Trump’s rambling 93-minute speech reveals the US is set to be dragged back to 2016

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Donald Trump’s campaign spent the better part of four days promising a changed Trump – a more solemn, thoughtful man, forever changed by a would-be assassin’s bullet.

That image was shattered over 93 minutes on Thursday.

The ex-president spoke to delegates on the final night of the 2024 Republican National Convention as he accepted his party’s nomination for president for a third time. His speech, which trailed off the prepared remarks on the teleprompter at multiple points, was in turn monotonous, as he waffled on the call for “unity”, and angry about state of American life which have been emblematic of his eight plus years in political life.

“As Americans, we are bound together by things that are shared that we rise together or we fall apart. I am running to be president for all of America. Not half,” Trump said, shortly after coming onstage.

That was roughly the end of the olive branches for the evening. The rest of Trump’s speech revolved around the enemies who have been in his sights since he first announced a run for president in 2015.

On the list: Democrats, who he accused of using the pandemic to “cheat” by expanding mail-in voter eligibility. Immigrants, too, received the same kind of targeting as they were subjected to in his first-ever campaign speech, when he called them “killers” and “rapists” from the lobby of his Manhattan tower.

“In El Salvador murders are down by 70 per cent. Why are they down? Now [President Nayib Bukele] would have you convinced that because he’s trained murderers to be wonderful people. No. They’re down because they’re sending their murderers to the United States of America,” the ex-president claimed.

He has frequently made this assertion that Central and South American countries are “sending” migrants including alleged criminals to the US. There’s no evidence that’s ever been true.

The image of unity wasn’t the only one Trump did damage to on Thursday.

Just a day after his vice presidential nominee JD Vance projected his own veneer of pro-labor sentiment on the RNC stage with a vow to take on Wall Street and corporate greed and two days after the president of the international Teamsters union became the first such organized labor leader to speak at the RNC, Trump took a broad swipe at another union, the United Autoworkers. Vance had joined its members on a picket line just last year.

“The United Auto Workers ought to be ashamed for allowing this to happen,” Trump said, referring to auto plants owned by American companies being set up overseas.

“[T]he leader of the United Auto Workers should be fired immediately, and every single autoworker — union and nonunion — should be voting for Donald Trump, because we’re going to bring back car manufacturing, and we’re going to bring it back fast,” he said.

Camera footage of the crowd during Trump’s rambling, hour-and-a-half-long speech showed delegates growing visibly tired by the end, with some checking their phones and zoning out.