Donald Trump’s campaign spent the better part of four days promising a changed Trump – a more solemn, thoughtful man, whose politics were forever altered by a would-be assassin’s bullet.
That image was shattered over 93 minutes on Thursday night.
The ex-president spoke to delegates on the final night of the 2024 Republican National Convention as he accepted his party’s nomination for president for a third time. His speech, which trailed off the prepared remarks on the teleprompter at multiple points, was somehow both monotonous – as he waffled on the promised call for “unity” – and angry.
“As Americans, we are bound together by things that are shared – we rise together or we fall apart. I am running to be president for all of America. Not half,” Trump said, shortly after coming onstage.
That was roughly the end of the olive branches for the evening. The rest of the speech revolved around the enemies who have been in his sights since he first announced a run for president in 2015.
On the list: Democrats, who he accused of using the pandemic to “cheat” by expanding mail-in voter eligibility. Immigrants, too, received the same kind of targeting as they were subjected to in his first-ever campaign speech, when he called them “killers” and “rapists”.
“In El Salvador, murders are down by 70 per cent. Why are they down? Now [president Nayib Bukele] would have you convinced that it’s because he’s trained murderers to be wonderful people. No. They’re down because they’re sending their murderers to the United States of America,” the ex-president claimed last night.
He has frequently made this assertion, that Central and South American countries are “sending” migrants, including alleged criminals, to the US. There’s no evidence that’s ever been true.
The image of unity wasn’t the only one Trump publicly played with then abandoned on Thursday.
Just a day after his vice presidential nominee JD Vance projected his own veneer of pro-labor sentiment on the RNC stage, vowing to take on Wall Street and corporate greed, and two days after the president of the international Teamsters union became the first such organized labor leader to speak at the RNC, Trump took a broad swipe at another union, the United Auto Workers. Vance had joined its members on a picket line just last year.
“The United Auto Workers ought to be ashamed for allowing this to happen,” Trump said, referring to auto plants owned by American companies being set up overseas.
“[T]he leader of the United Auto Workers should be fired immediately, and every single auto worker – union and non-union – should be voting for Donald Trump, because we’re going to bring back car manufacturing, and we’re going to bring it back fast,” he added.
Camera footage of the crowd during Trump’s rambling, hour-and-a-half-long speech showed delegates growing visibly tired by the end, with some checking their phones and zoning out.
Reacting to the speech as it ended, a former adviser to Obama said the bizarre, boring speech was “the first good thing to happen to Democrats in weeks”.