Photo: Hannah Beier/Bloomberg/Getty Images
For five days we were told that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump had transformed him, maybe even made him “spiritual,” and very much inclined to replace the savage tone of his campaign with an appeal to “national unity.” The four days of rhetoric preceding his acceptance speech in Milwaukee certainly didn’t seem tonally different from any other MAGA rally you’ve ever seen, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and their administration treated as incompetent, heartless and evil. Shortly before he came to the podium, his son Eric delivered a raging, vengeful rant about his persecuted father and the terrible people in the White House who wanted to destroy him and the country as well.
Then the former president spoke, and there’s not much question he sounded different, at least at the beginning: inestimately softer, even thoughtful, and understandably slow-paced when discussing his ordeal in Pennsylvania. But after this long windup, and his pledge “to be president for ALL of America, not half of America,” he returned to the indictment of the Biden administration that he has angrily made so many times, and that the convention he controlled had reinforced over and over and over again.
But before he launched into his attack lines, he asserted that if Democrats wanted any sort of unity, they had to drop all the legal actions against him, essentially consummating the immunity the Supreme Court partially gave him. It’s the unity that comes from surrender, it seems, and he made no bones about his hostility to his opponents:
[W]e must first rescue our nation from failed and even incompetent leadership. This will be the most important election in the history of our country.Under the current administration, we are a nation in decline.
We have an INFLATION CRISIS that is making life unaffordable, ravaging the incomes of working and low-income families, and crushing our people like never before.
We also have an ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION CRISIS as we sit here in this beautiful arena – a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities all across our land.
Then there is an INTERNATIONAL CRISIS the likes of which the world has seldom seen. War is now raging in Europe and the Middle East, a growing specter of conflict hangs over Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, and all of Asia, and our planet is teetering on the edge of World War Three, and this will be a war like no other because of what the weapons are.
It is time for a CHANGE. This administration can’t come close to solving their problems. They aren’t fierce people, except when they are cheating. We simply cannot sustain four more years of this administration.
An even more striking sign that the old Trump was still there was his wandering off-script, with a very long digression on the arcana of “right to try” laws, an even longer digression on Iran, including a very Trumpian reference to a network TV show as “Deface the Nation.” And at that point, despite advance assurances that he would not so much as mention his opponent, with his voice rising to his customary snarl, he said that the ten worst presidents in history together “didn’t do as much damage as BIDEN.” He spoke of his “deep humility” but returned to his usual claims that his presidency was uniquely successful in every respect and would save the country from the horror of the status quo. If there was anything fresh or up-lifting about these lines, it eludes me:
Less than four years ago, I handed this administration the strongest border in American history….
The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country—they are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—they’re coming from everywhere, and this administration does nothing to stop them.
They are coming from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums, and terrorists at levels never seen before.
You know the tune. Trump’s acceptance speech, however it began, wound up echoing a convention that vowed the reversal of everything good or bad that the Biden administration did, to be replaced by the most ideologically extreme presidency ever, backed by a very united party that has a good chance of achieving control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. And it would be led by a chief executive who clearly wasn’t changed by his brush with death, but rather liberated by his apparent belief that the election is over, perhaps dictated by God Almighty himself. He was so liberated that one of the few people he directly quoted was Hungarian authoritarian strongman Viktor Orban.
Trump fans can be happy that their leader has recovered sufficiently to speak long past prime time and into Friday morning, capping this undisciplined if unified convention with a major address significantly less coherent than Biden at his worst. It is the longest presidential acceptance speech in recorded history.
Democrats should take some badly needed cheer from the conclusion of the RNC. All the reasons Donald Trump is anathema to at least half the electorate were on full display in Milwaukee, and if they can get their own act together and decide on a nominee, they can still win, no matter what the polls say today.
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