Donald Trump’s speech in Cincinnati Wednesday night astonished even those in the press corps and political world who have spent a long time watching Donald Trump speeches. As Trump talked and talked — the speech lasted 68 minutes — some took to Twitter to express amazement, and in some cases, outrage.
“Can anyone think of a speech by a major-party candidate to compare to Trump’s raving performance tonight in Cincy?” wrote Politico’s Glenn Thrush.
“This is the craziest speech I’ve ever heard since last night which was the craziest speech I’d ever heard,” wrote Commentary’s John Podhoretz, who had also watched Trump’s Tuesday speech in North Carolina.
“We shouldn’t be talking about anything but Clinton’s flagrant abuse of classified info but Trump wants to exercise his right to word vomit,” wrote Republican strategist and former Eric Cantor aide Rory Cooper…
The (far) bigger question is those 62 million voters. What do they hear? Mostly they hear what journalists want them to hear, if they’re even listening to that. And in Cincinnati, the media message was that Trump had given a speech about the Star of David tweet.
The New York Times’ headline was, “In a Defiant, Angry Speech, Donald Trump Defends Image Seen as Anti-Semitic.” The paper reported that “the bulk of Mr. Trump’s energy was spent on the Twitter post.” It might be hard for other observers to come away from the hour-plus performance convinced that the bulk of it was the four-and-a-half minutes spent on the tweet, but that is what the Times said.
The Washington Post’s headline was, “Trump says campaign shouldn’t have deleted image circulated by white supremacists.”
Given reporting like that, multiplied many times by other news outlets, it’s clear Trump faces an enormous, perhaps insurmountable obstacle in getting his message out. He clearly believes he is a great communicator, and he is in fact a very good one. But as a political speaker, Trump is so far outside the box that he has virtually overwhelmed the senses of those reporting and analyzing the news, making it difficult for some voters who haven’t actually seen him to get a clear picture of his appeal to supporters.
