Here’s How Long Trump’s Insanely Boring RNC Speech Lasted

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 fearmongering 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 fearmongering, blaming immigrants for any and all of the country’s ills, when he decided to name-drop the thirty-fourth 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.

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 race.

The main points of the speech emphasize the importance of saving America and democracy, and insist that to do that, the Democrats must win. But for that to happen, Democrats need to reclaim the confidence of the American people.

The speech would maintain Biden’s position that he thinks he could still succeed in beating Trump in November, but concede that Americans desire a candidate who is younger than Biden or Trump. Biden would declare that for that reason, he has decided to leave the ticket and pass the torch to the next generation.

The speech would also have Biden pledge his support for a cease-fire in Gaza and promise to back the Democratic candidate. Notably, the speech does not have him hand over his candidacy to a specific politician, such as Vice President Kamala Harris. It also gently sidesteps the widespread criticisms of Biden’s disastrous debate performance and questions about his mental acuity.

Biden has been faced with calls from top Democrats to reconsider his candidacy in the race against Donald Trump, as well as frozen funds from several major donors who have decided to pause their six-figure contributions until Biden chooses to step down from the ticket.

While Biden has made no indication that he intends to withdraw, it’s been reported that he has grown “more receptive” to criticisms and is doing some serious “soul searching” about his candidacy.

In the past 36 hours alone, several sources have leaked that the president has had some tough conversations with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who have all urged him to reconsider his candidacy for the sake of the Democratic Party. Former President Barack Obama reportedly told his allies that he feels similarly. Meanwhile, Representatives Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin have both publicly called for Biden to take his leave from the presidential race.

The pressure is mounting against the presumptive Democratic nominee, a title that, for now, should be regularly followed with a question mark.

Another top Democrat has called on President Joe Biden to exit the presidential race, marking the fourth instance this week that news has broken of a top lawmaker suggesting it’s the 81-year-old president’s time to bow out.

In a four-page letter sent earlier this month, Representative Jamie Raskin largely waxed poetic about Biden’s myriad accomplishments in office. But the Maryland Democrat then turned to an all-American metaphor to translate his waning competence: a tired baseball pitcher, too many innings into the game.

“There is no shame in taking a well-deserved bow to the overflowing appreciation of the crowd when your arm is tired out, and there is real danger for the team in ignoring the statistics,” Raskin wrote, likening Biden’s insistence on staying in the race to the 2003 American League Championship Series, in which Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez refused to get off the mound despite his manager’s insistence eight innings in. That decision to stay and keep throwing, despite the statistical disadvantage, cost the Red Sox the game and a spot in the World Series.

“Your situation is tricky because you are both our star pitcher and our Manager,” Raskin wrote in the letter, which was obtained Thursday by The New York Times.

“But in democracy, as you have shown us more than any prior president, you are not a Manager acting all alone; you are the co-Manager along with our great team and our great people,” he continued. “Caucus with the team, Mr. President. Hear them out. You will make the right decision.”

Behind closed doors, several other major Democrats also urged the president to hit the bench this week, including a double-whammy of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of whom reportedly made direct appeals to Biden to drop out for the good of the party. Elsewhere in the liberal ecosphere, news broke that former President Barack Obama had spoken with allies about Biden’s narrowing chances at winning the White House for a second term, and believed now was the time to act to protect Biden and his legacy.