Emotional moment at RNC: Gold Star families remind Biden of the dead he forgot

In a moment that tugged on heartstrings, Gold Star families reflected on the pain of losing loved ones after an ISIS-K suicide bomber attacked Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate during the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Thirteen service members were killed, as were 169 Afghan civilians, 11 Marines, one soldier from the 8th Psychological Operations Group, and one Navy corpsman, during the attack.

The family members were greeted with chants of “USA!USA!USA!” when they appeared onstage holding photos of their fallen service members.

“[Biden] let my son down. He let the 13 down. He let the 45 wounded down. He let those 174 civilians down. He let our country down,” Kelly Barnett, the mother of Marine Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover, 31, said.

“While Joe Biden has refused to recognize their sacrifice, Donald Trump spent six hours in Bedminster with us,” said Christy Shamblin, who was the mother-in-law of the late Sgt. Nicole Ghee. 

To remind everyone, Joe Biden claimed that he'd not lost any American military personnel in combat. That was no mere error, the families told the Republican delegates. For the last three years, these families have heard nothing but silence from Biden and the White House, one of the grieving mothers declared. While Biden ignored them, Donald Trump has spent time with the families, "carrying the weight," as the mother-in-law of another of the fallen. And they then conducted a Roll Call of the Honored Dead, forgotten by the administration that put them into harm's way but remembered by all in the audience.

The display was so powerful because, unlike much of the programming at the RNC so far, the emotion on display was not anger. There was no bombast or table-pounding. It was bereft of the apocalyptic hyperbole that opens the wallets of small-dollar donors. The sentiments expressed were sadness, bitterness over the president’s conspicuous refusal to name and honor the fallen, and disappointment in a country to which they gave so much but had failed to reciprocate. It was the quietest moment of an otherwise boisterous convention. That reserve spoke louder than any activist or politician ever could.

The Gold Star families were followed with appearances from veterans of America’s foreign wars, the revered and neglected alike, and the victims of terroristic violence Joe Biden would prefer to forget. Ronen and Orna Neutra, the parents of Omer Neutra, charged the president with forgetting the fact that their son is still in the custody of Hamas after that terrorist group took the lives of over 30 Americans on October 7. Sergeant William Pekrul, a 98-year-old veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, brought down the house with his unalloyed expressions of affection for his country to which, he insisted, even his own extraordinary contributions in the services were not enough. Despite the “dark” present, Afghan combat veteran Scott Neil maintained that America remains a “good” country. “We’re still the shining city on the hill that everybody wants to come to,” he said.

Through it all, the audience was rapt. Heart-rending monologues from mothers who lost their children were leavened by expressions of stalwart patriotism, noble self-sacrifice, and optimism over the future America’s men and women in uniform fought for and secured. There was humor and sadness, despair and optimism, pathos and ebullience — sometimes within the same speech. As theater, it was magisterial.

Democratic partisans seemed flummoxed by this poignant and moving exhibition. The president’s allies took the prudent course and simply ignored these proceedings in favor of a circular, repetitive conversation about Biden’s uncertain future in electoral politics. What else can they do? How are they to explain the decision-making that led Biden to abandon Bagram Airbase, falsely retail the notion that the U.S. embassy would remain open even as diplomatic personnel fled, and evacuate U.S. soldiers before civilians and our Afghan allies? How can they defend the process that led the White House and the Pentagon to insist that the Taliban would provide security for Americans beset by a human tide at Kabul’s civilian airport? What justifies the president’s indifference toward the pain endured by these Gold Star families such that he seemed to hope they would just go away — ceding their cause to Republicans and Trump, who Axios’s Alex Thomson notes “had been reaching out” to them “since September of 2021.” There is no defense.

Democrats are unlikely to repeat Trump’s mistake in precisely the same way. Yet, in having no answer to the charges levied against Biden last night, they all but concede their guilt. This wasn’t just a stirring moment — it was a savvy one. The president’s job-approval rating flipped from positive to negative territory in August 2021 as Americans were forced to witness our prolonged national humiliation, and Biden’s image never recovered. In reminding voters of the human cost associated with incompetence in the commander in chief, the RNC scored a direct hit on the Democratic Party and demolished its self-professed claim to competent, managerial governance. But it wasn’t hollow rhetorical pugilism that delivered this devastating blow. The shiv was skillfully administered through tears.