Was That the Worst Convention Speech of All Time?

It was certainly the longest and the least tethered to reality -- and showed that Trump, an elderly man in decline, is unfit for the presidency.

I hope that you were not, like me, required to watch Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night (and into Friday morning), and were instead doing something more enjoyable: Going out with friends, sleeping soundly, driving hot fireplace pokers into your eyes, literally anything. The former president rambled on for more than 90 minutes in a speech that was incoherent, wildly digressive, and often bizarre without being at all entertaining.

Anyone who managed to stay awake for the whole speech could only draw one conclusion: This is not a well man, and this is not a man fit for the presidency.

Donald Trump has never been a coherent or linear speaker, and during his 2016 campaign there was much speculation about how mental acuity and cognitive health, not to mention the smattering of personality disorders he appears to live with. But then he won, and he held office for four years, and when he ran again in 2020 his flaws were familiar and so didn’t garner as many headlines — “Donald Trump still an unhinged maniac” wasn’t exactly new, and so it didn’t make the news.

But now we’ve had a four-year-old break from Trumpism, and when the former president reemerged on stage at the RNC, he exhibited all of his previous flaws, plus a marked decline: He was slower, even less coherent, less connected to the crowd, less tethered to reality. It’s hard to overstate just how bad his speech was. If Joe Biden gave a speech that colossally disjointed and tortuously boring, the headlines tomorrow morning would all be about just how severely he has deteriorated — and how Democrats are crazy for running him.

Trump is an elderly man in decline. He has always been a narcissist, the kind of guy who will ramble on and on because no one in his life has ever told him no. Eight years ago he made clear he was living in his own reality, and has long put forward his own facts and his own version of the truth, all of which is pretty well divorced from the reality in which the rest of us live. This in and of itself should be disqualifying. For most Republicans, though, it was not. Eight years ago, Trump was exciting. He stuck it to the establishment. He was actually very funny (I know someone will get mad at me for saying that, but the guy — and especially his crude insults — is not exactly crafting sophisticated comedy, but he is funny). He was, as has been observed many times over, the Id of conservative America, willing to cast “compassionate conservatism” aside for something more muscular and aggressive. He gave an angry, coarse base permission to hate immigrants, hate feminists, hate racial justice activists, hate the coastal elite (except for Trump himself), hate all of the people who don’t look like them or think like them and who had in recent decades challenged their position at the top of the social and economic hierarchies. At the time, this was all very fresh and new. To people like me, it was shocking and appalling. But a lot of American voters do not see the world the way I do.

Those same Americans, though, have heard this song-and-dance before. The same way that Trump’s insanity doesn’t garner headlines because it’s old news, Trump himself may be less magnetic because it’s also familiar — and now aped by so many Republican politicians.

All of this is to say that Trump is far from invincible. He is, by any reasonable measure, a weak candidate. His RNC speech made clear just how weak he is — and how much weaker he has gotten since 2020. And with the right candidate opposing him, Democrats can make clear just how mentally unfit he is to run the country.

Trump is surrounded by yes men in a movement more akin to a cult than anything else. These people will stand by him. They will deny the obvious reality in front of their faces. That can be beneficial: They can flood social media with heavily-edited videos and insist that their invented narrative is the truth; that may persuade some voters.

But Democrats’ broader (although far from universal) refusal to deny the reality in front of them is a strength, too. It means Democrats can pivot and adjust. This, in the worst-case scenario, can result in chaos. But it can also mean getting off of a path that only leads us over an obvious cliff. Elections are not won only by turning out the most engaged and dedicated portion of your base. Right now, I fear that’s what both parties are banking on: Republicans are hoping MAGA loyalists will propel a clearly declining candidate across the finish line, while Democrats are hoping their voters see that the stakes are high enough that they would vote for the corpse of FDR over Donald Trump.

Trump’s biggest fans are also either delusional or dishonest, and I doubt they will admit that his speech was an abject disaster. But the rest of us should say exactly what we see: A man who is simply not cognitively, emotionally, or temperamentally equipped to sit in the Oval Office.

xx Jill