The former president had an amazing opportunity. He failed to grasp it.

You’re reading the Prompt 2024 newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.

Donald Trump on Thursday accepted his party’s nomination for the third time — his first as an ex-president. Let’s block from our minds the image of J.D. Vance bobbing his head along to Kid Rock, if we can, and instead focus on Trump’s speech.

I’m here with two Davids whose work I very much admire — Ignatius and Von Drehle — who can help us figure out what Trump achieved, or didn’t achieve, in his speech delivered less than a week after he was nearly killed by an assassin’s bullet.

💬 💬 💬

Matt Bai: Between the three of us, we’ve seen dozens of conventions — some of which seemed shorter than Trump’s acceptance speech. I generally don’t like handing out grades, but let’s start there anyway, because I’m curious to see if we agree. How do you grade the speech and why? David Ignatius, you go first.

Advertisement

David Ignatius: I’d give him a B-plus in the first half. A C-minus for the second half which was partisan, predictable and seemed to lose even the captive convention audience.

David Von Drehle: It’s hard to know how to grade it. The first 15 minutes might have been a solid A, which is a great grade for Trump. But then it turned into something painful to endure — surely the longest acceptance speech on record. He oughta hope that most Americans will only see highlights or shut it off.

Bai: Well, I’m going to go a different way and give him a disappointing D, and I’ll tell you why. He had a chance tonight, I thought, coming out of the tragedy in Pennsylvania, to address his biggest weakness: his divisiveness. He had a chance to broaden his appeal considerably without losing any of his base. But he made a few noises about unity, blamed Democrats, took responsibility for nothing and then devolved into a dark and ranting rally. Just as Hillary Clinton had a chance to put Trump away in 2016 and failed, I think he squandered that same chance tonight, no matter whom his opponent ultimately is.

Advertisement

Von Drehle: It got to the point where I thought he might say: “Folks, I will stop talking if you vote for me.”

Bai: What do we think of his use of the assassination story? Moving or tacky? Hard to see Reagan doing that.

Von Drehle: He had a chance to put it away and blew it. But to put it away, he would have had to be an entirely different person.

Bai: I agree with that. Bigness is not his most obvious virtue. I thought perhaps the shooting would prompt at least a political calculation.

Von Drehle: Reagan might have used it, but in three or four sentences. Trump’s rule of rhetoric is “anything worth saying is worth saying over and over and over again.” He ruins all his good lines.

Ignatius: In the early parts of the speech, I thought he talked convincingly like a man who had narrowly escaped death. He spoke more quietly than usual, without the usual smirk or scowl. But as the speech went on, the talk of unity seemed to me to vanish into the teleprompter.

Advertisement

Bai: Mr. Ignatius, given your mastery of foreign policy, I wonder how disturbed you were by his citing Viktor Orban, at length, as a validator. Strange for an American presidential candidate, no?

Ignatius: The Orban reference was bizarre. The Hungarian........

© Washington Post