Trump kicks off Republican convention with rambling speech filled with lies

• More than eight hours before the official televised programming was set to start, President Donald Trump made an unexpected appearance in the Republican National Convention hall in Charlotte, North Carolina.
• He started out by rattling off a series of false and misleading statements on voting by mail.
• Trump, riffing almost the entire time, touched on his usual slate of topics, delivering lines such as, "The pandemic, we're handling it very well. Look at the crowds."
• The president also incorrectly said the border wall was almost done, complained over how cable news channels covered the roll-call vote earlier in the hour, and said he believed the country was more divided under President Barack Obama.

Though the Republican National Convention's televised programming was not supposed to start until 9 p.m. ET, President Donald Trump was on the stage in Charlotte, North Carolina, by 1 p.m. to deliver a typical MAGA-rally speech.

"The pandemic, we're handling it very well. Look at the crowds," Trump said during his rambling speech, which lasted about an hour.

The president dedicated most of the first half hour of his speech to repeating his favorite lies about voting by mail.

At one point, CNN cut away from his speech, citing the growing number of inaccurate claims Trump made about voting.

Trump repeated his usual false statements that voting by mail is more prone to fraud and the Democrats are promoting "ballot harvesting."

Trump was using a more inflammatory term closer to voter fraud than under the broader category of ballot collecting, where a third party can deliver the envelope containing another voter's signed ballot.

Some states have recently changed their laws on ballot collection to limit it to family members or limit the kinds of elections where it's allowed, such as in Arizona, where restrictions were eventually overturned in violation of the Voting Rights Act. In some places with high numbers of residents voting by mail, campaigns offer to deliver ballots as a form of organizing, with a 2018 Republican congressional campaign in North Carolina abusing the practice in the first documented instance of a federal election being overturned in the courts over fraud.

His comments on voting by mail were hard to follow at times, with Trump veering between hypothetical examples and false claims of what is happening in the country.

Trump also falsely said 80 million ballots would be sent to Americans who aren't registered to vote and that various crews would be going door-to-door to collect them.

Many states have expanded their mail-in-voting parameters during the coronavirus pandemic, and each state's deadlines can be found here.

Trump also corrected the crowd's "four more years" chants by saying, "If you really want to drive them crazy, you say 12 more years."

The president also incorrectly said the border wall dividing the US and Mexico was almost done; said farmers who call him "sir" tell him how much they love China; complained about how MSNBC, CNN and Fox News covered the roll-call vote earlier in the hour; and said he believed the country was more divided under President Barack Obama.

Trump reportedly plans on speaking at the convention at least four more times this week.