Casting the opinion net far and wide, Washington Post columnist Matt Bai interviewed Washington Post columnist David Ignatius and Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle this morning about Trump's acceptance speech. I clicked on the interview just after glancing at the Post's multivolume "fact-checking" piece, whose opening sentence contained three words that defined not only last night's Trumpian oratory but all Trumpian oratory — rambling, incoherent and falsehoods.
I didn't watch it, I was touring Whidbey Island, Wash. with my daughter at the time, nor would I have watched another miserable 92 minutes of Trump's rambling, incoherent falsehoods if I had had the chance. I did read a couple recaps (identical in substance) upon returning from the mountainous isles and sure enough, I had missed nothing new. So on to some opinionated takes when I arose today, Bai & Guests' being the first.
I note this interview because of the host's first question; the answers I've edited for brevity. "How do you grade the speech and why?" asked Bai.
Ignatius: I’d give him a B-plus in the first half. A C-minus for the second half which was partisan, predictable and seemed to lose even the captive convention audience.
Von Drehle: The first 15 minutes might have been a solid A.... But then it turned into something painful to endure — surely the longest acceptance speech on record. He oughta hope that most Americans will only see highlights or shut it off.
Bai: Well, I’m going to go a different way and give him a disappointing D.... He had a chance tonight ... to address his biggest weakness: his divisiveness. He had a chance to broaden his appeal considerably without losing any of his base. But he made a few noises about unity, blamed Democrats, took responsibility for nothing and then devolved into a dark and ranting rally.
I was shocked by Ignatius and Von Drehle's grades, and post-shocked by Bai's D. I spent years in the academy and yet did not know until one minute ago that even D- is a passing grade in the U.S. educational system. The host has a right to grade Trump's (literal) term paper however he wants, but no responsible instructor of rhetoric would permit anything but an F to land on a pile of rambling, incoherent falsehoods.
Perhaps Von Drehle would have assigned an F to Trump's "painful" 77 minutes that followed the columnist's laughable A. I don't know this, he failed to give them a mark, but if 77 minutes are sheer torture and a mere 15 are somehow imaginable as prime material, add and average the two and you get a solid Fail.
Ignatius, though, must have been deep into some sort of chemically altered transcendental Hendrix Experience when he uttered B+ and C-. Myself, being clean and sober at the moment, well, I'm at a loss for any other explanation — rational on my part, irrational on his. I can appreciate how in a moment of stoned sentimentality Ignatius had a B+ flash before his pinwheeling eyes during Trump's Oscar-winning minutes of humanity, but his motherlode? The 77 minutes to which Von Drehle referred? Bad trip, man. Bad trip.
In general, I suppose the trio's assessment of Trump's Sturm und Drang acceptance speech was a classic case of Beltway slack-cutting and grade-curving when it comes to those fascistic politicians among us. Swimming somewhere in their overgenerous brains this morning was maybe the thought, Trump cannot be as extraordinarily evil as he seems. America would never willingly allow such appalling, vicious depravity to reign.
All I can say to that, gentlemen, is that scores of journalists and political commentators had the very same delusions swimming around in their heads in late-1920s, early-1930s Germany. And if by 1933 they were still expressing such thoughts in print, they soon vanished.