Trump Overplayed His Hand Tonight
as the saying goes, "you can have your own opinions, but you can't just make up shit."
Well, that happened.
Donald Trump just did American voters--at least the ones not under a hypnotic spell--a huge favor, by publicly demonstrating beyond all doubt what an empty suit blowhard con man he really is.
Trump could have quit the stage after 20 minutes, and gone out on a roll. But no-o. He had to give the vast viewing audience one of his unabridged stump speeches.
As with the Biden-Trump debate, I want a transcript of every last word of that stem-winder. Every false claim, every disingenuous factoid, every kitchen-sink digression, every mind-numbing rote appeal to patriotism, every expression of phony piety, every 8th grade flunkout history lesson, every fantasyland promise, every self-evident policy contradiction. If that speech had been a drinking game where the audience had to do a shot every time Trump resorted to a hyperbolic superlative- inflation under Biden, the "worst ever"; immigration across the southern border under Biden, "the worst in world history"- I'd be needing to write this tomorrow with a hangover. Maybe from a hospital bed, after a stomach pump.
It appeared to me that a sizeable part of the GOP convention audience wasn't quite ready for it, either. I might be wrong, but the crowd shots gave me the impression that at least some of them had never heard The Great Man doing his thing raw and unedited- the full banquet, the way Trump takes his act to the stage at his rallies. Not everyone in the audience appeared all that impressed, with good reason. You'd have to be a carny mark to be wowed by that performance. The guy literally does not know when to quit, even when he's ahead. He would not get off the stage. He just had to go full Snake Oil Salesman.
As Matt and Walter have already said many times, Trump's biggest political enablers have always been the Democrats, and the knee-jerk anti-Trump news media. If they hadn't already diminished their credibility so much with their panic-driven premature attacks and requirement to make him wrong on the slightest pretext, an appearance like this one would be enough to discredit Trump permanently, without any need for further comment other than elementary fact-checking. Because, wow, I've never heard anyone launch such a cascade of whopping lies and manic hyperbole from a Presidential nomination convention stage.
Amazingly, Donald Trump came off worse tonight--speaking unopposed, at the celebration of his nomination--than he did in the June 27 debate, where he had Joe Biden as a foil for the purpose of comparison and contrast. (And yes, that's how bad Biden is as the prospective Democratic Party nominee.)
If I was J. D. Vance, after having to sit through that performance, I'd hand back the VP nomination and tell Trump to find someone else. I'm not J. D. Vance, and I doubt he's going to do that. But I hope he has some inkling of what he's in for as VP to a Trump Presidency. Whatever halo he might have been granted as miracle survivor of an assassination attempt has vanished. He's the same old Donald Trump, running true to form. A self-convinced ignoramus. A confidence man.
To borrow some excerpted verbatim quotes from the article on Trump's speech by Fred Kaplan, published in Slate:
“I could stop wars with a phone call,” [Trump] said in Milwaukee. “I will end every single international crisis that the current administration has created. … I will end the devastating inflation crisis immediately. … We’ll start paying off debt and start lowering taxes even further. … 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.”
