As smjjames said, it was mostly points from his rallies rehashed without any energy or vulgarity, which took his usual rant and turned it into a ramble. His natural and only cadence sucks for anything other than shouting anyway.
This was an abysmal failure by any metric. Trump went into tonight needing something momentous to shift the narrative from the shutdown to the wall proper; he's losing that fight, both according to the polls and according to the usual anonymous sources regarding Congressional wherewithal (which presumably accord with what they're telling him in person.) He's also out of proxies that can credibly make this case. Miller was laughed off the stage in a cloud of spray-on hair, anything Conway says is going to be undercut by her husband, and McConnell has cast things so deferentially that no Republican congressperson can really say more than they have without getting out ahead of their party. Nielsen vociferously doesn't want any part of this, and his "actings" are going to face awkward questions of their own. This one was always going to be on him, and that means his reputation as a salesman is on the line. Further, while Presidents have historically been able to get the nation's attention like this, there's no law saying the networks have to give him airtime, and someone in his orbit had to know going in that any defense of the wall was going to give them a good reason to refuse going forward. This was always going to be his last, best shot.
And he missed. Utterly. He wasn't just incoherent; he was positively boring, sniffling his way through bare-bones accounts of crimes committed by immigrants and vague references to people in CBP who support him. There's not even anything worth quoting as a particularly memorable lie; even his laughable claim that Democrats specifically asked for steel slats so they could support a wall just sounded perfunctory. There was just nothing. There was no exhibition of leadership to rally Republicans in Congress. There was no show of bravado to convince his base that The Donald is still breaking norms and making America great again. Trump gave the Democrats a national address during primetime (including on Fox, no less) and burned his ability to speak directly to the nation in future, and in return he got, in all probability, a collective national shrug. Behold the Art of the Deal, I guess.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4211790 times)