“The Republican Convention’s Speaker Lineup Is Largely White,” was the ABC News headline eight years ago, noting that only three of the 2016 Republican National Convention’s sixty-three speakers that year were black. As Donald Trump prepared to be nominated by a deeply divided Republican party, the headline seemed to confirm every negative thing that had been said about him.

It’s a different picture this year. As the GOP works to neutralize one of the Democratic Party’s central attacks on Trump and the party as a whole, and to capitalize on polls that show the former president significantly growing his support from non-white voters, one of the central themes of the 2024 RNC can be summed up as, You’ve been lied to that Donald Trump is a racist, and you’re not racist if you vote for him.

Similar to the RNC in 2020, the GOP has worked hard this year to up the diversity of its speakers. The RNC’s first night featured five black Republican elected officials, with Dallas mayor Eric Johnson — a former Democrat who switched parties last year, making the city the country’s largest one run by a GOP mayor — taking the stage the next night. They and others took part in a convention event, pitched as the first of its kind at a Republican convention, held by the recently founded the Black Republican Mayor’s Association to honor the party’s black delegates.

“The Republican Party isn’t a scary place for black folks,” the group’s founder Aurora mayor Richard Irvin told those assembled.

Night one also featured model Amber Rose, who told the story of her conversion to being a Trump supporter in a speech roundly praised by CNN talking heads. Rose had “for a long time believed those lies” and “left-wing propaganda” about the former president being a racist, she said, until she did her own research and realized that Trump and his supporters “don’t care if you’re black, white, gay, or straight — it’s all love.” The night ended with a Sikh prayer delivered by Harmeet Kaur Dhillon, a member of the Republican National Committee for California.

Reecia Stoglin, the wife of retired chaplain Rich Stoglin, a delegate-at-large from north Texas, echoed this messaging when I spoke to her. “They know the trigger words for black people — the r-word,” she said of Democrats, referring to “racist.”

“The left-wing liberal media tells so many lies about President Trump,” she said, with the charge that he’s racist being number one, when the truth was that he had “done more for African Americans than just about anyone other than Abraham Lincoln.” Stoglin says she and her husband, who are black, had been Democratic voters, but switched to the GOP in 2016, feeling that the Democrats no longer represented their core values of God, family, and military service.

Night two was notable for its Asian representation, in the form of onetime Trump foe Nikki Haley, Senate candidate Hung Cao, and biotech executive and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, the latter joking that he had “achieved the impossible” by getting most of the convention to know how to pronounce his name. The next night would see a speech from J. D. Vance’s wife, Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants, who would praise her husband for learning how to make Indian food for her mother.

The second night’s black speakers had prime-time speaking slots, including Madeline Brame, the New York mother of a murdered Afghanistan veteran, who criticized Democrats’ “soft-on-crime” policies and accused them of having “betrayed” and “neglected” loyal “poor minorities” like herself. “Donald Trump shares our values,” she said, railing against progressive prosecutors of color and charging that Trump had been “a victim of the same corrupt system that I have been” — all core messages of the Trump campaign.

Also notable was James Crawford, chair of the Forest County Potawatomi nation in northern Wisconsin, providing some indigenous representation, four years after an election where aggressive GOP outreach to the 40 percent of Robeson County residents who are Native American saw the Democratic stronghold swing toward Trump. Like Brame, Crawford delivered a Trump campaign message that, out of the former president’s mouth, might have been vulnerable to accusations of race-baiting, warning that the “use and abuse of illegal drugs” was on the rise in reservations, and that Native women and girls were “exploited, trafficked, and subjected to violence at reprehensible levels” — claims in line with Republican charges that reservations were a conduit for drug cartel criminality from across the border.

The several Latino voices on the second night — including Senator Marco Rubio, who had been in the running for Trump’s vice presidential pick — carried into the third, when five Latino speakers took the stage. That included Donald Trump Jr’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the daughter of a Puerto Rican teacher, who declared herself, as she had four years ago, a “proud Latina.”

In reality, the slate of speakers on stage was far more diverse than the rank-and-file Republicans actually assembled in Milwaukee this week. Whether the delegates inside the Fiserv Forum or the various attendees milling about outside, the convention attendance has been an ocean of overwhelmingly — but far from exclusively — white faces. But it is the speakers that the millions of voters tuning in at home will see, and delegates quietly hope this will buttress their concerted efforts to increase Trump and the GOP’s minority voter share this year.

Navin Jarugumilli, a Trump delegate in 2020 and a GOP activist in Wisconsin’s solidly blue Dane County, told me he feels optimistic about Trump winning the state this year, largely based on his conversations with independents and minority voters. He says there has been a concerted effort by Republicans in the state to target minorities, not just independents but disaffected Democratic voters too.

Multiple Pennsylvania delegates said there was a similar effort to target blue counties in that critical battleground state, and that the Democratic Party’s traditional voter registration advantage has drastically narrowed as a result. Delegate Gerald Bergen says while Democrats still have as much as a seven-to-one edge, Republicans have been making gains, including in his home city of Philadelphia.

“There is something about Donald Trump that resonates with black and Hispanic communities there,” he said.

Indeed, even in 2020, when Biden had dominated among voters of color, a survey of young black Americans in battleground states found that roughly two-fifths of those under forty-five agreed with the statement “I do not always like President Trump’s policies, but I like the way President Trump shows strength and defies the establishment.”

That night, black Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell talked about how Trump had come to his church “in a Democratic stronghold . . . to listen to average, everyday Americans like you and like me.” After him, Annette Albright, a three-time North Carolina school board candidate, presented herself as another black American who had been “a lifelong member of the Democrat Party,” before switching her party allegiance for the first time this year. (In fact, Albright had been part of a scheme in 2023 by the local Republican Party to fool voters into voting for secretly GOP-backed candidates, with Albright sharing a PO box and treasurer with Republican figures while being officially registered as “unaffiliated.”)

Similar efforts to appeal to non-white voters were visible all around the convention grounds. Ex-NFL player Jack Brewer, who at the 2020 RNC had likewise presented himself as a “lifelong Democrat” who backed Trump, spoke about fatherlessness in black communities at the “Convention Fest” stage. At the Turning Point USA stage, comedian Terrence Williams did an extended bit mocking Kamala Harris, before talking about the love he had received from attendees, declaring that “not one person” had taken note of his skin color. Next up was rapper Forgiato Blow, whose song, “Trump Trump Baby,” debuted on the RNC’s first night. “Trump is a gangsta,” he said, pointing to his criminal conviction and the shooting he had survived.

To some extent, the Democratic Party’s lack of an economic critique created the opening for this strategy. For years, the Democrats’ central criticism of the GOP was simply that it was a party of old white men, and through Trump’s term as president, Democratic attacks overwhelmingly rested on charging he was a racist or a second Hitler in waiting, while stressing the diversity of their party in contrast. Even this year, this framing has endured, with MSNBC anchor Alex Wagner at one point saying that Vance “fundamentally believes in the supremacy of whiteness.”

But it turns out this kind of thing is a fairly easy line of attack to neutralize, in the exact way that the GOP has done over the course of this week: by increasingly recruiting black, Latino, and Asian conservatives into their ranks to deliver a previously controversial message, without having to adjust that message one bit.

Will these Republican outreach efforts work? Later, as the RNC proceedings went on, I found myself sitting next to two members of a choir set to perform that night, both of them black women from Milwaukee.

“I’m singing and then I’m leaving,” said one. “I don’t like all this mudslinging. I feel like I’m back in grade school. Just tell me what you plan to do.”

“These speeches are boring me to tears,” said the other.

Both tended to vote Democratic, but far from happily. Nothing seemed to change whoever was voted in: under Biden, they told me, things had only gotten more expensive; under Trump, one complained, a level of racism had been unleashed that made it harder to raise her young son. If only there was a third option.

Then, just like that, they were smiling. James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” was blasting over the speakers. They danced and clicked their fingers.

“Who’s coming out to this?” asked one.

On the screen, Trump appeared, walking through the crowd. They took out their phones and began to film the scene.

“Who else?” said the other, grinning.