Trump goes for Biden’s jugular in convention speech

President Donald J. Trump just gave an impressive and unprecedented State of the Union address from the lawn of the White House…oh wait, it was his 2020 Republication nomination speech. It just felt like a quasi-imperial event.

The address was long, too long for an acceptance speech — coming in at 6,000 words, it took more than an hour. Trump just always has to dwell on all his achievements. ‘I say very modestly that I have done more for the African-American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president,’ he said. That really is his idea of modesty.

The President hasn’t changed much after three and a half years in office. But he’s got much better at reading from a teleprompter, even as he still can’t resist the extemporaneous comic flourishes (‘I took on Big Pharma… you think that’s easy, it’s not’).

The speech lacked some of the wild energy of his campaign rallies, which led even some Fox News analysts to call it ‘flat’, but it also had many strong moments.