It appears that not everyone at the Republican National Convention was loving Donald Trump’s nomination acceptance speech Thursday night. What began as an intense retelling of Trump’s attempted assassination at a rally on Saturday gradually devolved into the same meandering, anti-immigration fear-mongering Trump has touted throughout his campaign.

Dispatches on X, formerly Twitter, from within Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum said that Trump had a little trouble holding the crowd’s attention, as his speech stretched to one hour and 32 minutes, the longest nomination acceptance speech on record.

“People starting to leave. Loud chattering on fringes of the arena,” wrote Edward Luce, an associate editor at the Financial Times, who weighed in a little over an hour into Trump’s speech. “Trump is boring the audience.”

Around the same time, The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta wrote that even in the middle of the crowd, people were growing impatient. “I’m standing 10 feet from the stage, in a sea of diehards, and some are getting restless. Checking phones, stealing glances at the teleprompter, whispering about when it will be over,” he posted.

Wajahat Ali, a columnist for The Daily Beast, wrote that there were “a lot of concerned faces in the RNC crowd right now.”

“Definitely a different energy from an hour ago. I think some people are going, ‘Uh...what’s happening,’” he said.

While the energy in the room started high, with a wild appearance from Hulk Hogan and a weird rap performance from Kid Rock, Trump couldn’t keep the excitement alive as he worked his way through all the same beats as ever, sounding a bit more subdued than in his typical rants.

Donald Trump promised a massive deportation plan Thursday night, even larger than the biggest mass deportation in U.S. history: President Dwight Eisenhower’s racist-named “Operation Wetback.”

The former president was doing his typical fear-mongering, blaming immigrants for any and all of the country’s ills, when he decided to name drop the 34th U.S. president.

“And bad things are gonna happen, and you’re gonna see it happen all the time,” said Trump. “And that’s why the Republican platform promises to launch the biggest deportation operation in the history of our country. Even larger than that of Dwight D. Eisenhower, from many years ago.”

Under that program, which was implemented “many years ago” in 1954, U.S. authorities employed military-style tactics to deport around 1.3 million Mexican immigrants, some of whom had been naturalized. The government packed people into trucks en masse, and shipped them to locations without food and water, resulting in many unnecessary deaths.

During Trump’s speech Thursday on the final night of the Republican National Convention, he continued to baselessly claim that countries around the world were sending people from their prisons and mental institutions to the United States.

The former president also claimed that illegal immigrants were responsible for taking all the American jobs… even faster than they could possibly be created it seems?

“Today our cities are flooded with illegal aliens. Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken. By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens,” he said, claiming they were taking the jobs from Black and Hispanic Americans, as well as unions.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that Democrats used the Covid-19 pandemic to cheat during the last presidential election.

During his speech Thursday at the Republican National Convention, Trump made a strange claim while talking about a failed deal he’d tried to make with Iran, ahead of the 2020 election.

“Iran was gonna make a deal with us, and then we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again. The election result, we’re never gonna let that happen again,” he said.

“They used Covid to cheat. We’re never gonna let it happen again,” Trump insisted, a strange shift in his election denialism.

Trump on the 2020 election: "We had that horrible, horrible result that we'll never let happen. The election results, we're never gonna let that happen again." pic.twitter.com/G5EYdBFoO4

Of course, Trump has been a broken record when it comes to believing he was cheated out of the White House. Earlier in his speech, Trump remarked that the Biden administration wasn’t “fierce” except for “cheating on elections, and a couple of other things.” But suggesting that Democrats had taken advantage of the deadly Covid-19 virus is a uniquely untethered claim, though it’s not totally clear how that would be even possible.

Earlier on Thursday, Lara Trump suggested that the former president had learned to embrace mail-in voting, a tactic pushed by Democrats in the previous election for the sake of public health. At the time, Trump heavily (and falsely) criticized the tactic as being rife with fraud.

A top West Coast Democratic donor has reportedly drafted and begun circulating a seven-step swan song for President Joe Biden.

The “victory speech,” which was obtained Thursday by The Daily Beast, contains seven bullet points for Biden to use, should he decide to withdraw from the presidential........

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