Actually the DNC should be pretty fun, they have real politicians, good speakers, and not(many) hateful bigots on the docket, tomorrow or the next day will probably see the VP announcement, I assume the Clinton campaign will time it so that it takes as much away from Trump coverage of the news cycle as possible, and I suspect it will be a boring white guy with established political credentials, my guess is the Clinton campaign is in "don't lose" mode and will not be doing anything dramatic.
Anyway, the day was pretty standard for the most part, the daytime speakers where awful people one and all, and most of them can't give a rousing speech to save their lives. There was once again no policy discussion with one exception.
Ivanka Trump spoke before her father, and of all the people there today she seemed the most collected and in control, and also gave basically the only policy details we have seen all week for the campaign, it was a legitimately impressive speech.
The problem is those policies bear no resemblance to anything held by the RNC platform or the Trump campaign itself.
She spoke at length about Trump's positive treatment of women and the battles he would fight on their behalf in the White House. Now this is clearly a lie as Trump has no record of positive treatment of women and anyone who reads knows it, but for the purposes of the speech it was good. She spoke of plans to push for equal pay, maternity leave, and fair hiring practices. Not a single element of which is part of the RNC platform, and gender stuff is not mentioned at all, in anything that resembles an official list of the Trump campaign policies.
Her speech would not be out of place at the DNC and it was really confusing.
Then we came to Donald Trump, and honestly what can I say? The stage should tell you everything you need to know about that:
It was the usual stuff, well not really it was actually a bit more... I don't wanna say nuanced but it was different than Trump's usual stump speech. First he talked for seventy two minutes, and it was a teleprompter aided speech, which means it was written ahead of time and he mostly stayed on script, so we can't blame the content on his usual tendency to wander.
It was one hundred percent fear mongering, he gave no solutions beyond "Making America Great Again", hell he didn't even really talk about building the wall, which is usually a guaranteed crowd pleaser. He just... talked about how many people want to kill us and how many people are beating us economically.
Now that is basically his stump speech too, but he at least says something about what to do about it in those, even if it is stupid anecdotes about using bullets dipped in pigs blood to kill Muslims or something about building islands in the South China Sea, but he really didn't this time and it was glaring to me that he has abandoned any pretense of using hope as a motivator and is exclusively going for fear to unite his followers.
But fear isn't going to work, because the things he wants us to fear include the largest religion in the world, our closest neighbor to the south, and everyone who immigrates to the country, but all of those things are also gigantic voting blocs in their own right. It isn't a sustainable program and I don't think it is going to work.
Polls results should be interesting and taken with a grain of salt since there won't be a lot of time for them to settle after the RNC before the DNC starts, but I expect Trump to get a minimal bounce from the convention, one to four points perhaps, he didn't shit himself on stage and nothing dramatic happened to ruin the night otherwise I'd say he'd come out of this worse than he was going in, but with a vaguely competent seeming day four to point at, his supporters can use that to justify increased polling numbers, for a little while at least.
It won't last long, especially if the Democrats can make their convention seem at all competent and lively. Here's hoping.
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