Opinion | Donald Trump missed his chance with his convention speech

I’m here with two Davids whose work I very much admire — Ignatius and Von Drehle — who can help us figure out what Trump achieved, or didn’t achieve, in his speech delivered less than a week after he was nearly killed by an assassin’s bullet.

Matt Bai: Between the three of us, we’ve seen dozens of conventions — some of which seemed shorter than Trump’s acceptance speech. I generally don’t like handing out grades, but let’s start there anyway, because I’m curious to see if we agree. How do you grade the speech and why? David Ignatius, you go first.

David Ignatius: I’d give him a B-plus in the first half. A C-minus for the second half which was partisan, predictable and seemed to lose even the captive convention audience.

David Von Drehle: It’s hard to know how to grade it. The first 15 minutes might have been a solid A, which is a great grade for Trump. But then it turned into something painful to endure — surely the longest acceptance speech on record. He oughta hope that most Americans will only see highlights or shut it off.

Bai: Well, I’m going to go a different way and give him a disappointing D, and I’ll tell you why. He had a chance tonight, I thought, coming out of the tragedy in Pennsylvania, to address his biggest weakness: his divisiveness. He had a chance to broaden his appeal considerably without losing any of his base. But he made a few noises about unity, blamed Democrats, took responsibility for nothing and then devolved into a dark and ranting rally. Just as Hillary Clinton had a chance to put Trump away in 2016 and failed, I think he squandered that same chance tonight, no matter who his opponent ultimately is.

Von Drehle: It got to the point where I thought he might say: “Folks, I will stop talking if you vote for me.”

Bai: What do we think of his use of the assassination story? Moving or tacky? Hard to see Reagan doing that.

Von Drehle: He had a chance to put it away and blew it. But to put it away, he would have had to be an entirely different person.

Bai: I agree with that. Bigness is not his most obvious virtue. I thought perhaps the shooting would prompt at least a political calculation.

Von Drehle: Reagan might have used it, but in three or four sentences. Trump’s rule of rhetoric is “anything worth saying is worth saying over and over and over again.” He ruins all his good lines.

Ignatius: In the early parts of the speech, I thought he talked convincingly like a man who had narrowly escaped death. He spoke more quietly than usual, without the usual smirk or scowl. But as the speech went on, the talk of unity seemed to me to vanish into the teleprompter.

Bai: Mr. Ignatius, given your mastery of foreign policy, I wonder how disturbed you were by his citing Viktor Orban, at length, as a validator. Strange for an American presidential candidate, no?

Ignatius: The Orban reference was bizarre. The Hungarian leader’s chief virtue seems to have been that he came to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Trump made a gratuitous attack on President Biden, accusing him of causing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as if Vladimir Putin and Hamas were not among the great villains of our age. He talked about how he would end a “planet of war” but never said a word of useful specifics.

Bai: I think it’s also hard to discuss this speech without at least mentioning the exaggerations and untruths littered throughout, although we’ve grown almost inured to them. This is the worst inflation the country has ever seen? Not even close. Anything strike you as especially egregious?

Von Drehle: It was news that he was somehow going to keep the Bagram air base after negotiating the U.S. surrender to the Taliban. Yeah? How was that going to work? I grant the Biden administration made a mess of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the decision to pull out without a plan was entirely Trump’s.

Ignatius: As the speech wore on, and Trump rambled through his pet peeves, I began thinking: This man is very beatable. Maybe not by someone named Biden (or Harris). But tonight, Superman didn’t seem to have his cape.

Bai: I agree. He is not an electoral behemoth — far from it. Shame on the party that can’t capitalize. Also, I found the religious imagery — both in the convention generally and in the first part of the speech — to be somewhat unsettling. The assassination attempt seems to have given rise to an almost overt worship of Trump as a Christ-like figure, with the ear gauze as a kind of crucifix. There were almost constant references to his being an instrument of God.

Von Drehle: The “saved by God’s grace” did not bother me. Although a better speech would grapple with the question of where this grace was for the three people seriously wounded, one fatally.

Ignatius: Anyone who survives an assassination attempt gets to invoke God.

Von Drehle: Exactly right, David.

Bai: Yeah, I suppose that’s fair — he was incredibly lucky, as was the country. But to me, there was a level of worship at this convention, with that story at its core, that felt more religious than political, and unusual for any party convention.

Von Drehle: The missed opportunity was to say what he feels saved to do. Did God spare him to talk aimlessly about how strong Hulk Hogan is? To brag about how he redesigned the prow on a Navy ship? To tell us that his dad liked evangelist Billy Graham?

Ignatius: He seemed to be saying at the beginning that he was “saved” to unify the county. But as the speech continued, the rhetoric became poisonous.

Bai: Yes, that ties it all together nicely for me — well said. It’s fine to feel divinely favored and grateful. But to what end? He had an opportunity to do something more profound with that, and win an election at the same time. But as you say, that’s not who he is.

Ignatius: The interesting thing to me about the speech was that Trump was at once the reformed man, who has seen the light of unity, and in the next moment the backslider who couldn’t escape his addiction to trivial partisanship.

Bai: Yes, I think the reform part was overhyped and not really in the speech. And Democrats should breathe a sigh of relief at that. Because no idea in American politics is more attractive right now, or has been for many years now, than reform. Trump has always had the capacity to own that, as an outsider, but he’s just more of a culture warrior at heart.

Von Drehle: For folks who fear a Trump tyranny, tonight was a great reminder that the man lacks the self-discipline to get big stuff done.

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