What Went Down During President Trump’s Closing Speech At The RNC

Although there’s polling evidence that the protests are becoming less popular, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily smart for Trump to spend a lot of time talking about them. In fact — given how poor people think his handling of the protests has been — it’s possible that they’re becoming less popular because Trump has been talking about them less. I had a longer version of this take in a Twitter thread this morning:

I saw little in here to shake up the race. Trump hit on very familiar themes and used his speech to excoriate Biden and Biden’s policies as though Biden were the incumbent and Trump were the scrappy challenger.

Trump’s speech was pretty perfunctory and included a lot of the usual things you’d expect an incumbent to brag about. It wasn’t the style of delivery he is best at, though — although he did some ad libbing, he mostly read off the teleprompter. It won’t really matter because people only watch the final hour of these things (which was all Trump), but I actually thought the rest of the night was the most effective night of the RNC by far. There were several emotional speeches, such as Ann Dorn’s, and several very rousing patriotic videos. It was the most coherent theme (“Land of Greatness”) of the week.