Outside the Beltway

Trump Being Trump

Even getting shot, he can't pretend to be a unifying force for long.

James Joyner · Friday, July 19, 2024 · 10 comments

The combination of a long-scheduled evening Zoom call and a severe lack of sleep the night before made skipping Donald Trump’s acceptance of the Republican presidential nomination for a third consecutive term an easy call. I heard a few excerpts from it on The Daily podcast on the way in to work and have read a handful of news articles about it.

All in all, it was pretty much what we’ve come to expect. To paraphrase the late Coach Dennis Green, he is who we thought he was.

For a few minutes, he was very much on script, preaching a theme of unity and paying homage to Corey Comperatore, the volunteer fire chief who died saving his family from bullets flying in Saturday’s assassination attempt of the former President. but unable to help himself, he quite literally veered from the script on the teleprompter into an hour-and-a-half stream-of-consciousness rant.

And, quite probably, changed the calculus for the November matchup between him and a Democrat to be named later not one iota.

Representative Mainstream News Coverage:

WaPo (“Trump recounts assassination attempt to galvanize the GOP he transformed“):

Donald Trump accepted his third straight Republican nomination on Thursday by wrapping a fresh gesture toward unity around the same dark view of American decline and loathing for political opponents and immigrants that have defined his nine-year political career and transformed the GOP.

The former president dramatically recounted the experience of narrowly missing a would-be assassin’s bullet five days ago, and he opened and concluded with calls for Americans to set aside the rancorous partisan divisions he has played no small role in stoking.

In between, he rehearsed his usual themes of framing this election in catastrophic terms, characterizing the current state of affairs with depictions of doom and destruction. Trump also used the banner of unity to return to form in assailing the criminal cases against him, saying the prosecutors should drop the charges and Democrats should stop calling him a threat to democracy.

He also returned to his refrain of vilifying undocumented immigrants as dangerous, describing them without evidence as criminals and mentally ill, even cannibalistic. Within a half-hour, the speech started resembling a typical rally, with ad-libbed shout-outs to VIPs and railing against subpoenas and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Particularly Noteworthy Analyses:

NYT, (“Trump Struggles to Turn the Page on ‘American Carnage’“):

Donald J. Trump has long been a man undone by himself.

He imperiled his presidency and political campaigns with personal grudges, impulsiveness and an appetite for authoritarianism. His casual approach to the rule of law — and unwillingness to accept electoral defeat — resulted in $83 million in penalties, nearly three dozen felony convictions and additional legal trouble ahead.

But on Thursday night, with his right ear still bandaged five days after he was wounded by a would-be assassin’s bullet, Mr. Trump attempted a politically cunning transformation.

He opened his address by casting himself as a unifying figure, promising to bridge political divides he had long delighted in deepening. He mentioned President Biden by name only once. At brief moments, he struck tones more similar to President Barack Obama’s message of hope and healing than to the dark version of America that Mr. Trump described in accepting his first two Republican presidential nominations.

“The discord and division in our society must be healed — we must heal it quickly,” Mr. Trump said on the Republican convention’s final night. “As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together — or we fall apart.”

With the Democrats divided and polls tipping in Mr. Trump’s favor, Republicans used their national gathering in Milwaukee to bask in the moment. In their view, Mr. Trump — twice impeached, repeatedly indicted, convicted, fined and soon to be sentenced — appears on the verge of regaining control of the world’s most powerful office.

Yet even this speech, designed to debut the new message, underscored Mr. Trump’s challenge with discipline. He stuck to the script at the start. But as the clock ticked well beyond the one-hour mark, he couldn’t resist falling back into the kind of rambling, unscripted diatribe that has long been his signature style. At more than 90 minutes, it was the longest Republican nomination address since at least 1956, when the American Presidency Project at the University of California-Santa Barbara started tracking the statistic on the G.O.P. side.

Mr. Trump’s ultimate success will depend on whether, for the final 15 weeks of the campaign, he can contain his self-destructive tendencies and temper his preference for vengeance and unpopular, hard-right policies. Since voters rejected him at the ballot box in 2020, Mr. Trump has embraced an increasingly unrestrained and radical version of conservatism that has often bordered on authoritarian.

The NYT Gang (“What Undecided Voters Thought of Trump’s Speech: Mostly, Not Much“):

For a group of undecided voters from around the country, who are sharing their thoughts on key moments in the race with The New York Times, the effect was not strong. Some found the speech off-putting. A few found bright spots. None were swayed.

“I still don’t know what I’m going to do,” said Sharon Reed, 77, a retired teacher-turned-farmer in rural Pennsylvania who previously voted for Mr. Trump but is torn this year. “He tried, I think, to be much more unifying at the beginning. But then he got on his high horse there at the end.”

Ms. Reed’s husband, who watched the speech with her and is leaning toward Mr. Trump, was somewhat more positive. “He’s hitting all the points that I like,” Mr. Reed said, mentioning in particular Mr. Trump’s talk about securing the border and “drill, baby, drill.”

Arnel Ramos, 21, a food service worker living in Milwaukee, had hoped that Mr. Trump would talk about his belief systems, and that she would get to know him better before she casts a ballot in her first presidential election.

“You read a lot of stuff about what this guy says, but to actually sit down and hear it and sit through it, it was just insane to me,” she said. “That’s the only way I can describe this whole ordeal.”

Ms. Ramos said she found much of the speech unsettling — such as the connections Mr. Trump drew between immigration and crime, destruction and even disease — but she took particular issue with Mr. Trump’s aggressive tone on foreign policy and his description of being on the brink of “World War III.”

“It made me uncomfortable,” she said.

[…]

The Times spoke with the same group of undecided voters after the debate, many of whom came away still feeling mostly disappointed in the choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden. “It was just terrible,” Ryan Rivera, a trans man from the Phoenix area who works at Target, said at the time.

The speech on Thursday — and the flurry of major political events that preceded it — had not made the choice any clearer, especially with what appeared to be the increasing possibility of a different Democratic candidate.

Kristen Morris, 60, a nursing student in a suburb outside Charlotte, N.C., said she felt after the debate that she could not vote for Mr. Biden despite having supported him in 2020. She attributes her current dissatisfaction to what she felt was Mr. Biden’s stubbornness in remaining in the race.

“He is not putting the country first,” Ms. Morris said. “Maybe he will, but he has not been doing that.”

But after watching Mr. Trump’s speech on Thursday night, she was not sold on the former president either. She said she would still rather not vote for him because of his hyperbolic — and at times, confusing and incendiary — rhetoric, particularly around immigration.

There were possible glimmers of a slightly changed Trump after the shooting, she said, but that did not negate her memories from his time in office, when she watched him resist the peaceful transition of power after losing the election in 2020.

Other Major Outlet Opinion Columns:

• Phillip Bump, “The imaginary Trump ‘unity’ pivot was just another demand for fealty” (WaPo)
• Alexandra Petri, “Donald Trump was never going to change” (WaPo)
• Matt Bai, “Did Donald Trump blow his RNC acceptance speech?” (WaPo)
• Maureen Dowd, “Trump the Lion, or Trump the Lyin’?” (NYT)

My Two Cents

I continue to struggle to understand the undecided voter. Certainly, I understand finding both candidates unappealing; hell, so do I. Similarly, I can identify with those who disagree with both candidates on many issues, and thus find them both to be bad options. But the men are so wildly different that it’s hard for me to fathom not having a preference.

I keep reminding myself that most folks simply don’t pay all that much attention to politics. And, that when they do, they either simply view incoming information through pre-existing partisan lenses or react to it viscerally rather than intellectually. Few people are genuine ideologues.

Listening to sound bytes of Republican delegates this morning, it struck me how earnest they sounded in the view that Biden and the Democrats were trying to destroy the country with their crazy ideas, while Trump was being put here by God himself to save us all. That’s just nutty to me at every level but they seem to genuinely believe it. They think that we’re the crazy ones.