As Donald Trump got into his stride at the Republican national convention on Thursday night, largely ad-libbing one of the longest presidential acceptance speeches in US history, the adulation among his Make America Great Again (Maga) crowd inside the hall was matched outside by a cautious sigh of relief from Democrats.
After several painful weeks of Democratic party implosion, as an ageing Joe Biden self-isolates with Covid while calls for him to step down mount relentlessly, Trump managed to give despairing Democrats something they least expected: hope. Van Jones, a former special adviser to Barack Obama, put it succinctly on CNN.
“He had the whole world in his hands. If he had stayed with that unity message, he could have caused problems, but he could not help himself.”
For the first 15 minutes Trump was on point, and had millions of prime-time American viewers where he wanted them. His right ear still bandaged, he described the attempt to kill him that he so narrowly dodged last Saturday in powerful yet subdued terms.
Was this the new, humane Trump, the contemplative and caring national unifier that Republican strategists had promised would be on stage?
But then, in a puff, it was back to business as usual. For the next hour and a quarter, old Trump was firmly in the saddle.
He dished out insults – “crazy Nancy Pelosi” – demonized undocumented immigrants – “illegal killers and criminals” – and even revived his bizarre hero worship of the “late, great Hannibal Lecter” from The Silence of the Lambs.
By the count of one factchecker, the former president committed at least 22 bold-faced lies including his equally bizarre claim that “107%” of jobs created under Biden have been taken by “illegal aliens”. (In fact, 15m jobs have been added under the Biden administration, while up to 2.5 million undocumented immigrants have entered the country).
For Democrats dismayed by Trump’s lead in opinion polls, by the thought that as the survivor of an assassination attempt he is now untouchable, and by talk of a new, restrained iteration of the former president emerging, this was manna from heaven. “This was the first good thing that’s happened to Democrats in the last three weeks,” said David Axelrod, chief strategist for Obama’s presidential campaigns. “It reminded everyone why Donald Trump is fundamentally unpopular with everyone outside this room.”
Axelrod added on social media that Trump’s undisciplined address had blown what had been a strikingly controlled and well-choreographed Republican convention. The most hot-headed speakers in Milwaukee had been confined to earlier time slots where they could do less damage with daytime viewers.
Meanwhile, the prime-time roster of speakers stayed largely on message, hewing to the theme of a post-shooting national-unifying Trump.
Which promptly went up in smoke when the man himself returned to his dystopian vision of how the Democrats were “destroying our country” and pushing the world to the “edge of World War III”.
Seasoned political observers could sense how Trump’s speech was stiffening Democrats’ spines in real time. Ezra Klein, a prominent New York Times columnist and podcaster, noted on X that “no Democrat watching that speech thought Trump unbeatable”.
The rightwing editor of the Free Press, Bari Weiss, said that before Trump’s acceptance speech the consensus was a Trump landslide. After it? “Now it’s like find a Dem with a pulse who can read a teleprompter and like: toss up!”
None of this means that the Democrats are out of the woods. Far from it. It is quite possible that a catastrophic descent into chaos and acrimony over Biden and who might replace him has only just begun.
The Trump campaign will also have good material to work with from those first 15 minutes of the speech as they carve up online-friendly snippets for widespread dissemination to the American public. Far more voters are likely to consume these bite-sized packages, with Trump talking emotionally about the attack – “I’m supposed to be dead” – or about unity, than will have slogged through the entire 90-minute screed.
What has changed though was the sense that had been gripping a growing proportion of Democrats that it was already game over. All that remained to be decided was whether to emigrate to Canada or Portugal.
Now even some Republicans are fretting about a possible change of leadership at the top of the Democratic party. The governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, told Politico that if a switch from Biden happened, “everything would change”.
It would energise the party, Sununu said. Independent voters would reward the Democrats, saying: “‘Hey, none of us liked that whole Biden-Trump ticket to start with. You guys had the courage to change your nominee out,’” Sununu said.
Some commentators are of the view that the fresh shoot of optimism that some Democrats felt after Trump’s acceptance speech might in itself encourage a push to get Biden to step aside. As Klein put it, “the best argument against the party replacing Biden was fatalism; if you’ll lose anyway, may as well lose conventionally”.
Now that the new Trump has morphed back into the old Trump, that logic no longer applied. His acceptance speech, Klein said, “was an antidote to fatalism”.
