Trump's acceptance speech was a disaster. He is so easily beatable.
Boring, yet hateful. Rambling, yet dangerous. Sleepy, yet nightmarish. The worst convention acceptance speech in living memory, and one that highlighted a terrible candidate.
I watched the longest presidential nomination acceptance speech in history—at over one and a half hours—and the worst in living memory, so that you didn’t have to.
But maybe you did. Or you’ve heard about it.
I’m not going to go into it in much detail. There is not much that was coherent to really analyze, and most was retread. I’ll just give an overview of what happened as Donald Trump gave his speech accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention. Because, yes, it was more of a failed event than a speech. And it shows how bad Trump is as a candidate and how he is so beatable.
For the first 17 minutes, it was a somber, perhaps medicated Trump, recounting what happened on the Saturday night before when he was targeted by a shooter at his Pennsylvania rally.
He milked his assassination attempt, marketing a horrific attack into a campaign highlight. And he had visuals and props. Behind him were giant images of the moment the bullet apparently hit him, when he put his fist in the air as the Secret Service tried to get him secured.
On the stage was the volunteer firefighter uniform of the man who was killed at the rally, Corey Comperatore. (His name was misspelled, but this wasn’t apparent Trump campaign incompetence; it was reportedly an error from years ago by the local fire department.)
This part seemed like it might be the beginning of an effective and emotional speech—if you didn't know it was Donald Trump. He called for unity, claimed to have been changed, and was reflective and soft-spoken.
“The discord and division in our society must be healed—we must heal it quickly,” he said in a very serious tone, which was pretty laughable coming from the guy who sowed the division for years. “As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together—or we fall apart.”
The Signorile Report is reader-supported. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism. Thanks!
But 17 minutes later, Trump went from somber to sleepy. The energy level was already low. Now it went through the floor. It was bad enough that his VP running mate, JD Vance, was dull as dishwater the night before and not filling the role of the VP running mate, who is supposed to be an attack dog.
But Trump outdid him by just completely petering out. The presidential acceptance speech is supposed to be the high point, the crescendo of a convention, charging up the delegates in the room. Instead, it had delegates leaving the floor before it was over.
Trump went off-script from the speech and meandered, riffed, and rambled, undoing any claims about unity. It became his greatest hits of grievance, but on Quaaludes.
So, we heard mumblings about “crazy Nancy” Pelosi and about Joe Biden—who he at first swore he wasn’t going to name—and how “the damage that Biden's done to this country is unthinkable.” So much for unity.
Trump named Biden again to attack him again, even as he claimed he wasn’t going to name Biden. He attacked trans students, kids in schools, as he vowed, “We will not have men playing in women’s sports.” And the promotion of white supremacist great replacement conspiracy theory was off the charts, with Trump actually claiming there is “an invasion of our country that's killing hundreds of thousands of people a year,” which he called the “worst invasion in history.”
It was lie after lie about how there were no “no wars” in the world during his presidency—yes, world peace!—and how he had handled the COVID pandemic in a “great” way. As HuffPost notes:
And 38 minutes in, he repeated the lie that he used to incite the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol—that the 2020 election had been stolen from him through cheating. Immediately after that, he made liars out of staffers who had told reporters that he would never mention the name of the man who had defeated him, claiming Biden, by name, was worse than the previous 10 worst presidents combined.
But all of this and much more was spoken in such a laconic way as to make it largely toothless and ineffective. The speech just went on and on, rambling with no direction and no end in sight.
I’ve been to quite a few conventions—just about all the GOP and Democratic conventions from the ‘90s through 2016—and I’ve never seen a presidential acceptance speech that was so bad when it came to the connection with the audience of delegates, who have the cameras on them. Instead of rousing the crowd—all the cultists who are there and ready to be roused—it just kind of had them bewildered at times.
The speech showed that Trump not only lacks discipline—which we knew—but has lost vigor in a big way. He lacks the energy to get through a campaign, and this is why he’s campaigning far less and doesn’t seem to even like it. He’s also in mental decline, going off on things you know his aides tried to steer him clear of, like his usual mention of “the late, great Hannibal Lecter," in which he grotesquely compared migrants to the fictional serial killer in “The Silence of the Lambs.”
How the media isn’t talking about the cognitive decline of Trump—after what they did regarding Biden and the debate—is beyond me. But that’s another discussion.
The takeaway for Democrats is that Trump is not up to this and can easily be beaten. The choice of Vance was a big mistake—a MAGA extremist—and Trump is clearly not equipped to run the country. There’s a lot going on right now among the Democrats as to whether or not Joe Biden will drop out of the race. Whatever the outcome, it needs to happen now so that we can focus full force on winning the election.
ONE MORE TIME: Joe is going to stay at the top of the ticket, he's NOT dropping out, per his campaign manager this morning. The elected Democrats, ALL of them, need to get their act together and support OUR candidate IN PUBLIC AND BEHIND CLOSED DOORS and quit worrying about their own re-election bids and relying on "polls". They should realize by now that they WILL be re-elected if Biden is by virtue of just being a Democrat on that ticket and working their butt's off to present unity in support of the President from now until November 5th. Joe has every chance of winning if he has ALL of his party's steadfast support!!
Hi Mike, well…if you have your golf caddy and a former “pro rassler” who was stinking drunk, ripping his shirt apart and threatening to hunt down folks who don’t agree with Donald to speak at your coronation…. You have the making of a colossal clusterfuck of a confab.. This confab is a collection of weirdos, criminals, drunks, 8 Ball consumers, in your face fascism, trout pouts… Have a great day Mike.