GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP) — To a room full of Republicans from across North Carolina on Friday, former President Donald Trump railed against the Biden administration and vowed to win in the state for a third time — all over a speaker phone call after his son Eric Trump dialed him on stage.

“I just want to thank all of the people of North Carolina. The support has been great and never wavered,” Donald Trump said, met by cheers from hundreds in the crowd.

The four-minute phone call kicked off keynote speeches from RNC co-chair Lara Trump and her husband, Eric Trump, at the North Carolina GOP Convention in Greensboro. The couple touted key changes to the national Republican Party under Lara Trump’s leadership and insisted on the necessity of getting Trump back in office.

“What we have going on in this country right now is not Republican versus Democrat or left versus right,” Lara Trump, a Wilmington, North Carolina, native, said during the couple’s almost 40-minute address. “It’s good versus evil.”

Lara and Eric Trump’s speech comes a year after Trump addressed North Carolina Republicans as a keynote speaker at the party’s 2023 convention — one of his first public appearances a few days after his first criminal indictment claiming he mishandled classified federal documents was handed down from a grand jury.

Lara Trump and her husband Eric Trump leave after speaking at the North Carolina GOP convention in Greensboro, N.C., Friday, May 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Chuck Burton

But a lot has changed at the state and national party since Trump’s June visit to the convention — including his daughter-in-law’s meteoric rise within the Republican National Committee.

Lara Trump became the RNC’s co-chair, the party’s top fundraising official, in March and serves as No. 2 to Michael Whatley, the new RNC chair and former chair of the North Carolina Republican Party who is expected to speak at the NCGOP Convention on Saturday. Both Whatley and Lara Trump came into their leadership positions looking to revitalize the party and ensure Trump’s victory in November.

In the weeks following their ascension, the RNC saw major shakeups in staffing and an increase in fundraising — the latter greatly needed to fund Trump’s growing legal fees as he faces multiple civil and criminal trials.

While Lara Trump is early in her role, Nancy Murray, a GOP delegate from Charlotte, said she has high hopes for what Trump’s daughter-in-law will bring to party leadership.

She also said Lara Trump may be a major improvement from previous longtime RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who Murray believes is a RINO — a derogatory term for conservatives meaning Republican in Name Only.

Under McDaniel, Emily Bourgeois, another Charlotte delegate, said the party suffered financial issues and lost too many races across the country.

“I’m hopeful Lara Trump can bring this back,” Bourgeois said before the speech.

Lara Trump pitched the RNC shifts to the crowd as necessary changes to winning the 2024 election, which included an emphasis on getting Republicans to turn out in massive droves in November. She urged the crowd to vote as early as possible — including by mail-in ballots, which Republicans such as Trump previously admonished against — and take others to cast their ballots to make sure the election is “too big to rig.”

“Any way you can vote and as early as you can vote, get your vote banked,” Lara Trump said.

The couple levied significant criticism against the Biden administration, which included concerns on immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border and inflation. As a way to get back to the country’s “guiding principles,” Eric Trump told the crowd that he and Lara Trump were committed to leading Trump’s campaign to victory by November.

“We’re going to make America great again, and we’re going to do it together and we’re going to start in North Carolina,” Eric Trump said.

Other prominent conservatives are scheduled to speak at the Greensboro convention over the weekend, including former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson.

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COLUMBIA, N.C. — People who live in a small county in North Carolina have filed a federal lawsuit to have a Confederate-era monument to “faithful slaves” removed from outside the county courthouse.

The monument is a zinc statue resting on a base featuring a bust of Robert E. Lee and the inscription: “IN APPRECIATION OF OUR FAITHFUL SLAVES.”

The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday, May 21, in the Eastern District of North Carolina by a group called The Concerned Citizens of Tyrrell County.

The plaintiffs claim the public monument violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because it “expresses a racially discriminatory message.”

The inscription on the statue promotes a “pro-slavery message and a pro-Confederate message,” according to the lawsuit.

Jaelyn Miller, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told CNN she feels county commissioners have a responsibility to ensure that racist messages are not being displayed to the Black community.

“This is sort of the only monument in the country on public land that textually endorses slavery,” Miller said.

Ian Mance, another attorney for the plaintiffs, said the historical record is clear that the monument was meant to send a message.

“It was put up in the front yard of what was soon to be the Tyrrell County Courthouse, which opened a few months later, to communicate to people that members of the Black community could not expect to get justice inside of that courthouse,” he said.

The lawsuit alleges the construction of the monument and the county’s continued maintenance “communicates, on behalf of local government, the idea that Tyrrell’s institutions regard Black people’s rightful place as one of subservience and obedience” and that “Black people who were enslaved in Tyrrell County preferred their slavery to freedom.”

The lawsuit also claims that the county’s display of the message has “incite(d) racial hostility” and endangers the plaintiffs’ safety.

The monument has been standing since 1902 and the lawsuit is the latest move in a decades-long battle to have it removed from courthouse grounds.

Mance said the plaintiffs have been attending commission meetings since the 1990s and holding demonstrations since 2019.

“Litigation was our last resort,” Sherryreed Robinson, one of the plaintiffs said in a news release announcing the suit. “We have peacefully voiced our objections for years. This monument says our ancestors preferred slavery to freedom. That’s a false and hurtful message for the government to communicate.”

The monument was unveiled in 1902, nearly 40 years after the end of the Civil War. The event brought together politicians, officials and Confederate veterans, and was described by newspapers at the time as the “most momentous occasion ever celebrated in the county of Tyrrell,” the suit states. That day, Thomas Gregory Skinner, a U.S. congressman and veteran of the Confederate army, gave a dedication speech marked by a “masterly defense of the cause of the South,” according to the University of North Carolina’s online inventory of the state’s monuments, shrines, and commemorative public art.

The removal of Confederate monuments gained momentum in North Carolina and across the nation after the death of May 2020 death of George Floyd.

On Memorial Day I reflect on two deaths from the 9/11 wars, and what, from the comfort of my home as the chirping of the spring birds greets the dawn, I owe them. One was a Marine I only knew for an hour or so, and the other was a close friend of years and deployments.

The Marine died because he took a few seconds to push his men off of a rooftop first and didn’t jump down the stairwell to safety when he could have. He waited his turn, which as a leader, was to go last.

A bullet hit him in the back, just above the plate in his body armor, traveled through his chest, and exited the front. When I removed his body armor, the ugly little piece of metal fell into the hands of another Marine helping me work on him.

We tried the best we could, with what we had, but he died quickly and silently, in the shadows of a rooftop staircase in Iraq. He was from Georgia, and he is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

My close friend died as a member of a special mission unit. At the time, the terrorist network run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who commanded al-Qaida in Iraq, was strapping bombs on special needs children and adults and walking them into crowded marketplaces, and a raid targeting those jihadists resulted in his death.

My friend and another SEAL were clearing a room that held a hidden bunker and a machine gun, awaiting their entry. Both men were killed instantly. I learned of his death from a mutual friend on a snowy day in northern Vermont, working as a lab technician while I applied to medical school. My friend was from New Hampshire and is also buried in Arlington.

Both of these men are with me now and will always be. Their sacrifice, of all they were and would ever be, took away from them all the fruits our nation have enjoyed. T-ball games on warm spring days, hot cocoa fireside in a snowstorm, and love, community, and family were all sacrificed in dank little buildings in Iraq.

Making sense of their deaths, for me, was only possible if I viewed their sacrifice as a gift. It makes sense that my friend gave his life for me. It made sense that the young Marine gave his life, quite literally, in my stead.

Or at least that’s how I try to see it.

And while I can never repay what these men gave me, I can try to earn it by accepting the Sisyphean task of living a “good life.” Their gift was not free of obligation, or duty, and while it can never be repaid, it can be earned.

As I think through the meaning of Memorial Day, to honor all those who lost their lives in defense of America, I wonder what would these two men who live inside me feel about our democracy today?

On Friday, I am joining a coalition of veterans, including past leaders of the North Carolina National Guard, concerned about this issue. We are gathering at Greensboro’s Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.

Across the city, the state Republican Party is holding its annual gathering, which will include members of the Republican National Committee, like new co-chair former president Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump. In attendance at the GOP event are multiple individuals, who echo Trump’s doubts about the legitimacy of U.S. elections and his refusal to commit to accepting this year’s results.

The former president, who has displayed an unprecedented disrespect for military service over the years, has also repeatedly threatened violence if the election does not go his way.

We are demanding that Republican leaders now in Greensboro use all their influence to force Donald Trump to renounce these awful and dangerous threats of violence, which have no place in a democracy. Trump must commit to a peaceful and non-violent election season.

We have a duty to our fallen brothers and sisters, whom we honor this weekend. They fought battles abroad so we can live in a country free of such threats. Who among us will not honor their sacrifice?