Don't let Trump's distractions bury his record
Opinion by E.J. Dionne Jr.
As President Trump droned through his 70-minute acceptance speech while desecrating the White House as a television backdrop, which was probably illegal the words that kept coming to mind were two he has applied with relish to his opponents: low-energy and sleepy.
Find footage of his 2016 acceptance speech and watch it back to back with Thursdays. If thats too painful, just watch parts of both. Even a speech instructor at the late Trump University would notice the contrasting levels of vitality.
The 2020 Trump looks like a man who knows his show is about to be canceled. He has to make a herculean effort to turn things around and he is just too sick and tired of the whole thing to give it a real try. Perhaps he hoped the quantity of his words would offset the lack of forcefulness in his presentation. It backfired. A man whom even critics concede is interesting became ponderous and boring.
Seeing things this way is not, as far as I can tell, the prevailing view going into the final months of this election. Spooked by what happened in 2016, many analysts especially Democrats seem to assume that things will go very wrong for Biden.
The post-2016 language about liberals, Democrats, elites and the media not understanding the values of White working- and middle-class class Americans in the Midwest is back in force. The disorder in Kenosha after the police shooting of Jacob Blake and now the killing in Portland over the weekend are assumed to be helpful to Trump, even though Biden pointed out, rather logically, that this mayhem is happening on Trumps watch.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-ponderous-low-energy-guy-is-trump/2020/08/28/3ef27940-e971-11ea-97e0-94d2e46e759b_story.html