Trump Started His Speech with Calm, Unity Unlike Him But Then There Was Trump
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Deputy Opinion Editor, reporting from Milwaukee
In my 20 years of covering presidential campaigns as a journalist, there have been just two political conventions where the presidential nominees, their teams, the delegates and the party spent all four days radiating the confidence of a winner.
The first was the Democrats’ in 2008 with Barack Obama — I’ll never forget how everyone I spoke with was certain of victory in November. The second one was the Republicans’ this week in Milwaukee, where Trump supporter after Trump supporter calmly, clearly insisted that Donald Trump would win this November.
Don’t get me wrong: Many of the convention speakers spewed grievances to tear down Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and there was a certain fraudulence to the whole event — with Republicans lying about their war on abortion rights by censoring any talk of it, and misleading the audience about the economy, immigration, crime and more.
But the tone and tenor of the convention were ecstatic about Trump, who was portrayed and praised as a man who survived an assassination attempt by the grace of God and emerged as a “lion” (a word used multiple times this week).
For three nights he took in more adulation than he’s ever gotten in his life. He looked tired and bored at times, but mostly he looked pleased with himself, loved by his party while Democrats were abandoning their presidential nominee.
Then, on the fourth and final night, Trump took the stage, and at first he held the audience in his hand as he told the story of the assassination attempt.
“I said to myself, wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet,” he recalled, as the crowd listened, rapt. But, he added, “In a certain way I felt very safe because I had God on my side.”
Then, almost on cue, Trump started steering his convention off the rails.
After beginning his speech with calls for unity — “There is no victory in winning for half of America” — the former president turned the convention into a Trump rally, attacking “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and slamming Biden by name after Republicans said that he would rise above the insults and not mention the president.
He ripped into Democrats on Social Security, Medicare, the border and energy policy, saying America was “stupid” under Biden while ad-libbing about Hannibal Lecter and having the next Republican convention in Venezuela.
Trump was suddenly thin on the unity and heavy on the unhinged, as his speech became tiresome and stretched past midnight on the East Coast. Biden may have messed up the June debate, but Trump’s own cognitive functioning was messing up the July convention.
These are strange times. Democrats are so worried about Biden, but he is not the one who poses a huge risk to the economy, national security and civil rights. Many Democrats think Biden will lose in November.
But will Trump win in November? For much of the convention, I thought Trump looked like a winner — a guy who could win not just the swing states but also Democratic states like Minnesota and Virginia, maybe.
Then came Thursday night and Trump looked like something else — he looked like the Trump of 2020, rambling and ranting and talking about himself more than voters, talking babble more than basics.
That edition of Trump lost four years ago. And I ended Thursday night and the convention thinking that, whether the ticket is Biden-Harris or Harris-Whitmer or Whitmer-Shapiro or something else, the Democrats still have a shot against this guy in November.
THE ONLY PROBLEM, IN THE END, WAS TRUMP HIMSELF.
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