July 19, 2024 10:40 AM UTC

Trump Throws Dems Another Lifeline By Being Trump

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Republican National Convention in Milwaukee wrapped up last night as former President Donald Trump accepted his third consecutive presidential nomination, with a speech that set a new record for the longest presidential nomination acceptance speech in history–beating the previous two records that were both set by Trump in 2016 and 2020.

After the failed assassination attempt last Saturday against Trump, his campaign encouraged the spread of the notion that the experience had fundamentally changed him, sufficiently that Trump claimed to have scrapped the acceptance speech he originally composed in favor of something more “unifying.” Throughout the week leading up to Trump’s address last night, the speculation over what this “New Trump” would sound like ran wild.

But as AP’s David Bauder reports, after days of voluminous hype about the “changed man” America would allegedly meet on Thursday night, what America got after a relatively on-script play-by-play of the assassination attempt was the same Donald Trump who spent the last eight years dividing the country like no President in modern American history ever has:

Trump’s speech had been billed as a call to unity where President Joe Biden’s name wasn’t going to be mentioned, but instead the Democrat’s name came up twice after Trump switched gears. Vanity Fair said the address “gave America whiplash.”

NBC News reporter Garrett Haake, stationed on the convention floor, reported that “in the first half I saw a lot of wet eyes. In the second half I saw a lot of closed eyes.”

The New York Times said in a headline Friday that Trump had struggled to turn the page on “American carnage,” the attention-getting phrase from his 2017 inaugural as president. “On the last night of the GOP convention on Thursday, Donald J. Trump promised to bridge political divides, and then returned to delighting in deepening them.”

Elder pundit Jeff Greenfield writing at Politico says Trump “derailed his own convention speech.”

Some Republican allies had claimed he had become a changed man after the assassination attempt. The Trump campaign promised a convention that promoted unity. Trump himself said he ripped up his original speech and that he wouldn’t even mention by name his opponent President Joe Biden. None of it was true; Trump couldn’t help himself, not completely…

But more significant, that shooting had no impact at all on the remainder of his meandering and occasionally bizarre speech. Except for one statement that “we must not demonize political disagreements” — a hilarious assertion coming from someone who has urged a military tribunal for one critic and an execution for another, and for whom terms like “vermin” for his enemies are par for the course — the rest of his speech did not reflect a single authentic note of reflection, not a hint that he had given a moment’s thought to a wider, more profound message for the American people. He blasted Biden by name, if just once, and called former Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy.”

Even the New York Times’ equivocator of record David Brooks couldn’t defend it:

There is no cure for narcissism. The part after the assassination-attempt story was one of the truly awful and self-indulgent political performances of our time. [Pols emphasis] My brain has been bludgeoned into soporific exhaustion.

With one speech that held true to the notion of a “New Trump” for about 30 minutes before devolving into Trump’s standard impromptu rambling only occasionally interrupted by the prepared text on the teleprompter, Trump appears to have both talked his way out of much of the goodwill he earned from the events of last Saturday, as well as significantly undermined the argument that Trump is mentally sound enough to serve again as president. Few politicians in history have been given such a golden opportunity to pivot from divisive demagogue to unifying statesman, and after being hyped as precisely that moment in history, Trump completely failed to deliver.

Because it’s just not who Trump is. In or out of office, Trump is America’s divider-in-chief.