MILWAUKEE — Oh, they’re friends again.
It was reconciliation night Tuesday, day two of the Republican National Convention. Many of the GOP rivals that former President Donald Trump has mercilessly beaten in two Republican Party primaries took to the convention stage to tell American voters why they now love Trump. Or at least can plug their nostrils long enough to vote for the GOP nominee — in the case of Trump’s former United Nations Ambassador and defense industry darling Nikki Haley.
All that was lacking from the prodigal sons and daughters segment was Dr. Phil.
“Tricky Nikki,” as Trump once nicknamed Haley, joined Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (Ron DeSanctimonious or Meatball Ron, if you prefer), U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (Lyin’ Ted, as Trump once labeled him), U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (Little Marco), and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (Young Vivek Ramaswamy) to talk up Trump and urge unity.
Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy all lost “bigly” to Trump in his latest quest for the White House; Rubio and Cruz were vanquished challengers in 2016.
‘Our Baby Was Gone’
But the real stars of Tuesday’s lineup were the average Americans who shared their stories of loss and pain under Democrat President Joe Biden and his leftist policies. And none has proved as deadly as the administration’s open-border policies that have led to millions of illegal immigrants pouring into the United States on Biden’s watch. Some are carrying with them lethal drugs, particularly the poison that is fentanyl. The synthetic opioid has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans during Biden’s tenure. The U.S. posted a record 112,000 drug overdoses in fiscal year 2023 alone, the brunt of those fentanyl-related, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a House Budget Committee Report.
Anne Fundner’s firstborn son, Weston, is among the tragic numbers. Weston was a bright and big-hearted 15-year-old, a loving big brother who enjoyed making people laugh, Fundner told attendees at Tuesday’s packed Republican National Convention in downtown Milwaukee. Succumbing to peer pressure and a teen’s desire to fit in, Weston tried something laced with fentanyl, his mother said, her voice breaking in the retelling of that life-shattering day in February 2022.
“Our baby was gone,” Fundner said, choking back tears. “This was not an overdose, it was a poisoning.”
“His whole future, everything we ever wanted for him was ripped away in an instant,” the grieving wife and mother of four added. “And Joe Biden does nothing. I hold Joe Biden, Kamala Harris — the border czar. What a joke! — and [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom and every Democrat who supports open borders responsible for the death of my son.”
The hall erupted in applause in one of the most poignant moments from the four-day convention thus far, as Trump and his newly named running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, joined in a standing ovation. Cameras focused in on conventiongoers, mostly women, moms, who wiped tears from their eyes and put their hands over their hearts in a show of parental pain.
With polls showing illegal immigration as one of the top issues of the campaign, Biden recently moved to shore up the porous border his executive orders, including reversals of Trump-era border security policies, have created. The Democrat’s border “security” measures have slowed arrests for illegal border crossings at the U.S. border with Mexico, according to the administration. But the transparently political act, for many, is too little too late.
Estimates from the Center for Immigration Studies peg the number of illegal immigrants coming into the country on Biden’s watch at around 6.6 million, according to Cronkite News. Other estimates put illegal immigrant encounters with U.S. border agents significantly higher, on track to hit 10 million in the 3.5 years since Biden’s been in charge.
‘Say His Name’
“This fight is not for me, my son is gone. This fight is for your children,” Fundner said.
“Say his name, Joe Biden. Weston,” she said, the crowd responding by chanting her late teenage son’s name.
It was a moment reminiscent of Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this year, when U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., interrupted and demanded the president say the name of Laken Riley, the 22-year-old nursing student murdered allegedly by an illegal alien.
The Morin family knows all too well the pain of such a horrific loss. Michael Morin, brother of Rachel Morin, spoke deliberately in recounting the grief his family has endured since the August murder of the 37-year-old mother of five allegedly at the hands of an illegal immigrant.
“Rachel was raped and murdered by a suspected illegal immigrant,” Morin told conventiongoers. “This was described as among the most brutal and violent offenses that has ever occurred in Harford County, Maryland.”
Madeline Brame nearly brought the house down with a powerful speech about her Afghanistan war veteran son, an Army sergeant, who survived enemy fire only to be beaten and stabbed to death by a group of four people on the streets of New York. She said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who campaigned for the job on going after Trump in a legally suspect “hush money” case, denied her son justice.
As the New York Post reported, in 2022, “the Manhattan DA’s office downgraded and dismissed charges against two of the four offenders.” Two others were convicted in the gang attack and are serving 20-year sentences, the publication reported.
“Trump was right when he said, ‘They’re after us.’ He’s just standing in the way,” Brame said to thunderous applause. “And guess what, he always will.”
In preaching party unity on a night meant for putting aside old grudges, Trump’s allies agreed that Biden and his leftist friends are the GOP’s real political enemies and that the only way to “save America” is by throwing Democrats out of power.
In finally officially endorsing Trump, Haley told the convention hall, in a message meant for Never Trumpers and voters at home vacillating about the former president, that Americans don’t have to agree with him “100 percent of the time” to vote for him. In the understatement of the evening, the former South Carolina governor who endured a bruising and losing nomination battle with Trump said she doesn’t always agree with the GOP’s standard bearer.
“We agree more often than we disagree,” Haley said. At the moment the RNC cameras cut to Trump raising his brows quizzically. Some in the crowd chuckled. “We agree on keeping America strong, on keeping America safe,” she pressed, adding that Democrats have moved so far left that they are putting Americans’ basic freedoms in peril.
