Did the Media Actually Listen to Trump’s Bonkers RNC Speech?

Donald Trump promised a nomination acceptance speech that would “bring the country together” in the wake of his attempted assassination, but the meandering rant he delivered on Thursday night missed the mark by a long shot. It doesn’t appear that everyone got the memo, though, as some publications proceeded to publish glowing reviews of the former president’s supposed pledge for unity.  

To be fair, Trump’s speech started off sounding more controlled, as he delivered remarks as written on the teleprompter. “The discord and division in our society must be healed, we must heal it quickly. We are bound together by a single fate, a single destiny,” Trump said. “We rise together. Or we fall apart.”

“I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America. So tonight, with faith and devotion, I proudly accept your nomination for president of the United States.”

Of course, this was within the first 10 minutes of the former president’s speech—the rest of his address was a severe departure, as he used a pledge for unity to further create a wedge between Democrats and Republicans, claiming that his party was just way more into unity than the other guys. 

“If Democrats want to unify our country, they should drop these partisan witch hunts—which I have been going through for approximately eight years—and they should do that without delay, and allow an election to proceed that is worthy of our people,” Trump said, transforming his impassioned call for unity into just another one of his stump speeches about his many legal battles. My unity is bigger than your unity, and so on. 

Predictably, Trump spiraled off-script into the same old baseless, racist claims about immigration, crime, and election denialism, and he delivered lies about a vast array of other topics that stretched on for 90 minutes. It seems Trump’s lengthy speech may have interfered with publications rushing to get to print, as some wrote headlines that ran with just the first few beats of the speech as front page news. 

In its print edition, The Boston Globe published its story under the headline, “In a departure, Trump calls for unity, healing in America.” The Dallas Morning News published the headline “Trump emphasized unity.” Both headlines could be improved with the addition of “momentarily.”

USA Today’s Weekend Edition featured the question, “After attempt on life, can Trump unite US?” 

Writer Parker Molloy posted the covers on X, formerly Twitter, remarking that the headlines seemed to match the prepared remarks, but not the ones Trump actually delivered. Another possible explanation for their eerie break from reality. 

It’s worth noting that some of these publications supplemented their coverage online. For example, The Boston Globe provided a steady stream of updates about the speech as the night went on. But headlines—especially front page ones—are important, as they’re often the only part of a story anyone will actually read. 

The most egregious offender was the New York Post, which touted “A NEW DON” on its front page. “Trump preaches unity, vows to heal divided America in RNC speech,” read the subhead. In reality, Trump demonstrated that despite everything, he is still the same as ever: deeply divisive, and bent on winning no matter what. 

Trains and planes around the world were stalled and grounded Friday due to an international Microsoft outage during what was supposed to be a routine update from a cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike.

In what has been described as the “largest IT outage in history,” CrowdStrike’s catastrophic error fumbled every sector of the working world, from banks to hospitals, law enforcement, and McDonalds. But an update from CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, early Friday was surprisingly unapologetic and so bogged down in legalese that it was immediately read to filth by its customers.

“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” Kurtz wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

“We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website,” he continued. “We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels. Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.”

Critics quickly observed that, despite the fact that the failure likely caused millions of dollars’ worth of damages around the globe, Kurtz refused to take any modicum of blame by writing the statement entirely in customer service jargon and by aggressively dodging any word combination that precisely identified the problem, offered a solution, or simply said, “I’m sorry.”

“It comes off as cowardly and callous,” wrote former Activision Blizzard CCO Lulu Cheng Meservey. “People might have died. And the CEO is not sorry.”

Kurtz had a significantly more human—albeit still callous—update in an interview with NBC News.

“Many of the customers are rebooting the system, and it’s coming up, and it’ll be operational because we fixed it on our end,” Kurtz told the news outlet. “Some of the systems that aren’t recovering, we’re working with them. So it could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover.”

On Instagram Live early Friday morning, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discussed the ongoing debate over whether President Biden is fit to run for reelection.

Speaking for close to an hour, the New York progressive explained her support of Biden and why she thought replacing him was a bad idea.

“If you think that there is consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave ... that they will support Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Ocasio-Cortez attacked her fellow Democrats who have spoken anonymously to the press about Biden, particularly those resigned to defeat in November.

“My community does not have the option to lose,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “If they’re going to come out and say all their little things on background, off the record, but they’re not going to be fully honest, I’m going to be honest for them. I’m in these rooms. I see what they say in conversations.”

“A lot of them are not just interested in removing the president. They are interested in removing the whole ticket,” Ocasio-Cortez added.

As far as a plan for replacing Biden, Ocasio-Cortez said that whenever she has asked, she hasn’t gotten an answer.

“I have stood up in rooms with all of these people and I have said, ‘Game out your actual plan for me.’ What are the risks of this going to the Supreme Court? And no one had an answer for me.… I’m talking about the lawyers. I’m talking about the legislators,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

She noted that the convention is in less than a month, and that Michigan has to finalize their ballot two days after the convention, which could result in a legal crisis. Ocasio-Cortez said she was concerned that these factors aren’t being considered by Democrats in the replacement camp.

Recent reports say Biden dropping out of the race is increasingly likely, and could happen in a matter of days. The president appears to be strongly considering the idea after meeting with Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, and reportedly even former president Barack Obama thinks Biden needs to reconsider running. A major West Coast donor has already drafted a withdrawal speech.

Watch Ocasio-Cortez’s full remarks on Instagram Live here:

Donald Trump unleashed so many falsehoods during his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that it seemed to overwhelm CNN’s on-air fact checker. 

After Trump’s appearance Thursday night, CNN’s Daniel Dale ran through a lengthy list of Trump’s lies, having to brush past several on his list because he was running out of time to dispute each baseless claim. 

During his speech, Trump had claimed that his opponents inherited a world “at peace.”

“Trump did not achieve world peace when he was president; certainly wasn’t at peace when he left office,” Dale explained. “There were active wars or armed conflicts in dozens of nations in 2020: 51 by one research institution’s count, and then 51 again in 2021.”

“Trump handed President Biden ongoing civil wars in Yemen and Syria, of course, an unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israeli-Iranian conflict, a war in Ethiopia,” Dale explained. There were also the U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, a civil war in Somalia, insurgents fighting Africa’s Sahel region, violent clashes between drug cartels in Mexico, to name a few others, according to CNN.  

“I could go on for a while, but I don’t have time because there were so many other false claims. So let’s address some of those, not even all of them,” said Dale. He later noted that Trump falsely claimed to have defeated “100 percent of ISIS.” 

“In fact, the ISIS caliphate was declared fully liberated more than two years into his presidency,” Dale said. 

Trump “repeated his usual lie about Democrats having cheated in the 2020 election. It’s nonsense,” Dale said. During his speech, Trump offhandedly claimed that Democrats had somehow managed to use the Covid-19 pandemic to cheat in the 2020 election. 

“He said crime is going up. The opposite is true. It’s gone sharply down in 2023 and early 2024. It’s now lower than it was under Trump in 2020,” Dale said. Trump has repeatedly made claims about an increase in violent crime and tried to blame it on undocumented immigrants. 

Not only has Trump’s campaign failed to provide any evidence of a surge in crime committed by migrants, there has been no increase in violent crime to speak of. More importantly, U.S. citizens are proven to commit crimes at a higher rate than undocumented immigrants. Still, Trump falsely claimed that other countries were releasing people from prisons and mental institutions into the United States. 

Trump also “said we have the worst inflation we’ve ever had. Again, not even close. It is 3 percent right now. The U.S. record is 23.7 percent. He said there was no inflation under him. It was low, of course, but not nonexistent—it was 8 percent total for his presidency, 1.4 percent year over year in the month he left office,” Dale said.

Trump also lied about the price of groceries, according to Dale: “He said the price of groceries is up 57 percent under Biden. It’s actually 21 percent.”

Apparently, plenty of Trump’s numbers were all over the place. The former president “said Democrats are proposing to quadruple people’s taxes. That is imaginary. He said his tax cut was the largest in American history, not even close again,” Dale explained. A report from the Congressional Budget Office found that Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama had each facilitated larger tax cuts than Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. 

Much like Trump’s speech, which seemed to go on and on into eternity (it was a whopping 92 minutes), his lies continued to stack up. 

Trump claimed that the government had recently hired 88,000 IRS agents, but that number appears to be from a projection from a 2021 Treasury Department report, which predicted the agency could bring in roughly 87,000 new hires in the next decade, thanks to $80 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Trump “said the Biden administration does nothing to stop migrants. Well, the administration tried to get Congress to pass a bill to tighten the border, and after Trump himself helped to kill that bill, Biden took executive action to tighten the border.” Dale said. “Trump said he stopped human trafficking. Again, not true.”

Trump made plenty of false claims about his business dealings with China, claiming that the country had “stopped buying oil from Iran under him,” Dale said. “Also did not happen.”

On Thursday night, Donald Trump took the stage to accept the Republican nomination for the presidency in a speech anticipated to be the grand finale of the four-day long event in Milwaukee. Instead, he put his own fan base to sleep.

Trump began his speech around 9 p.m. Central time, recounting the details of his recent near-death experience to an—initially—rapt audience. But according to some present at the convention, the energy evacuated the room as the 93-minute speech, “the longest nomination acceptance speech at a convention” per NBC News, stretched languorously into the evening.

At 10:46 p.m., Financial Times journalist Edward Luce tweeted from the convention, “People starting to leave. Loud chattering on fringes of the arena. Trump is boring the audience.” A few minutes later, from a “sea of [Trump] diehards” just some paces from the stage, Atlantic reporter Tim Alberta posted, “some are getting restless. Checking phones, stealing glances at the teleprompter, whispering about when it will be over.”

One X user observed, “People are visibly falling asleep,” clipping a wide shot of the audience from CBS News’s broadcast, in which more than one attendee can be seen being lulled to sleep—slumped in their chairs, with heads bowed and eyelids heavy—as Trump droned on.

As the speech finally came to a close and balloons fell on the convention, a rendition of the operatic aria “Nessun dorma” rang through the hall. The song’s title and opening lines are Italian for “Nobody shall sleep,” but, apparently, some shall.