CBC News Network's Carole MacNeil spoke with Mary Kate Cary, senior fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center and former White House speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush, about Melania Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention.

In a traditional presidency, a natural disaster can provide a political advantage because it can give the incumbent a chance to put his or her leadership on display, said Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.

The deluge of back-to-back misleading depictions offered a distortion of reality with the sole aim of earning Trump a second term, said Barbara A. Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “Our legendary presidents are known for their truthfulness: Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Lincoln earned the moniker ‘Honest Abe,’ Truman was famous for plain speaking,” she said. “So it is indeed ironic that our first reality-TV-star-turned-president, abetted by his party, would bury truth in an avalanche of prevarications about current cataclysms and his role in them.”

Lehrman joins “Chicago Tonight” to discuss the RNC speeches along with Mary Kate Cary, who served as White House speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush.

Jennifer Lawless, a politics professor at the University of Virginia, notes that the old cookie-cutter template for women in politics — a helmet haircut, a perfect family, a career they put on hold to raise children (who were older when they ran for office) — has crumbled since the 1990s.

Political participation in the United States has been contested since the founding of the nation and defined by distinct periods of electoral expansion and contraction. The US has at times excluded certain segments of the population from the voting process: women, racial and ethnic minorities, landless whites, members of certain faiths, and most recently, citizens with felony convictions. For each of these groups, securing the right to vote has been won through collective action amid or following periods of immense social transformation or economic crisis, with far-reaching impact on partisan politics. As COVID-19 profoundly alters how Americans vote and candidates campaign, the 2020 US elections are expected to be extraordinarily consequential for the American electoral and political system. ​The Trump administration’s response to the pandemic and the economic crisis it has triggered, along with protests demanding racial justice, may also result in an influx of new voters or voters crossing party lines, thereby changing the electoral base and ushering in partisan realignment. Hear from former presidential speechwriters as they discuss how the 2020 elections may be more or less inclusive and may reshape the Republican and Democratic parties and American democracy itself.