Trump’s surreal, subdued, and unfocused address gave Democrats an opening to turn the tide of this campaign.
Donald Trump arrives to speak during the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Thursday, July 18, 2024.(Hannah Beier / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Milwaukee—There can be no doubt that Donald Trump united the GOP delegates, alternates, and hangers-on who gathered at the Republican National Convention here on Thursday night to witness his presidential nomination acceptance speech, the culmination of an evening that also featured Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock and Dana White, the CEO of the mixed martial arts promotion company Ultimate Fighting Championship. Even the bedraggled supporters of Nikki Haley—who famously dismissed the former president as “unstable and unhinged” and announced that “I do not need to kiss the ring” of her rival for the party’s nod—went along with the former United Nations ambassador in offering Trump a “strong,” if humiliating, endorsement.
But there was something off about the night that was supposed to signal Trump’s triumph.
Everyone else did their part. Speaker after speaker hailed Trump as “a hero,” “a tough guy,” “a champion,” “a gladiator” and an “American badass.” The Rev. Franklin Graham announced, “Last Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, President Trump had a near-death experience. No question. But God spared his life.” When Trump recalled last week’s assassination attempt, he told the crowd, “I’m not supposed to be here tonight.” They responded, “Yes, you are!” But after that compelling moment, the expectation was that Trump would launch into an epic address.
That never happened.
Instead, Trump delivered a rambling 93-minute speech (by far the longest convention acceptance speech in history) that was strangely subdued—”much more muted than usual,” observed the Associated Press—and unfocused. The former president spun off in so many directions that the technicians running his Teleprompter struggled, without much success, to keep up with the twists and turns. The coherence and natural flow Trump brought to his acceptance speeches at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland and on the grounds of the White House in 2020 were long gone.
The official line on this year’s speech was that, after the traumatic events of last Saturday, the nominee and his team had decided to tear up his anticipated remarks and prepare a new kind of Trump speech. The candidate, we were told, was going to position himself as a unifier who was prepared to bring a divided country together.
But the speech didn’t deliver. Through much of the night, Trump spoke almost in a monotone, rarely raising his voice. There were some relatively poetic appeals woven into the text, including a section that read, “As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate. We rise together or we fall apart.” But, for the most part, Trump delivered a supremely self-congratulatory acceptance address, a “greatest hits” presentation cribbed from his similarly jumbled rallies. He even included the weird references to fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter—”the late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner”—that have caused actor Anthony Hopkins, who played Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, to pronounce himself “shocked and appalled” by Trump’s admiration.
Of course, there was the usual slurry of gripes about the reelection race he didn’t win and the Democratic administration that succeeded him. And there were the even more usual lies, misstatements, and errors of fact—like the section of the speech where Trump congratulated Scott Walker on the “very nice job” he was doing as governor of Wisconsin, seemingly forgetting that Walker was ousted from that job six years ago.
Yet the crowd did not care. Trump was constantly interrupted by shouts of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” and “We love you!”
This was Donald Trump’s convention. And that was enough for him. Instead of reaching out beyond the hall to Americans who are still uncertain about his candidacy for a second term, the man who lost the 2020 popular vote by 7 million ballots was content to bask in the applause of the party faithful, welcoming and encouraging the adulation that was directed his way on the last night of a four-day love fest where speaker after speaker pledged absolute loyalty to his candidacy.
With his ego very much intact, Trump made it clear that he believed that he merited the applause. “I am the one saving democracy for the people of our country,” he announced early in the speech.
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In a narrow sense, Trump did have something to celebrate.
After a decade of having to wrestle with “Never Trump” Republicans who openly rejected him, and with the far greater community of “if it must be Trump, so be it” Republicans who grudgingly supported him, the alleged billionaire and convicted felon 34 times over finally had the leaders of the Grand Old Party precisely where he wanted them: cheering his every word with the bleary-eyed enthusiasm of the MAGA cultists he has encouraged them to become. Even when he didn’t deliver on the promise of a historic address, they acted as if he had.
This is the peculiar twist that the 2024 Republican National Convention has put on American politics.
There were few if any pretenses to traditional Republicanism, to the Grand Old Party, its history or its values. The loyalty of this convention was to a man, not a party.
That inside-the-bubble approach to politics gives Democrats, dispirited and in disarray because of the conflict over President Biden’s uncertain prospects, an opening that could prove to be politically consequential. They can speak, more loudly than ever, about the problem with a cult-of-personality politics that has very little vision for America beyond Trump’s recitation of 2016 and 2020 slogans: “Drill, baby, drill!” and “Close our borders!” and “I could stop wars with a telephone call.”
If Thursday night’s speech is any indication, the “vision thing” is going to be a problem for Trump once the convention ends and the home stretch of the campaign begins.
Gone are the days when Trump—whose personal favorability ratings stand at a dismal 42.2 percent in the Real Clear Politics survey of recent polls—could rely on the cohesive, if wrong-headed, Republican vision of former House Speaker Paul Ryan and similarly serious conservatives to fill in the blanks and secure his candidacy. Ryan, whose support was critical to narrowly winning the state of Wisconsin for Trump in 2016, wasn’t even at this year’s GOP convention—even though his hometown of Janesville is just 60 miles away from the Fiserv Forum.
Trump announced on Thursday night that he would be “a president for all of America.” But that made-for-TV appeal from a former reality-TV host doesn’t match reality. While this week’s Associated Press poll found that 70 percent of Americans—including 65 percent of Democrats—thought that President Biden should end his candidacy, a striking 57 percent of Americans—including 26 percent of Republicans and 51 percent of independents—also want Trump to exit the race.
Trump’s numbers in a race against the Democratic nominee, be it Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris, may tick up a bit in coming days. That’s predictable after a week where Americans have witnessed an assassination attempt on Trump, the selection of a vice presidential nominee, and a reasonably successful convention—as well as the apparent unraveling of Biden’s reelection bid.
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But the fundamentals of the 2024 race were not changed by Trump’s address on Thursday night. The promise of a new message for his third campaign went unmet.
To win in November, Trump needs more than the support of the party loyalists who literally attached bandages to their ears in order to mimic the look of the former president, whose upper ear was injured in the assassination attempt. (“The ears are the bloodiest part,” Trump informed his audience on Thursday.)
In this deeply divided country, it will require an absolutely united Republican Party outside the convention hall, as well as the overwhelming support of independents who have traditionally leaned Republican. Yet Trump’s retread message is unlikely to wow the doubters who cast unexpectedly high numbers of votes for Haley when she was in the race, and even after she left it. And the longtime Republicans who might draw those swing voters into the fold— the Ryans and Mitt Romneys and Cindy McCains—were far from the convention hall in Milwaukee. They won’t show up for him on the campaign trail this fall. In fact, some of the most prominent of their number will very probably hit the trail for the Democratic ticket.
Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican rising star from Illinois, warns that Trump would “hurt anyone or anything in pursuit of power.” Kinzinger endorsed Biden weeks ago, and would almost certainly back a Harris-led ticket.
Losing Republicans like Kinzinger and Ryan, who now dismisses Trump as an “authoritarian narcissist” rather than a “conservative” and who promises to write in an alternative candidate, is a serious matter. These aren’t Never Trump adventurers who jumped off the Trump train before the 2016 election and never got back on. These are people who once campaigned for Trump and were critical to his success in the only partisan race he ever won.
The Republican Party that made Trump the president in 2016 is gone. It has been replaced over the past eight years by the Party of Trump that was on display in Milwaukee Fiserv Forum this week.
While the former president succeeded in uniting a convention, he did not unite a nation. He did not quell concerns about his extremist record on everything from abortion to cutting taxes for the rich. And his announcing, “The leader of the United Auto Workers should be fired immediately,” isn’t likely to garner much favor with workers who have come to recognize UAW President Shawn Fain as a determined. and strikingly successful champion of their interests.
Nor will Trump’s tepid and unsteady appeals to vague notions of unity be sufficient to cause Americans to forget the chaos and conflict that were associated with his presidency. Smooth words on a Thursday night in Milwaukee won’t calm those who are concerned by Trump’s recent talk of governing as a dictator, or diminish the threat posed by the Project 2025 scheme to remake the federal government in Trump’s image, and as a plaything for the plutocrats of Wall Street.
Trump did his victory lap this week. But the convention is now done, and the campaign—as confusing and uncertain and unwritten as it may remain—is on. It will not be easy for either party. Democrats are in for plenty of highs and lows. But it is absurd to suggest that Trump’s opposition lacks the openings it will need to win.
Beating Trump won’t be any easier than it was in 2020. But Democrats are better positioned than the pundits will tell you to run against the man and what has become of the Republican Party— because, while the GOP is now a cult of personality, the United States is not.
John NicholsTwitterJohn Nichols is the executive editor of The Nation. He previously served as the magazine’s national affairs correspondent and Washington correspondent. Nichols has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.