At Daily Kos Greg Dworkin rounded up some insightful and funny tweets responding to Trump’s 75-minute GOP convention speech, including:
James Fallows @JamesFallows: Half this speech is same old fear and mistrust. But some little part, as delivered, is first glimmer of The Pivot. HRC, pay attention.Michael Gerson @MJGerson: He is summoning primal forces of anger/fear, displaying leadership without moral guardrails, religious principles or civic responsibility.Josh Barro @jbarro: When I read the text, I thought it would play. But since he’s shouted the whole thing, I think he’s coming off as alarming in the wrong way.
Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63: I’ve heard this sort of speech a lot in the last 15 years and trust me, it doesn’t sound any better in Russian. 11:15 PM – 21 Jul 2016
Norman Ornstein @NormOrnstein: If Leni Riefenstahl were alive, Trump would hire her to film this speech. Then not pay her. 10:23 PM – 21 Jul 2016.
Dworkin also shares quotes and comments from the non-twitter universe, including:
David Brooks: “Donald Trump is dismantling the Republican Party and replacing it with a personality cult. The G.O.P. is not dividing; it’s ceasing to exist as a coherent institution…It’s going to end catastrophically, in November or beyond, with the party infrastructure in tatters, with every mealy mouthed pseudo-Trump accommodationist permanently stained…Some rich children are careless that way; they break things and other people have to clean up the mess.”Ezra Klein: “He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he’s a racist, a sexist, and a demagogue, but he’s also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante. He lies so constantly and so fluently that it’s hard to know if he even realizes he’s lying. He delights in schoolyard taunts and luxuriates in backlash….He has not become more responsible or more sober, more decent or more generous, more considered or more informed, more careful or more kind. He has continued to retweet white supremacists, make racist comments, pick unnecessary fights, contradict himself on the stump, and show an almost gleeful disinterest in building a real campaign or learning about policy.”
At the Daily Beast Jonathan Alter observed “The ugliness at the core of the Trump candidacy—perfumed by his attractive children—came through in his Mussolini delivery…,” while Timothy Egan wrote in his NYT column that “The man who couldn’t manage his own convention, the creator of a “university” built on fraud, bet his shot at the top job in the world on a panicked public and collective amnesia of his serial misdeeds…And the instigator of four corporate bankruptcies, the man who stiffed plumbers and carpenters, the failed casino owner, promised to use his dark arts to “make our country rich again.”
The New York Times editorial noted, “Given a chance to replace the empty sloganeering and self-aggrandizement of his primary campaign with solid proposals worthy of Americans’ trust, Mr. Trump made clear that he instead intends to terrify voters into supporting him, who will protect them from violence, a word that occurs over and over in his remarks…He is a poisonous messenger for a legitimate demand: that an ossified party dedicate itself to improving working people’s lives, instead of serving the elite.”
Harold Myerson described the speech this way at The American Prospect, “..What made Trump’s speech truly ominous and without precedent in American politics was the role he assigned himself—and the rest of us. We are mute and defenseless. He is our voice. He alone can fix our problems. That doesn’t really leave much for the other 300 million-plus citizens of our democracy to do. It doesn’t leave much for other elected lawmakers to do, either…I don’t think most Americans will agree with him that it’s Midnight in America,…that Trump is their voice, and that he alone can fix our problems—not if the Democrats sufficiently highlight the implications of these unsettling claims.”
Trump’s speech concluded with the usual gathering of the ticket’s families on stage, clapping, waving and giving the tumbs up sign to the crowd, but also an ironic choice of songs, “You Can’t Always get What You Want” by the Stones. I imagine millions of Americans found that appropriate, though not in the way the organizers intended. The George Harrison estate took exception to the GOP convention playing “Here Comes the Sun: and called it “offensive,” but also tweeted “If it had been Beware of Darkness, then we MAY have approved.”
Actually I thought Trump was describing Gotham city and dreamong he was batman.