face a growing backlash among voters.
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The world is moving at warp speed, as are all the things within it. In order to keep up, we too need to move and adapt or be lost in the black hole of entrenchment and entitlement. Many decades ago, Winston Churchill wrote a series of essays predicting the ever more dizzying pace of change in the modern world. It could not and must not be stopped, but he worried that mankind might have so much more, yet be unhappier than before. "Their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things," he wrote. We need to be reminded about the "simple questions which man has asked since the earliest dawn of reason," about the meaning, purpose, and ends of mankind – in other words, the same kind of questions that led America's Founders to declare the self-evident truth that all human beings are created equal. As we question the status quo and chip away at the corrosion that attends old thoughts, ideas, and institutions, we must not fail to keep in mind the difference between material things that are always changing and the abiding truths that have made America great.
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