Donald Trump lays an egg
Yesterday I wrote that I still expect Donald Trump to lose the election. Why? Because he’s still Donald Trump. He’s still the unhinged and unraveling senile blob that he’s been in his last hundred rally appearances. No one outside his base watched those rallies. But put that same Trump on the national stage as the election ramps up, and he was going to lay an egg. Sure enough, last night that’s what Trump did.
Trump’s Republican National Convention speech should have been a gimme for him. Last week he was shot (or shot at; he never did issue a medical report). The media was ready to paint him as a unifying and even inspiring candidate. All Trump had to do was, well, not be Trump. But he couldn’t do that.
Worse for Trump, he was a ghost of himself. For significant stretches of his speech he had a long pause after every three or four words, suggesting he was struggling to understand what was on the teleprompter. He spent the entire speech sound lifeless and half asleep. He droned on… and on… and on. He went off script at one point and praised fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter as if he were a real person. This was another Trump rally speech – and that was what Trump couldn’t afford to do.
Just how awful was this speech? Reporters who were in the crowd, even in the Trump cult sections, said that the audience was disappointed and bored. And as for the persuadable voters tuning in on television, they surely came away saying “Wait a minute, I thought the media said the other guy was senile.”
Trump couldn’t even play the sympathy card right. He once again wore a ridiculously oversized bandage on his ear, which persuadable voters watching on TV could surely figure out was unnecessary for a flesh wound a week ago. And Trump’s attempt at recounting the shooting was lifelessly devoid of any emotion, a reminder that even in his so-called “human” moments, this guy is still a sociopath.
This speech was an out and out disaster for Donald Trump. The shooting, and the media’s week long attempt at trying to force President Biden out of the race, teed things up such that Trump simply needed to seize the momentum and run with it. Instead Trump did the opposite. He laid an egg. Now let’s go win this: donate to Palmer Report via PayPal or GoFundMe.
