Donald Trump accepted the 2024 presidential nomination with a rambling 90-minute speech Thursday night that had Republican National Convention delegates falling asleep in their chairs. He departed from his promise of using the address to push for unity and sunk instead into his worn-out story of a nation in decline and calls for the biggest deportation of people in U.S. history.
The speech was aimed at showcasing him as a strong candidate, and perhaps it did the trick for those in the room in which it was delivered. The views and policies he presented are rejected by the broad majority of Americans, however. Any undecided voter tuning in would not come away convinced to support Trump after hearing his remarks. The candidate and his party are probably lucky that because he talked so long, much of his speech fell outside of prime time, resulting in fewer people watching the whole broadcast.
The only part of his speech that kept the attention of delegates and television viewers was probably his description of the shooting last week at his rally in Pennsylvania. The rest had everyone, including him, drifting off.
Democrats, meanwhile, had plenty of reason to come away from Trump’s speech feeling that their chances in November could be revitalized. That applies to both the chances of Biden or any potential replacement candidate at the top of the ticket.
Couldn’t help himself
A bitter Trump couldn’t help but attack anyone not been on board with his program. He attacked the United Auto Workers, for example, which is backing Biden, essentially blaming them for shipping their own jobs overseas. He warned auto workers that they had better support him if they wanted to stay employed.
Those kinds of remarks reminded everyone outside the room full of adoring fans in Milwaukee of why Trump is hugely unpopular with so many workers and their allies.
Biden has been criticized for losing his train of thought during speeches lately, yet Trump did precisely that, even launching into another of his totally disconnected-from-reality stories about, as he put it, “the late great” Hannibal Lecter. Trump snapped his jaws to imitate the fictional serial killer infamous for eating people in the book and movie series, The Silence of the Lambs.
Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump group, said, “Trump’s speech was, objectively, the single worst convention acceptance speech in modern history. It was a rambling disaster from start to its long-delayed finish, and nothing is going to make it better.”
Professor Robert E. Kelly, a politics expert based out of Pusan National University in South Korea, posted online, “The media owes Biden a huge apology after that disaster. Can we now have three weeks of intense speculation on Trump’s mental health, plus endless calls for him to quit? Biden is literally owed that by any standard of fair play or equal treatment.”
The record hour-and-a-half oration before a capacity crowd followed a parade to the podium of Trump family members and estate workers, the Rev. Franklin Graham, and longtime pro-wrestler Hulk Hogan, among others. All extolled Trump. Several touched on the theme he began with, a call for “unity.”
Hogan destroyed the unity theme. He virtually issued a call to war for Trump, ripping off his shirt to expose a red Trump sleeveless T-shirt. The crowd roared.
Red meat came in the second half of the speech, when Trump focused fire on his favorite targets, migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, weaving in denunciations of Biden’s policies for dealing with border security and those seeking asylum or fleeing poverty, wars, crime, and natural disasters.
He particularly aimed his provocative rhetoric at Midwestern swing-state white blue-collar workers, including union workers. His anti-migrant vitriol, Republicans believed, would play to that crowd. The same went for Trump’s denunciation of electric vehicles and the claim that his industrial policy—which was non-existent—led to millions of dollars in investments in swing state Wisconsin. didn’t mention the corporate class behind him. Trump even promised to close the U.S.-Mexico border and abolish the EVs “on day one.” And he said his nonexistent policy sent so much money to Wisconsin “because I’m trying to buy your votes.”
“We have a massive illegal invasion crisis that has spread crime, poverty, and disease” domestically, Trump charged. Abroad, citing war in Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza, Trump warned, “We’re on the verge of World War III.” His solution? Elect a supposed strongman, him.
“It’s time for a change,” he declared. “They’re very tough,” he said, speaking of U.S. foes “and we’re dealing with fierce people. We’re not tough, except when they [the Democrats] are cheating” to steal elections, yet another falsehood. It was Trump who tried to steal the election four years ago.
In a nod perhaps toward his newest billionaire supporter, Tesla owner Elon Musk, Trump acknowledged EVs “have their place.” Otherwise, he failed to mention that some of his most fervent backers are to be found among the capitalist class rather than the unionized workers he courted in his speech.
Claims borders will be “secure”
“Our borders will be secure, there will be harmony between states” in the U.S., and his racist Mexican Wall will be finished, Trump said. But to do that “we must secure our nation from incompetent leadership,” meaning Biden, he declared.
Then the man who once brandished a Bible upside down outside a D.C. church invoked God, to the delight of the overwhelmingly white and allegedly Christian crowd. “I felt very safe because I had God on my side,” Trump said of his shooting. The divine intervention pitch served to bolster Trump as Heaven’s favorite candidate but is also distracted from another issue making some Evangelical supporters unhappy.
That was the total absence of any mention of abortion in Trump’s remarks. Republican attacks on reproductive health have proven to be a major liability for the party; it has lost on the issue in multiple referenda and elections across the country. There have been strong efforts at the convention to hush discussion of abortion. Trump, for instance, didn’t mention that his three Supreme Court justices provided the muscle to end the constitutional right to abortion two years ago in their overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Denial of abortion rights is now recognized by many in the GOP as a big loser, with many down-ticket candidates running away from the issue as fast as possible. One who didn’t in the past is Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, the vice presidential nominee. But Vance, too, was silent on banning abortion when he spoke the night before.
As an aside, Trump anointed Vance as his ideological successor for the MAGAites: “This is the greatest movement in the history of the country. J.D., you’re going to be doing this for a long time.”
As for the U.S. under his leadership, Trump bragged: “We will not bend, we will not break. We will hit hard and we will not back down.”
He boasted, without evidence, that foreign leaders respect and fear him, allegedly including Chinese President Xi Jinping. For others, there is plenty of proof. Referring to fellow authoritarian Viktor Orban, Hungary’s right-wing prime minister, Trump said Orban told him, “The world needs Trump back in the White House.” Orban, like Trump, is rabidly anti-migrant, especially against people from the Middle East and North Africa.
Economic lies vs. facts
Other nuggets for the crowd, almost all contradicted by the facts, included:
- A lie that he left Biden “the best economy” in U.S. history with “the lowest unemployment” and with huge job creation, especially in factories. Unemployment is now lower than it ever was under Trump, and the federal deficit is declining. Factories have created tens of thousands of new jobs under Biden, but lost jobs—as did the economy as a whole—under Trump. He was the first president with job losses since Republican Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression.
- A lie that he made the U.S. energy independent, that Biden reversed that, and that he would restore the independence until the U.S. leads the world, cutting gasoline prices along the way. The crowd responded with the GOP’s common “Drill, baby, drill!” chant, and he picked it up. Despite the complaints of environmental activists, U.S. domestic oil production is higher under Biden than it has ever been in history.
- “We never got credit for [battling] COVID,” said Trump. Trump ignored his slow, stumbling response—including considering the possibility of drinking bleach to cleanse the virus from the lungs. He cost the U.S. all the lives it lost beyond the first 100,000, according to one of his few truth-telling advisers, Dr. Deborah Birx.
- A bid for Midwestern votes and specifically from Auto Workers fearful for their jobs with the conversion of cars, trucks, and SUVs to electric vehicles, the United Auto Workers’ new contracts with the Detroit automakers specify EV plants will be union plants. Trump’s plan: Cancel the EVs and demand UAW fire reformist President Shawn Fein, who led the union’s successful “Stand Up!” rolling strikes which won that gain and much more.
Trump also claimed he would “start paying off cumulative $36 trillion federal debt,” a common right-wing claim. He ignored the fact that his tax cut for corporations and the rich added $8.4 trillion to it. Biden’s measures to combat the coronavirus-caused Great Recession added only $3 trillion.
“And we’ll start lowering taxes, even more than before,” Trump declared, without saying how he’d reconcile those two goals. The cut, Trump said, came in corporate taxes and will again. He didn’t say what he would do about individual income tax breaks included in his former tax cut. They’re scheduled to expire at the end of next year.
- A slam against the Democrats, saying “We beat ‘em on the impeachments, we beat ‘em on the indictments, and we beat ‘em on all other things. If they directed all that time to our country, we’d have a much stronger country.” Trump didn’t mention why he was indicted, impeached, and—in New York state courts—convicted of felonies.
- He even charged that “the Democrats used COVID to cheat” him out of winning re-election four years ago. Some 62 federal and state courts ruled on Trump’s “stolen election” claims. Trump alleged vote fraud, not COVID, cost him the election. He won one technical ruling in Pennsylvania and lost the rest. Many judges, including Republicans, called his claims frivolous, unsupported, or worse.
Instead, Trump praised Florida Federal Judge Aileen Cannon for throwing out one of the cases, concerning the secret papers Trump stole from the White House and took to his Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump didn’t tell the crowd that earlier in the day, Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith appealed Cannon’s ruling. Smith is also trying the stalled case against Trump for the invasion, insurrection, and coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol three and a half years ago.
Unions hit back
Trump’s speech didn’t fool union leaders, even before his outlandish claims.
“In his first term as president, Donald Trump was a disaster for workers and our unions, governing exclusively for the wealthy and well-connected,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement even before Trump spoke. His second-term agenda is “a plan to turbocharge his anti-worker policies, eliminate or control unions, and eviscerate labor laws and workers’ contracts.”
She promised unions would fight back with “a plan to mobilize tens of thousands of grassroots activists across every community to get the message out and vote.”
During the speech, Unite HERE President Gwen Mills tweeted: “Donald Trump and some of the most far-right, anti-labor thought leadership gathered in Milwaukee for the RNC. The dangerous, fringe ideas laid out as their vision for America threaten the very foundation of workers’ rights & undermine the progress we’ve fought for.
“We saw Trump trying to make more empty promises to workers such as ending taxes on tips. What about his promises to establish national right-to-work laws, end union protections, and attack our right to organize?
“We’ve lived four years of a Trump presidency, and we won’t go back. We will canvass, organize, and vote to continue building a nation with strong labor protections, affordable healthcare, and humane immigration policies, where ‘One Job Is Enough’ for working people. See you on the doors.”
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