MILWAUKEE – As the Republican National Committee moves into its final day Thursday, the loudest applause for a speaker not named Trump so far has been for a previously little-known economist who served as a trade adviser to the former Republican president.
Peter Navarro came to the convention stage straight from Florida on Wednesday, the day he was released from a four-month federal prison sentence for defying a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 Committee.
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Navarro was one of Trump's advisers who urged Trump to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral college votes for Joe Biden on Jan. 6, 2021 in a last-minute bid to stay in office. Pence's refusal to act unlawfully helped spur Trump's defiant speech on the ellipse the morning of Jan. 6, and the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol by the president's supporters.
“Now here’s the most important thing I’m going to tell you,” Navarro said to the crowd as he complained of “lawfare jackals” pursuing him for his defiance of Congress. "You may think this'll never happen to you. Uh-uh, they’re already coming for you."
Navarro's appearance was the rare mention of what have become a staple of Trump's campaign but not his convention — the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and Trump's lies about widespread voting fraud costing him the 2020 election.
On the campaign trail, Trump's message has been unmistakable.
Last year, Trump called Jan. 6 a “beautiful day” and repeatedly calls the hundreds of people convicted of federal crimes for Jan. 6, including attacks on police officers, “hostages" whom he has pledged to pardon if elected to a second term. Trump's rallies sometimes feature the song “Justice For All,” recorded by a group of men imprisoned after convictions for the attack who call themselves the J6 Prison Choir. Trump's embrace of the song pushed it to the top of Billboard's digital song sales chart.
Trump’s senior campaign advisor Chris LaCivita was asked in an interview at the RNC Thursday with Politico about whether Trump will continue talking about pardoning the Jan. 6 rioters.
LaCivita wouldn’t directly answer the question but said “What we’re talking about right now are the issues that matter,” listing off Social Security, Medicare and closing the border.
The former president still continues to claim that fraud cost him the 2020 election even though his own attorney general, recounts and investigations found no evidence of that. Courts rejected dozens of lawsuits from Trump and his allies challenging Biden's win. And a comprehensive AP review found fewer than 475 cases of fraud in key battleground states, nowhere near enough to tip the outcome of the contest.
In 2022, Biden and Democrats campaigned on the GOP's embrace of Trump's election lies and found electoral success, winning control of the U.S. Senate while defeating election deniers in key state races. Biden has made the Jan. 6 attack the centerpiece of his own reelection campaign, arguing Trump is a danger to democracy.
Election denial, meanwhile, has become a central issue for the Republican Party. Trump has remade the party apparatus, installing his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as co-chair with Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who has repeated Trump's election lies.
The party has filed a wave of election lawsuits around the country and hired as its election integrity director Christina Bobb, a controversial former conservative journalist who has been indicted by Arizona's Democratic Attorney General for her role in assembling a slate of electors contending that Trump, not Biden, won the state in 2020. Republicans have also positioned themselves to try to block certification of November's election.
The Republican convention's program has been revised on the fly after Saturday's assassination attempt on Trump. Speakers have sought a more unifying tone. Trump's aides contend the former president is now the only candidate who can bring the country together.
Still, Trump's allegations and moments between convention speakers have been occasionally punctuated by a video of Trump vowing to require only voting on Election Day rather than the mail balloting he blames for his defeat.
“Keep your eyes open, because these people want to cheat, and they do cheat, and it’s the only thing they do well,” Trump says in the video.
Tony Fabrizio, Trump's pollster, said at an event outside the convention hall that the campaign isn't worried about Democrats' message about Jan. 6 and democracy. “If it was going to work it would have worked already," Fabrizio said.
Republican speakers have picked up one new wrinkle on election conspiracy theories, contending that illegal immigrants who entered the country over the past four years will flood the polls in November.
It's illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and reviews of voter rolls in states like Georgia and North Carolina have found only a few dozen to zero noncitizens have registered to vote, nowhere near enough to make a difference in statewide races.
But Republicans argue that it's conceivable there could be a sudden rise on illegal noncitizen votes and complain Democrats won't vote for their bill to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Critics say that, given the lack of evidence that noncitizens are voting in significant numbers, adding additional requirements will only make it harder for actual U.S. citizens who can't lay their hands on a birth certificate to vote.
“Biden and Harris want illegals to vote now that they’ve opened up the border,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said onstage at the convention.
But that's remained an occasional punchline rather than the focus of a speech. Navarro's appearance, on the other hand, was a full-throated attack on the federal justice system.
Navarro, who led the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, contended he couldn't testify before the Jan. 6 committee because it would violate executive privilege, a claim that was rejected by the courts. In doing so, he became the first Trump official convicted of a crime in connection to the Jan. 6 attack.
“The Jan. 6 committee demanded that I betray Donald Trump to save my own skin,” Navarro said. “I refused.”
He named the federal judge, a Barack Obama appointee, who ultimately sent him to prison and contended it was political, without mentioning that the only other person to similarly refuse to testify in the Jan. 6 inquiry, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, was similarly sent to prison by a Trump-appointed judge.
“They did not break me and they will never break Donald Trump,” said Navarro before being joined on the stage by a woman he identified as his fiancee, to wild cheers. He spoke for more than 10 minutes — longer than several members of Congress or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who preceded him.
On the floor, delegates were thrilled. Brian McAuliffe, a Texas financial planner, wore a giant button with a red line through a banana that read “Don't Banana My Republic.” He said he has an acquaintance who the federal government prosecuted for Jan. 6 even though McAuliffe says the man didn't enter the building — and he had to plead guilty to a lesser charge rather than fight a felony count in court because he didn't have the money to defend himself.
“It's not what they're doing to Trump, it's what they're doing to everyone else,” McAuliffe said.
He was glad, though, that allegations of election fraud were kept to a minimum. McAuliffe helps certify elections in Hays County, Texas, between Austin and San Antonio, and has surveyed non-voters to understand why they don't cast a ballot. Fear of fraud is the top reason, he said,
“Talking too much about fraud,” he said, “just turns people off.”
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Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price in Milwaukee contributed to this report.