RNC Day 4: Trump delivers longest acceptance speech in history

Former first lady Melania Trump has arrived in the arena -- marking her first appearance at the RNC this week and her time this election cycle publicly joining Trump at a major campaign event.

Melania Trump has occasionally appeared at closed-door fundraisers and other private events at Trump's private residences in Palm Beach or New York, but before tonight had skipped several campaign rallies as some of the other members of the family have attended.

She also did not appear in court with Trump during the hush money payment trial earlier this year while some other members of his family did.

Eric Trump, the former president's second oldest son, took the stage and went after his father's critics and Democrats.

He cited the "made up Russia hoax, sham impeachments" and "the efforts to cancel us, to silence him, to gag his free speech, and to drag him through every radical left courthouse in America," and last week's assassination attempt as examples of how his father was attacked.

"The swamp is terrified of this movement," Eric Trump said.

Eric Trump did not directly name President Joe Biden or former President Barack Obama in his speech.

Eric Trump argued that his father was "censured" and "persecuted" referencing his removal from social media platforms following the Jan. 6 attacks.

"We no longer trust our elections. We no longer trust our judicial system, and we no longer believe that our government is working in our best interest," he claimed.

"The greatest retribution will be our success," Eric Trump added.

It's been a frequent theme over four days in Milwaukee: The economy was roaring in the Trump years, and is flailing today. But the facts aren't so simple.

Here are few examples.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said: "They claim that our economy is thriving, yet hundreds of thousands of American-born workers lost their jobs these past few years."

PolitiFact rates that Mostly False.

People are constantly leaving jobs and taking new ones. But the average monthly number of layoffs was higher under Trump than it's been under Biden. Leaving out the coronavirus pandemic months of March 2020 to December 2021, the number of monthly layoffs under Trump averaged 1.81 million. Under Biden, that number has been 1.52 million.

GOP vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance said: "There's this chart that shows worker wages, and they stagnated for pretty much my entire life until President Donald J. Trump came along. Workers' wages went through the roof."

This is exaggerated; while wages were stagnant for much of Vance's life, there was no sharp divide after Trump's election when wages skyrocketed.
A key metric for inflation-adjusted worker pay - median usual weekly inflation adjusted earnings for full-time wage and salary workers - shows that this figure stagnated from 1984, when Vance was born, until the mid-2010s.

Then, after about 2014, when Democrat Barack Obama was president and Vance was in his early 30s, they started rising, by about 4% for the final three years of his term. From the roughly three years between Trump's inauguration to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, this figure also rose about 4%.

Vance also said that Trump "created the greatest economy in history for workers."

That's False.

The strongest evidence in favor of Vance's claim is the unemployment rate. During Trump's presidency, the unemployment rate fell to levels untouched in five decades. But his successor, Biden, matched or exceeded those levels. The annual increases in gross domestic product - the sum of a country's economic activity - were broadly similar under Trump to what they were during the final six years under his predecessor, Obama. And GDP growth under Trump was well below that of previous presidents.

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump signed paperwork to officially accept the nomination during the final day of the Republican National Convention

In a rare public campaign appearance, former first lady Melania Trump attended the signing.

Melania has not yet been seen on the convention floor.