You know a Donald Trump speech is bad when Fox News host Chris Wallace calls it “an endurance test.”
In case you missed it, Trump’s speech was panned and reviled by both liberals and conservatives. But on Fox News, the heavy criticism is reserved for Democrats or wayward Republicans like Ted Cruz. So Fox's level of criticism immediately following the speech was noteworthy.
Wallace made a point of praising the substance of the speech. But then he added this – an unusually strong fault-finding of a Republican, much less a Republican presidential nominee.
WALLACE: We can’t ignore the presentation. And for some reason, he shouted the speech. For some reason, he said each word so slowly that it kind of became an endurance test and in that sense, I think it was a bit of a missed opportunity.
Brit Hume didn’t say a good word, even about the substance.
HUME: Well, it certainly was emphatic. But I don’t think anybody listening to this who expected there would be new material and ideas here […] that would cause conservatives, for example, who’ve had their doubts about him and have not been prepared to support him and others to say, “Now, that I hadn’t heard before. That is new. That is, that is, that is reason for me to rethink my position.”
What he gave us, I think, was the standard material we’ve heard from him that has carried him this far. The question is, can these ideas and therefore this speech, carry him further. I think we’ll have to wait for the verdict from the people on that.
Host Megyn Kelly got in a dig. She noted that Ivanka Trump, who introduced her father, was “very optimistic in her tone” whereas her father was “a little bit more foreboding.”
Which was quite an understatement. But again, this is still Fox News, even if Roger Ailes has been kicked to the curb.
But then Kelly said pointedly, “There was such a contrast there between the tone and the approach.”
But if Trump’s little fingers started twitching watching this, he must have been greatly reassured by the cheering section that Sean Hannity brought in soon thereafter. Hannity and his fellow Trump lover Rudy Giuliani found nothing not to love in the speech. From Media Matters:
GIULIANI: That was the best acceptance speech I have ever seen, including my hero, Ronald Reagan.
[…]
I’ve always known him to be exactly the man you saw up there last night. A good man. A compassionate man, a fair man, and an exceptionally talented man. There is no way that this man is not getting elected.
HANNITY: Two things really impressed me in this speech. Number one, the statistics that he used to lay out the case that this country is headed in the wrong direction, that it is broken, and he literally—I don’t think he missed a single problem America is facing today, and offered what Hillary would do as the insider who has failed, and what he is offering, which is now a change election. America has a clear choice which direction this country will be heading.
In fact, the speech was full of lies and distortions. But don’t expect any serious fact checking on the “fair and balanced” network any time soon.
Watch it below, from the July 21 coverage of the Republican National Convention.
After The Ugliest American is thoroughly humiliated in November (please Jesus), the wrath and blamestorming from every quarter will be EPIC. They will be so busy with their internecine butchering, Hillary may just get a pretty easy road for the months or years it takes for them to more or less recover. Unlike what happened to poor old Barack, with the head honcho R-Souls meeting on the very night of his inauguration to plot ways to sabotage his plans at every turn. Those fucking Tea Potty gatherings were up and running within two or three weeks, lamenting the ways he was destroying their America – months before he had a chance to do anything!
Usually in a lay off situation of office jockeys they look for somebody who’s top heavy with senority and waay overpaid,…… hmmmm,… computer sez BOR.
9/11 Ghouliani is a toot. Long Dong could have played with his tiny member for an hour and Ghouliani would have raved that it was the best speech since Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
But I’m glad the republicans have sealed the deal with the Donald. I think he is a con man out to put campaign contributions in his own pocket or various Trump enterprises. The telltale sign for this will be how much he spends on TV ads.
If it is all a big con job, the rubes who will be out money are rotten fascist xenophobes mostly and no one will shed a tear…., oh, and the Koch brothers. Nobody is gonna cry for them either.
I’ve channel surfed during #RNCinCLE but mostly watched PBS. I like a couple of their analysts because they aren’t the wild-eye left or right extremists other networks, particularly cable news, use as info-tainment. Yeah, I’m talking to you too Sean.
Moderates (representative of uncommitted voters?) Brooks and Shields have enough convention history in their brains to do an autopsy of Trump’s complete conversion of the Republican Party from what it’s stood for over decades to a weird mix of pure Trump know-nothingness confusion and Fox News/talk radio vomit.
So the North Carolina delegation is pissed Trump doesn’t have his anti-gay on. Even cheerleader Laura Ingraham on “Hannity” notes there’s no Trumpeting on pro-life. It’s no coincidence the Bushs missed #RNCinCLE. The Donald is the anti-Dubya on so much like internationalism and free trade. Donald isn’t even on script with the optimistic Reagan Republicans have worshiped more than Christ.
The first thing that popped on my phone this morning was a series of notifications linking me to articles saying Trump announced the death of the GOP. Not that they aren’t going to win. Death in the sense he’s taking the party ideologically off the railroad tracks.
“Everything in the country is broken” is Der Furor’s message according to Hannity.
Maybe I live in my own bubble here in Richmond but I find that assessment of America stunning. That’s not me putting on my liberal beanie cap and apologizing for President Obama. It’s just that, while we’ve gone through an incredible economic meltdown and not completely recovered during a period of slow but consistent growth, we’re not in the midst of the Great Depression.
Nor is America as insecure as Der Furor rages. Crime is down nationwide so his law and order demagoguery exploiting some headlines rings hollow. ISIS is getting rolled back in the Middle East and, again, Der Furor whipping up fears over a handful of headline grabbing terrorist attacks, IMHO, overplays the threat by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Then Trump never offers solutions. Just bombast he’s the greatest and will fix anything and everything because he’s expert in the ‘art of the deal.’ Flip-flopping as needed to earn applause.
So I can see why GOP establishment types like Hume, Kelly, Baier, etc. are underwhelmed and the talk show screams like Ingraham and Hannity who lit these fires are ecstatic.