Trump ditches unity for ‘remarkably dishonest acceptance speech’

So much for uniting people.

Going into Donald Trump’s speech accepting his party’s nomination at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Thursday, all of the reporting indicated that, having survived an assassination attempt on Saturday, the former president was a changed man, one who would use his words to heal the nation.

And he did. For a little while.

What started out as a more somber, sober speech in which Trump mentioned unity and compellingly related the attack on his life devolved into a long, rambling series of the usual lies and confusion, including election denial — kind of like a slightly muted version of one of his rallies.

It was fascinating TV, until it wasn’t. After a while, it was boring TV, an endurance test for anyone but the truest believers. It turned into a slog. At least for those watching on TV.

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Trump’s acceptance speech was the longest in modern American history

“In the room, it was messianic,” Nicole Wallace said on MSNBC. “People were crying, they loved it.”

“At the beginning they loved it,” Rachel Maddow said.

Trump spoke for 1 hour and 32 minutes, the longest acceptance speech in modern American history, reportedly about half of it extemporaneous.

It was easy to tell which part.

As Jake Tapper put it, “He started off with what we were told was the new tone of unity … but then — and I hope this doesn’t sound harsh — then it just became the kind of speech we generally hear from Donald Trump at rallies where he went off script and riffed and ad-libbed.” It was, Tapper said, “Very much the same Donald Trump that we are used to.”

Or, as Chris Wallace put it on CNN, the speech was the best thing that’s happened to Democrats in three weeks.

It didn’t start out that way. By far the most riveting part of the speech was Trump saying he would only tell this story once, going into detail about the attempt on his life. He seemed humbled, and the effect on the crowd was clear.

It didn’t last.

Soon, Trump was rambling about “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and “this horrible, horrible administration that we have right now.”

Trump again lied about the 2020 election

Trump mentioned President Joe Biden, then said he would only mention him once, and immediately mentioned him again. Of course, Trump couldn’t resist making false claims about the 2020 election.

“And then we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again,” he said. “The election result. We’re never going to let that happen again. They used COVID to cheat.”

For the umpteenth time, there is no evidence of cheating in the 2020 election.

If you’re all in on Trump, then it was just another night at the office, I suppose. Maybe that’s why, on Fox News, Martha MacCallum talked about the Trump family gathered on the stage as balloons fell and sounded positively inspired.

“This is the moment his opponents have tried to take away from him every which way they possibly could,” she said.

Not to be outdone, Bret Baier said, “I tell you, there were a lot of lines in here about unity, about bringing the country together, about trying to bring all sides of this country together.”

There were also a lot of lies.

“It was a remarkably long acceptance speech and a remarkably dishonest acceptance speech,” Daniel Dale, CNN’s fact-checker said, noting at least 22 false claims.

Maybe Baier and MacCallum stopped watching after the assassination attempt part. (They didn’t; Baier, too, noted that it “felt at the end like one of his campaign rally speeches.”)

What now? Reports say Biden might drop out of the race, maybe as early as this weekend. Who knows what will happen there. But everything has an impact, and Trump’s performance might. Though Wallace on MSNBC doubted it.

“If you’re wondering what impact this has on a viewing audience, you have to wonder how much of it the viewing audience stayed through,” she said. “It was longer than modern baseball games with the new pitch clock.”

In short, everything’s a mess, and will probably remain so for a while. Some things never change.

‘Catastrophic’:How Fox News and CNN covered Trump rally shooting

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. X: @goodyk. Subscribe to the weekly movies newsletter.