For a minute there, former President Donald Trump sounded different on Thursday night. “Whether you’ve supported me in the past or not, I hope you will support me in the future, because I will bring back the American Dream,” Trump told a sea of conservative believers at the Republican National Convention. “With great humility, I am asking you to be excited about the future of our country.”
The acceptance speech he delivered lacked the soaring phrasing of Ronald Reagan telling the RNC crowd in 1980 that “the time is now, my fellow Americans, to recapture our destiny, to take it into our own hands.” The overall tone of the prepared text distributed ahead of his speech was a far cry from his first acceptance speech eight years ago, let alone his inauguration address, later dubbed the “American Carnage” speech. It was a shift in line with the reported “new softness” he’d displayed since last week’s assassination attempt.
The facade of a new Trump evaporated quickly, just like the last several times we were promised a new Trump.
As with most things Trump, though, any shift away from his usual bombast was surface level — at best. The facade of a new Trump evaporated quickly, just like the last several times we were promised a new Trump. Even when he has managed to momentarily project a calmer persona, a state that lasted only minutes into an address that broke records as the longest acceptance speech ever, Trump remains substantively the same: impulsive, xenophobic and more than happy to go on the attack in exchange for the applause of a crowd.
In his remarks, Trump initially portrayed himself as a happy warrior, one fighting for all Americans, in sharp contrast to his usual polemics against Democrats. “Together, we will launch a new era of safety, prosperity and freedom for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed,” he intoned toward the beginning of his speech. “The discord and division in our society must be healed. We must heal it quickly. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.”
If you’d handed me that quote before Thursday night, I would have sooner guessed it came from President Joe Biden or almost any other political figure before I ever landed on Trump. In promising to be the “president for ALL of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America,” Trump played against type in a way that I hadn’t expected even having read the reporting that he’d torn up his original speech in the aftermath of the shooting.
But despite promising unity, his speech only grew Trumpier as it continued, as he leaned into his worst instincts, riffing to the crowd’s delight as he threw it red meat. Even in the prepared text, though, he was still disparaging of LGBTQ Americans when declaring “we will not have men playing in women’s sports.” It was still filled with lies about a supposed surge in crime fueled by migrants sneaking across the border. It still framed the criminal cases against him as partisan witch hunts from Democrats, rather than the results of his own actions. It was still packed with pie crust promises, easily made and easily broken, that “incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish, jobs will come roaring back, and the middle class will prosper like never before.”
It is hard to find the unity in promising to “launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” darkly warning that “bad things are going to happen” otherwise. He miraculously managed to (mostly) avoid directly attacking Biden, using his name directly only once, saying the “damage he’s done to the country is unthinkable.” But I’m pressed to find anything meant to win over skeptical Republicans who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him in the primary campaign, let alone disenchanted Democrats and independents.
Despite promising unity, his speech only grew Trumpier as it continued, as he leaned into his worst instincts, riffing to the crowd’s delight as he threw it red meat.
Even if he did rewrite the speech he was prepared to give as he claimed, Trump couldn’t help but go off script and attack “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” drawing boos from the crowd, and accusing Democrats of “destroying our country” and “cheating at elections.” There was nothing he said that contradicted the conservative agenda laid out in Project 2025, even as he urged listeners to “rise above past differences and disagreements and go forward united, as one people and one nation.”
In the end, Trump may have offered to “a hand of loyalty and friendship” to “every citizen, whether you are young or old, man or woman, Democrat, Republican or independent, Black or white, Asian or Hispanic,” but he did little to disguise the racism and fearmongering at the heart of his campaign. The Trump we saw on display Thursday night wasn’t the chastened, humbled man some predicted might be on display. It was exactly the Trump we’ve come to know over the last nine years.
The bottom line is this: Donald Trump still wants the same things for this country that he did before Saturday’s attempt on his life and is still willing to do it in the least unifying way possible.
