Washington, July 19: From a media perspective, Donald Trump failed to stick the landing at the Republican convention that nominated him as its presidential candidate for a third time.
His acceptance speech, which exceeded 90 minutes and stretched past midnight Eastern time into Friday, won him wide praise for its vivid recounting of last weekend’s assassination attempt yet switched gears into something resembling what most of his supporters see regularly on the campaign trail.
“The ‘new’ Donald Trump soothed and silenced the nation for 28 minutes last night,” Axios’ Zachary Basu wrote on Friday. “Then the old Trump returned and bellowed, barked and bored America for 64 minutes more.”
The convention was received as a well-run display of unity surrounding the Republican ticket of Trump and vice presidential candidate JD Vance. Conservative media figure Tucker Carlson may be biased — he spoke from the convention stage on Thursday — but he was giddy and giggly about what he had seen. “I’ve never been to a more fun convention or a convention with better vibes,” he said.
Trump began in subdued tones as he talked about a bullet slamming into his ear at a political rally in Pennsylvania. He indulged in dramatic political theater: walking over to kiss the helmet on a displayed uniform of retired firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was killed by the assassin’s bullet intended for the former president.
Trump’s speech had been billed as a call to unity where President Joe Biden’s name wasn’t going to be mentioned, but instead the Democrat’s name came up twice after Trump switched gears. Vanity Fair said the address “gave America whiplash.”
NBC News reporter Garrett Haake, stationed on the convention floor, reported that “in the first half I saw a lot of wet eyes. In the second half I saw a lot of closed eyes.”
The New York Times said in a headline Friday that Trump had struggled to turn the page on “American carnage,” the attention-getting phrase from his 2017 inaugural as president. “On the last night of the GOP convention on Thursday, Donald J. Trump promised to bridge political divides, and then returned to delighting in deepening them.”
Similarly, the Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey wrote that Trump had wrapped “a fresh gesture toward unity around the same dark view of American decline and loathing for political opponents and immigrants that have defined his nine-year political career and transformed the GOP.”
