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DONALD TRUMP: Win, win, win, win, win, win.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Donald Trump and the Republican Party want to retake the White House. Who will be their opponent? NPR senior Washington editor and correspondent, Ron Elving, joins us now. Thanks so much for being with us, Ron.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: Let's begin with the convention in Milwaukee. What were your impressions?
ELVING: It was not like the conventions of the past, Scott, where party heavyweights beat up on the opposition party but also traded blows with each other. There was no suggestion of dissent or discord anywhere. The platform was rewritten to repeat what Trump has said already on social media about abortion, about trade and taxes, about every salient issue. Every speaker was either a long-standing Trump loyalist or a member of his family or a past or potential Trump rival who has recanted and pledged absolute fealty to the leader.
SIMON: And Trump diverged from his prepared remarks a lot - for example, when he talked about the assassination attempt that occurred just a week ago. And here is, I think, what we can fairly call a riff on international relations.
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TRUMP: And they were ready to make a deal. Iran was going to make a deal with us. And then we had that horrible, horrible result that we'll never let happen again. The election result - we're never going to let that happen again. They used COVID to cheat. We're never gonna let it happen again.
ELVING: What is Trump really saying here when he's talking about an Iran deal? He doesn't tell us anything about the deal, but he is mostly saying that the verified and certified vote of 2020, when he lost by 7 million votes, was a horrible thing. And, surely, from his perspective, it must have been painful. But it was certified by 50 state governors - Republican and Democrat alike - and also by the U.S. Congress. Trump's challenges in the courts failed, and election experts in both parties and Trump-era election officials called it the most secure election in U.S. history.
Then Trump refers to Democrats cheating with COVID when he's talking about pandemic-era voting by mail. Now, that's a practice widespread in America well before anyone ever heard of COVID. Voting early or by mail has historically been most popular among Republicans. And when he says, we're never going to let it happen again, just what does that mean? We assume he does not mean that we won't have elections or that we will only count the elections when he thinks they should. We assume that, but does he?
SIMON: Meanwhile, President Biden recovers from COVID at his home in Delaware. We're told his case is mild, vital signs are fine and that he's feeling calls for many in his party to step aside. What do a number of these major Democrats, which include dozens at this point, see that the president reportedly does not?
ELVING: Well, they see Biden's own performance, and they're hearing conversations and seeing polls in their own states and in their own races, polls nationwide and in the crucial states that decide our elections - they're seeing these polls say that two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to step aside. Now, these are people who may still vote for him in November if he's the candidate, but they think he should give way to a stronger candidate. And they are also drawing on their own experience as politicians.
When a party's headliner fails in a statewide election or a national election, that party suffers all the way down the ballot. And when a party unites behind a strong national leader, they can gain or at least hold their own contests for other offices. Now, Biden can see all this, we think, but he claims at this point to be unmoved. He is reading the data selectively and listening to people he has trusted the most for the longest time.
He may still think he can change the data with a rip-roaring campaign this fall, but the consensus among party people not named Biden and not employed in the White House or in the Biden campaign is that Biden cannot win.
SIMON: But so many Americans have voted for him already in the primaries. Are those votes just swept aside?
ELVING: No, they're not all for naught. They expressed the best hopes of the party at the time they were cast, but they may have been cast in the dark, so to speak. During the primaries, typical Democratic voters were simply not aware of Biden's age-related diminishment as they are now. There is a palpable fear that he cannot drive the turnout needed to keep the White House and to maintain a strong Democratic presence in Congress and in the states.
SIMON: Ron Elving, thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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