Opinion | After Trump RNC convention speech, does he deserve a clean shave?

He was preceded by a ritual of hype that featured Child Rock rapping for the gang to say “Struggle, battle!” and “Trump, Trump!” and calling the previous president “essentially the most patriotic badass on Earth.” After which Dana White, huckster and chief government of the Final Preventing Championship, touted Trump as “the hardest, most resilient human being that I’ve ever met in my life.” He might have been introducing UFC superstars Quinton “Rampage” Jackson or Georges St-Pierre.

However Trump didn’t strut onstage. He wasn’t wrapped in a Superman cape. He talked extra softly than I can keep in mind in a serious speech. And unimaginably, for me, within the opening parts of the speech, he talked about unity and therapeutic. Even on the finish, after he reverted extra to kind, he mentioned, “With nice humility, I’m asking you to be enthusiastic about the way forward for our nation.” “Humility”? Can Trump actually have used that phrase about himself?

“We stay in a world of miracles,” he mentioned. “Each single second we’ve got on Earth is a present from God.” Amen to that. And Trump had undoubtedly earned the proper to talk of being spared from tragedy.

However did we imagine what he needed to say? “The discord and division in our society have to be healed,” he mentioned. “We rise collectively or we disintegrate.” America couldn’t hope for a clearer assertion of our current disaster. However is it actually plausible that the nice divider is now a conciliator?

For years, the nice Publish cartoonist Herblock at all times drew Richard M. Nixon with a gangster’s beard. However after Nixon gained the White Home in 1968, Herblock drew a brand new picture, saying that each new president deserved a clear shave.

Does Trump deserve a clear shave? I used to be keen to think about that he was a distinct man till he launched right into a denunciation of Democrats for supposedly weaponizing the justice system. “I’m the one saving democracy for the individuals,” he claimed. That appalling assertion made it arduous to think about Trump as a person remodeled.

Because the speech went on, it grew to become a Trump laundry checklist, typically turning to vulgar speak about immigration and even a weird return to one among his most ill-chosen strains in regards to the flesh-eating killer Hannibal Lecter. He rambled about pet peeves and supposed triumphs; the longer he continued, the much less coherent he grew to become. Even the captive conference viewers appeared confused.

Trump has at all times dreamed of being an important man. He was the failed actual property tycoon, reborn as a TV superstar, who turned to politics in his need for public approval. He didn’t have a present for management in his first time period. As an alternative, he appeared to have a expertise for poisoning practically every thing he touched, firing one official after one other, failing to cross any main laws. He exhausted the nation. That’s why he was defeated in 2020.

Is he completely different in the present day? The longer the speech went on, the extra he appeared to stay the identical vainglorious man who believes he “might cease wars with a cellphone name.”

Trump’s core id, 4 years in the past and now, is that he’s directly the disrupter and the dealmaker. That dualism was on show in Milwaukee. He talks about power in order that he can compromise with adversaries; he disrupts allies to reassert American primacy.

The partisan tone elevated because the speech dragged on. By the point he completed, he had hit all of the predictable and, to me, false notes. He claimed President Biden had accomplished extra harm than “the ten worst” presidents mixed. People have been “barely dwelling” due to inflation. Biden had demonstrated “completely incompetent management.”

The international coverage concepts Trump laid out sounded easy, however they have been framed by magical considering. Underneath Biden, he claimed, “we’re in a planet of struggle.” Trump claimed he would resolve wars in Ukraine and Gaza that, in his fantasy world, wouldn’t have ever began if he’d nonetheless been president. How? He didn’t say.

He invoked America’s defining moments — Valley Forge, Yorktown, Gettysburg, Halfway — in asking the viewers to “rise above previous variations” and develop into “extra united than ever earlier than.”

Is he a distinct man? He spoke extra quietly, at occasions, Thursday evening. He expressed the need to be a pacesetter, relatively than a divider. However the internal man? He could have survived the murderer’s bullet, however he stays the chief of a motion that wishes to take America aside.