Opinion | Trump Derailed His Own Convention Speech

It began with as intensely personal an account as any presidential nominee has ever delivered — a step-by-step retelling of his near-death experience. And as soon as that narrative ended, it became… a Trump rally speech, with the prepared text delivered in a monotone worthy of a bus driver’s announcement, interrupted by lengthy ad lib riffs, jokes, shout-outs and a litany of “never seen anything like it” and “like never before.”

Even after what for anyone would be a life-changing experience, Trump remained Trump.

Some Republican allies had claimed he had become a changed man after the assassination attempt. The Trump campaign promised a convention that promoted unity. Trump himself said he ripped up his original speech and that he wouldn’t even mention by name his opponent President Joe Biden. None of it was true; Trump couldn’t help himself, not completely.

The convention address didn’t start out that way.

In the riveting opening of his speech, Trump told a personal story infinitely more compelling than those of other most presidential candidates. Once upon a time, in fact, personal recollections were far from the norm.

Dwight Eisenhower did not spent long minutes narrating his feelings on the night before D-Day. John Kennedy did not recount the hours of fighting for his and his fellow sailors’ lives in the Solomon Islands. When Ronald Reagan recovered from an assassination attempt in 1981, he referred only glancingly to his shooting in an address to Congress, reading a letter from a child hoping that he would not have to “make a speech in your pajamas.”

Now it has become routine for candidates to offer a life story and open up a little. George H.W. Bush discussed his move to Texas and Bill Clinton told us, “I never knew my father.” George W. Bush spoke of his experiences sitting down with youthful offenders, while Barack Obama linked his biography to an “only in America” theme.

In Trump’s case, the attack just days before the convention, and the narrowness of his escape, made it by far the most powerful of any such account.

But more significant, that shooting had no impact at all on the remainder of his meandering and occasionally bizarre speech. Except for one statement that “we must not demonize political disagreements” — a hilarious assertion coming from someone who has urged a military tribunal for one critic and an execution for another, and for whom terms like “vermin” for his enemies are par for the course — the rest of his speech did not reflect a single authentic note of reflection, not a hint that he had given a moment’s thought to a wider, more profound message for the American people. He blasted Biden by name, if just once, and called former Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy.”

His convention speech was another example of Trump’s belief — justified to be sure, at least as his followers are concerned — that anything he says, any off-the-wall observation, any “alternative fact,” will be met with rapturous cheers. This was true for both the hits from previous campaigns, like his assault on other nations as grifters and “plunderers,” as well as more recent messages, like his demand to end the criminal cases against him. He is delighted to recount poll numbers, conversations with a waitress (who explains that tips are not given in cash anymore) and anything that redounds to the self-image of the smartest man in the world.

The speech, all 90-plus minutes of it, was a lesson to all the talking heads who were seeing in Trump’s demeanor a sense of humility, serenity, a newfound sense of life’s meaning.

Maybe we should have known when he came out in front of a huge electric sign with “TRUMP” lighting up the hall. Even a near-death experience did not change a lifetime of self-aggrandizement.

Trump remains Trump.

For a battered, demoralized Democratic Party, that may be the one piece of good news this week.