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(CNN)Republicans pitched President Donald Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic as a massive success at their national convention Monday, despite large majorities of Americans feeling like the President and his administration have bungled the crisis.
In his first surprise appearance of the night, Trump met with health care, law enforcement and other workers who have been on the front lines during the pandemic. Throughout the evening, other average Americans shared stories of how Trump's actions have helped them survive the pandemic and the economic downturn, which led to tens of millions of Americans losing their jobs.
During a back-and-forth with front-line workers, Trump portrayed the federal government as having come to the rescue of governors, who were scrambling for personal protective equipment during the early months of the pandemic.
"I appreciate what you said because we have delivered billions of dollars of equipment that governors were supposed to get, and in many cases they didn't get," Trump said. "So the federal government had to help them, and all of the people that did this incredible work -- they never got credit for it. But you understand where it came from. Thank you very much."
The party devoted more than 10 minutes attempting to alter public perceptions of Trump's widely criticized handling of the coronavirus pandemic, choosing to take that issue "head on," according to event organizers. In a video, the Republican National Convention misrepresented Trump's handling of the coronavirus, repeating a flurry of falsehoods about Trump's attitude towards a pandemic that has now killed nearly 180,000 Americans and that he initially denied would be a problem, then neglected and ignored.
Despite attempts by Trump and Republicans to portray his response to the coronavirus as a success, the US is still the world's leader in total cases and deaths.
While Trump has focused on his January 31 announcement that banned foreign nationals from China from entering the US, many medical experts say that he lost valuable time in February when he resisted making major moves to contain the virus, insisting that it would just go away.
He refused to ask the federal government to take the lead on Covid-19 testing or even for devising a plan to fight the pandemic, insisting that governors were responsible for ramping up testing and determining their own protocols — which led to wide variation in the response across the country.
He did not announce the coronavirus shutdown until mid-March and then berated governors who he believed were reopening their economies too slowly, even though many of them did not meet the criteria that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had set. Experts say that is one of the factors that led to a deadly summer surge in cases.
And it was not until July when Trump finally wore a mask publicly during a visit to wounded service members at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
There have, however, been some signs of progress. This past weekend, the seven-day average of coronavirus deaths dropped below 1,000 a day for the first time since July.
Trump tries to cast himself as an empathetic leader
A week after Joe Biden's party spent days highlighting his empathy with personal stories about the former vice president, Trump and his party attempted to do the same in roundtables with front-line workers responding to the coronavirus pandemic and people who his administration freed from captivity abroad.
In Trump's first appearance of the night, a Louisiana surgeon, Dr G.E. Ghali said that Trump had torn down regulatory barriers to the development of vaccines and therapies. It is correct that the drive for a vaccine, in the US and elsewhere is moving at unusual speed -- though not as quickly as the President says it is. But neither the video nor the speech explained why the United States has failed to put in place a national test and tracing system or why it has only 4% of the world's population but has a quarter of its coronavirus infections.
Ghali said Trump "moved mountains to save lives."
In his second appearance of the night, the President was featured in a video from the White House with American hostages freed by foreign countries during his administration. "We got you back," Trump told Sam Goodwin, who was held in Syria in 2019.
Other featured Americans held been abroad in countries that included in Turkey, Iran and Venezuela.
While Trump mostly allowed the former hostages to tell their stories, he at one point told Pastor Andrew Brunson -- imprisoned by Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- that the strongman leader "was very good. ... He ultimately, after we had a few conversations, he agreed."
Trump has been more successful in freeing hostages than most other recent presidents.
He has kept in place revisions adopted by the Obama administration that make it easier for families of those held to talk to their captors. His government has also piled pressure on foreign governments to free Americans but officially sticks to the principle that there can be no negotiating with hostage takers.
However, some experts worry that events like Monday's, which showed the President personally and politically deeply invested in claiming credit for freeing hostages, could put a bigger prize on the heads of Americans who are in vulnerable situations abroad.
GOP casts a dark view of America
Tapping his roots as a television producer, Trump has been heavily involved in the planning for the four-day event, instructing organizers that he wanted to do more live programming and dynamic segments than the Democrats broadcast during their convention last week. However, it appears many speeches were pretaped for at least the convention's first night as plans were scrambled due to the coronavirus.
Though he has criticized Biden and the Democrats for holding what he called the darkest, angriest, gloomiest convention in history, he touched off the convention Monday morning by unearthing his grievances from the 2016 election and falsely suggesting that the election will be rigged against Republicans because many voters are turning to mail-in ballots due to concerns over the coronavirus pandemic.
And despite party officials' promises of an optimistic, positive convention, early speakers followed Trump's lead from earlier in the day and tore into Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, adopting Trump's dark framing of a nation on the brink.
That atmosphere was perhaps best encapsulated in a passionate speech from Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News personality who now works as a senior adviser to the Trump campaign and is the partner of Donald Trump Jr.
She claimed Biden and Harris, and their "socialist comrades," would adopt policies similar to those she said destroyed Cuba and Venezuela.
"They want to destroy this country, and everything that we have fought for and hold dear. They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what you see and think, and believe, so they can control how you live," she said, shouting into an empty room in the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC, as though she was in front of a huge convention crowd.
"They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal, victim ideology, to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself," she added.
In opening the convention, Charlie Kirk, founder of a key conservative students organization, warned that American freedoms were at risk from "bitter, deceitful, vengeful, arrogant activists." School choice activist Rebecca Friedrichs warned that "unions are subverting our republic." Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz said that Biden and Harris were a front for left-wing radicals.
"They'll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your house and invite MS-13 to live next door," Gaetz said.
Monday night's program features Trump Jr.; former Trump ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley; and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the party's only Black senator who championed the GOP's version of police reform after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer.
Trump Jr., the night's keynote speaker, will describe "Trump's America as a land of opportunity -- a place of promise" while Haley will argue that the President stood up for the United States in the world.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
CNN's Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.
