About Last Night (warning, partisan content)
The speech that wouldn't end
I was planning for today’s newsletter to be an opportunity to revisit some religious freedom questions, especially around the vague concept of “sincerely held religious beliefs.” Look for it on Monday.
Last night was the close of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Even though I’m an avowed political junkie, I couldn’t bring myself to watch Tucker Carlson, Franklyn Graham, Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, or the MMA guy. But given the stakes of the November presidential election, I figured it was important to watch Nominee Trump’s three hour ninety-minute-plus speech.
Many news outlets had received advanced copies of the text that was in the teleprompter and pre-wrote their copy on that basis. This allowed them to frame Trump’s “modified tone” along the lines of what campaign aides had predicted. Of course, estimates are that that text was only half of the speech. The rest was standard rally fare ad-libbed off whatever was on the screen.
Given my interest in governance over campaigning, I was listening for hints as to what we’d be in for were Trump to be elected to another four years. It proved very difficult to sort through the bombast, the halcyon images of the first Trump term, and the exaggerated attacks on the Biden administration to find things of substance. I won’t detail all of the factual errors and distortions, so here’s a link to the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler’s factcheck (hint: one factcheck every three minutes).
Trump opened his speech with a twenty plus minute description of last Saturday’s assassination attempt with images shown on multiple screens behind him. I’m very glad that he suffered only minor injury in what could have been a catastrophic situation for our country. I lived through too many assassinations in my early years to want to see that again.
I appreciated the opportunity to see Trump briefly grapple with mortality and acknowledge the precarity of his situation. And yet, the melodrama seemed a little much. He embellished details of the story with lots of incidentals about the crowd’s behavior.1 Again, I’m glad that he’s okay but his storytelling took something away from the initial emotion of finding him in fairly good form in contrast to what might have been. (Personally, I found the whole experience with the dead firefighter’s uniform to be way too exploitive.)
Following this prelude, he did the standard introduction one does at speeches like this. Thank the family, the previous speakers, and the vice presidential nominee. And then he launched the meat of the address:
I am here tonight to lay out a vision for the whole nation. To every citizen, whether you’re a young or old, man or woman, Democrat, Republican or Independent, Black or white, Asian or Hispanic, I extend to you a hand of loyalty and of friendship.
Together, we will lead America to new heights of greatness like the world has never seen before.
This was the plea for unity that his people had talked about.
Then he turned to a description of the first term (until February of 2020), listing things he was proud of that he didn’t get enough credit for (some are in Kessler’s list). Then came the pivot to the present.
But to achieve this future, we must first rescue our nation from failed and even incompetent leadership. We have totally incompetent leadership. This will be the most important election in the history of our country.
Under the current administration, we are indeed a nation in decline.
He returned to this later, vastly exaggerating the impacts of things like inflation. This is always a weird tell of his. If he told people that groceries had seen inflation at over 20% from January 2021 to today, they would have taken that seriously. But he’s never comfortable with numbers as they are, so they had to be up 57%.
The same thing happened with border security. He showed his big chart to talk about how the border was basically closed in May of 2020 (the only time he uses COVID in his favor). Philip Bump did a great analysis of what that chart actually says.
His attack on immigration is always told with the idea that people who cross the border come from prisons and asylums2. Then he shifts to horrific and detailed stories about two young women and a girl who were killed by someone in the country illegally. This is Willie Horton level stuff. Lee Atwater would be pleased that entire policies can be rejected by pulling out a few egregious cases.
Imagine the outcry if, on one of the nights of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month, there were a series of speakers telling stories about sexual abuse at the hands of evangelical pastors. The response would be, “You can’t hold everybody responsible for those actions!” Exactly.
Which gets us to the few policy proposals in the speech.
First, we must get economic relief to our citizens. Starting on Day 1, we will drive down prices and make America affordable again. We have to make it affordable. It’s not affordable. People can’t live like this.
This is a remarkable claim that I wish reporters would ask Trump about from now until November. How will they go about driving down prices? Is it really that easy?
His answer is the prices will come down through energy production.
Republicans have a plan to bring down prices, and bring them down very, very rapidly. By slashing energy costs, we will in turn reduce the cost of transportation, manufacturing and all household goods. So much starts with energy. And remember, we have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country by far. We are a nation that has the opportunity to make an absolute fortune with its energy.
I think he means that we would increase our production of natural gas (liquid gold) and then sell the surplus to other countries. Unless we have been artificially limited production (which I don’t think we have), it’s not like one can simply turn on a spigot and find more natural gas. Someone has to do the work of finding sources, obtaining the gas, and processing it. Even if you open up all the National Parks and ANWAR, development takes time so I don’t understand how that reduces prices.
And, of course, he will close the border on Day One. Even using executive powers, there will be the same kinds of lawsuits we saw in 2017 with the so-called Muslim Bans. There are international law implications for dealing with asylum seekers.
Under my plan, incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish completely, jobs will come roaring back, and the middle class will prosper like never, ever before and we’re going to do it very rapidly.
I’m sorry, that’s magical thinking. I know it played well in a room of rabid Trump supporters but I hope undecided voters in swing states are asking hard questions about how you get from where we are to the imagined promised land.
He closed the speech with a return to Butler, Pennsylvania and the hoped for unity.
Just like our ancestors, we must now come together, rise above past differences. Any disagreements have to be put aside, and go forward united as one people, one nation, pledging allegiance to one great, beautiful — I think it’s so beautiful — American flag.
Tonight, I ask for your partnership, for your support and I am humbly asking for your vote. I want your vote. We’re going to make our country great again. Every day, I will strive to honor the trust you have placed in me, and I will never, ever let you down. I promise that. I will never let you down.
These are challenging times. We have many issues that need out national attention and the political (and media) institutions seem woefully unprepared for addressing them. We need out leaders to be what Succession’s Logan Roy would call “serious people”.
And yes, I will plan on doing the same deconstruction of the acceptance speech at the DNC (whoever gives it).
I went back to the video to compare his description with last weekend. The entire event from being struck to standing and yelling “fight” took 45 seconds.
it’s consistent with the 2015 escalator speech.