How Badly Did His Acceptance Speech Hurt Trump?

Here’s a fun bit of trivia. Johnny Carson was the king of late night television for three decades beginning in 1962. He interviewed several guests a night, five nights a week. But he never interviewed a politician until 1988. And, no, the first wasn’t one of the presidential candidates from that year, Michael Dukakis or George H.W. Bush. The first politician to appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson was a little known governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton who had just absolutely bombed during a 33-minute speech at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Georgia. He’d actually been booed by a bored audience that cheered when he finally declared “In conclusion…” It was a humiliating failure on the biggest stage, and Clinton’s handlers knew he needed a quick redemption if he wanted to maintain his national political ambitions.

Clinton friend and television producer and director Harry Thomason contacted Carson’s producer Freddie de Cordova about whether Clinton could appear on The Tonight Show. Initially he was told that Carson had a policy against having politicians on as guests, but that changed when Thomason promised that Clinton would play the saxophone. The appearance was a huge success, and four years later Clinton accepted the nomination at the Democratic National Convention.

Here’s another piece of trivia. Until President Joe Biden came along, Bill Clinton held the record among presidents for longest spoken State of the Union addresses at 7,426 words. By comparison, Obama averaged 6,824 and Trump averaged 5,690. Biden’s average stands at an astonishing 8,333. Prior to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four-term presidency, the State of the Union had been delivered in writing since the time of Thomas Jefferson. George Washington (2,080 words) and John Adams (1,790 words) had been models of brevity.

Trump’s prepared remarks for his speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention were 3,000 words. That’s in the range of many of FDR’s State of the Union speeches, but shorter than the average for any president. But Trump didn’t stick to the script. His performance wound up being over 12,000 words long and didn’t end until after midnight on the east coast. At an interminable 92 minutes, it broke the record for longest acceptance speech in history by 18 minutes. But this shouldn’t have been a complete surprise since the second and third longest acceptance speeches in history are Trump’s from 2016 and 2020.

The response inside the hall was less than rapturous. Jonathan Chait described the speech as “incendiary yet dull” and the audience as “shockingly sedate.” It remains to be seen how the country perceived it.

The last hour, at least, was a rehashing of material he uses at MAGA rallies which made it easy to fact check since most of the claims have been previously debunked. Nothing he said was rated better than “half true” and he received a “pants on fire” for claiming the Democrats used COVID to steal the 2020 election. My perception from following along on X/Twitter is that media members long ago stopped watching Trump’s rally speeches, so they seemed shocked at his rambling performance and insane stories. But the only real surprise is that he gave a MAGA rally speech instead of something tailored to a bigger and less unhinged target audience.

I’ve seen several people argue over the last year that the cable news blackout of MAGA rallies was actually helping Trump this time around because people weren’t seeing how much he’s declined mentally since 2020. Anyone who watched his acceptance speech on Thursday night should have noticed, however, so my guess is that Trump badly hurt himself.

If Jonathan Alter’s response is an indication, a lot of Democrats got a new jolt of hope out of the fiasco. Democrats need hope, so thank you to Trump, I guess.