It appears that not everyone at the Republican National Convention was loving Donald Trump’s nomination acceptance speech Thursday night. What began as an intense retelling of Trump’s attempted assassination at a rally on Saturday gradually devolved into the same meandering, anti-immigration fear-mongering Trump has touted throughout his campaign.
Dispatches on X, formerly Twitter, from within Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum said that Trump had a little trouble holding the crowd’s attention, as his speech stretched to one hour and 32 minutes, the longest nomination acceptance speech on record.
“People starting to leave. Loud chattering on fringes of the arena,” wrote Edward Luce, an associate editor at the Financial Times, who weighed in a little over an hour into Trump’s speech. “Trump is boring the audience.”
Around the same time, The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta wrote that even in the middle of the crowd, people were growing impatient. “I’m standing 10 feet from the stage, in a sea of diehards, and some are getting restless. Checking phones, stealing glances at the teleprompter, whispering about when it will be over,” he posted.
Wajahat Ali, a columnist for The Daily Beast, wrote that there were “a lot of concerned faces in the RNC crowd right now.”
“Definitely a different energy from an hour ago. I think some people are going, ‘Uh...what’s happening,’” he said.
While the energy in the room started high, with a wild appearance from Hulk Hogan and a weird rap performance from Kid Rock, Trump couldn’t keep the excitement alive as he worked his way through all the same beats as ever, sounding a bit more subdued than in his typical rants.
