On Thursday, July 18, I felt more hopeful than I have in months about the future of this country. Actually, I should say on Friday, July 19, because Donald Trump’s horrible 93-minute speech—which literally put some Trump-loving delegates to sleep—didn’t end until after midnight.
Trump shattered his own record—76 minutes—for the longest acceptance speech in the history of conventions. He made Fidel Castro look like e.e. Cummings.
But the length was the least of it. Trump had a good thing going in the first 25 minutes or so. His story of the shooting was vivid and gripping, though I didn’t believe him when he said it’s the last time he’ll tell it. I didn’t like him kissing the dead man’s helmet, but I had to concede that it was a moving moment.
If Trump had stopped there—with “The discord and division must be healed,”; “We rise together, or we fall apart”; and “There is no victory in winning for half of America”—he would have been in tune with his well-managed convention and in a commanding position to win the election and destroy America.
But just then, God intervened and sent Trump back to his petty, divisive, and no longer entertaining rally speech. It might be red meat for the base, but the independent women in the suburbs who have abandoned Biden and tuned in to see if they could stomach Trump, um, they don’t actually like red meat that much. If they aren’t vegetarians, they aren’t caveman carnivores, either. They remember that Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked, too, and didn’t have a lot of use for “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” “witch hunts,” “DeFace the Nation,” “the late great Hannibal Lecter,” and Trump’s other moldy oldies.
Voters who aren’t worried about threats to democracy have to ask themselves if they’re cool with chaos. Do they want to see Trump’s mug for another four years at State of the Union addresses? Do they want to see the leader of the United Auto Workers “fired immediately”? Do they want to ban all Chinese imports into the United States, including a lot of the clothes they wear and appliances they use? (And pay more than $2,000 a year for his trade policy?) Do they believe that “there has never been an invasion like this” at the border? My own sense is that swing voters might be quite open to the argument that Trump had a chance to join with Joe Biden and conservative senators to actually address the problem and backed out for crass political reasons.
Trump is so undisciplined that he couldn’t help slamming Biden after he promised everyone he wouldn’t, and he knows perfectly well that Biden is unlikely to be his opponent. “If you took the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States, they will not have done the damage that Biden has done,” said the man whom historians unanimously rated the worst president since the founding of the republic—behind James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson.
About 40 minutes in, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. It had been a good day, as the leadership of the Democratic Party moved en masse against Biden staying in the race.
By 75 minutes in, with another 20 to go (Yay! I wanted him to go for three or four hours), I was thinking that if Democrats can get it together and make this a campaign about the future, they can win comfortably and put the horrifying Trump Era in the rearview mirror.
For those of you like my wife, Emily, who could not bear to watch—yes, Trump’s speech was that bad—it essentially broke the spell that his near-assassination had cast. It’s true that the iconic bloody photograph will continue to have power, and the raised fist and defiant “Fight! Fight! Fight!” chants—however fascistic to my ears—will help whip up enthusiasm in the Trump base.
But the effect will wear off. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in Milwaukee, just a mile from where the GOP Convention took place. The assassin’s bullet went through Roosevelt’s eyeglass case and the text of a 50-page speech (TR was long-winded, too, but not as bad as Trump) and lodged in his chest. Because he didn’t cough up blood, the former president finished his speech before receiving medical attention.
Roosevelt, too, was attempting a comeback four years after he left the presidency—in his case, voluntarily. He was the popular candidate of the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party, and many of his supporters believed his life had been spared by divine providence.
Here’s how the story ends: The shooting took place less than three weeks before the election. By the time Americans went to the polls, it was old news, and Roosevelt finished 14 points behind the winner, Woodrow Wilson.
The reason I have a spring in my step is that I believe Kamala Harris, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Witmer, or just about anyone else can whip Donald Trump in November. He’s old, nutty, and has no ideas for the country. Thank God.
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