WATCH: Ivanka Trump’s full speech at the Republican National Convention | 2020 RNC Night 4
August 28-
Ivanka Trump, a businesswoman and adviser to the president, introduced her father as the Republican nominee on the final night of the Republican National Convention on Aug. 27, 2020. Ivanka credited the president with leading nationwide shutdowns across the U.S. at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in order to save lives, but these decisions were largely driven by state governors and other local leaders. Trump once indicated he was more concerned about the economy than the virus, saying the cure for COVID-19 “cannot be worse than the problem itself.” Ivanka touted the state of the economy under the president’s tenure, saying, “I watched him take the strongest, most inclusive economy in our lifetime; the lowest unemployment in half a century, and the highest wage increase for working families in decades.”
While U.S. unemployment was at its lowest in 50 years prior to COVID-19, average hourly wage growth has been higher in decades prior, and the wealth gap has continued to expand since Trump took office. Ivanka claimed that through Republican tax cuts, “our child tax credit put over $2,000 into the pockets of 40 million American families.” This tax credit has been in place since 1997 and benefited 35 million American families under Obama. She said not a single Democrat voted to increase the Child Tax Credit in 2017, but nine Senate Democrats voted for a change to a tax bill that year that would have done so. She also touted legislation that will expand family leave to millions of Americans this October, but this only applies to federal workers — the majority of U.S. workers still do not have paid family leave. Finally, Trump said her father “rewrote history” by negotiating a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, although the deal has been sharply criticized by Palestinian leaders.
