By Canadian Press

Trump’s big speech: Heavy on gloom-tinged nostalgia, light on policy solutions

Jul 21, 2016 | 9:05 AM

CLEVELAND — Donald Trump delivered the biggest speech of his young political career borrowing from an old message, drawn from the same well of gloom-tinged nostalgia as his campaign slogan about making America great again.

His campaign staff had signalled this week that he’d reach back to the law-and-order message from 1968 where Richard Nixon began with a dual lament about disorder — chaos in the streets at home, and spiralling violence abroad.

That old message was tailored to working-class whites tempted by the segregationist George Wallace, as race-related riots left inner cities torched and almost 17,000 Americans left Vietnam in body bags.

This year’s race-related crisis is police shootings. The foreign crisis is terrorism in Nice, Paris, Brussels, Orlando and San Bernardino. And the candidate counting on disaffected working-class whites to deliver Ohio and Pennsylvania is Trump.

“Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities,” Trump said.

Stay Ahead of the Curve with Kamloops' Trusted Property Manager - Rohit Kumar

May 20, 2025

Two and Out

PETERS: Mayor's accountability push is more than a little rich

Jun 20, 2025

Looped In

LOOPED IN WITH NIKKI OMEN: June 19, 2025

Jun 19, 2025

“Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims. I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon — and I mean very soon — come to an end. Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.”

He said the country and world were far less stable than when President Barack Obama made the decision to put his foreign policy in the hands of Hillary Clinton, whom he derided as “a corrupt puppet” of special interests.

Trump received thunderous applause from a party that once resisted him. He strode to the stage and kissed his daughter Ivanka, who attempted to sand off some of the hard edges on her unpopular dad with a gentle introduction and messages directed at both Democrats and Republicans.

Yet Trump’s speech was light on three elements: the future, solutions, and optimism. An earlier text leaked to the Politico site included six uses of the word, “back,” zero uses of the word, “forward,” with the word “future” making a cameo appearance in closing.

It was devoid of details about how he’d end police-related violence; end the Syrian civil war; and stop the jihad-inspired violence that has flowed from it, except for blocking immigration from certain unspecified countries.

It offered more detail on his economic plans. Trump reiterated his pledge to rewrite trade deals like NAFTA, reduce corporate taxes, and use the promised economic windfall to rebuild crumbling infrastructure.

He’ll hope to have more success than Nixon did in bringing order to the streets. The murder rate increased every year he was in office. It started declining years later. It’s now near 50-year lows. The violent crime rate is down almost three-quarters since the 1990s.

Earlier in the day, a group of anti-Trump Republicans lamented the state of their campaign. 

One told a panel discussion that the bitter, backward-looking message was out of sync with the modern nation — a place becoming more culturally diverse, filled with dynamic young entrepreneurs, who should be voting Republican but are massively turned off by Trump.

“It’s a whole new game,” Richard Tafel, founder of a gay group called Log Cabin Republicans, told a forum hosted by the website Politico. 

“We could be watching the funeral of the Republican Party at this convention.”

Another woman on the panel said it’s true Trump is running close in polls in a number of the swing states that will decide the election. But she asked: Where will he pick up new voters, and new states, that Obama won in 2012?

“It’s not enough to just say, ‘I know all these coal miners who are … gonna vote for Donald Trump,” said Katie Parker, a campaign veteran who founded the anti-Trump Super PAC Our Principles. “Show me the suburban women… the Hispanic voters… the African-American voters clamouring to join this campaign… That’s a problem for our party.”

She said the party should be leading upcoming polls. It’s just announced a vice-presidential pick, and had its convention. If there’s no convention bounce now, she said, Republicans could be left in the dust when Democrats hold theirs next week.

Another panellist was less dismissive of his chances.

The campaign manager of Sen. Ted Cruz said Republicans can win if they increase voter turnout among whites by 3.1 percentage points. But Jeff Roe said he’s unsure Trump has the sophisticated digital voter-targeting operation he’d need to do the job. Also, he identified a subset of white voters cool to Trump: “He’s got to fix his college-educated women problem.”

If those people were looking to this speech for ideas about succeeding in the modern digital economy, it never arrived in the unusually long 75-minute address.

Trump did put some modern telecommunications to use Thursday.

Hours before he claimed the presidential nomination of Abraham Lincoln’s political party, Trump fired off some social-media missiles at the people he characterized as the embarrassed losers still refusing to back him.

The group includes two president Bushes; nominee Mitt Romney; the extremely popular governor of the swing state hosting the convention; and the No. 2 finisher in the primaries — who’ve all withheld an endorsement.

It was the latter holdout making waves at the Republican convention. When Cruz this week urged the audience to simply vote its conscience, the convention floor erupted in loud boos and scattered applause.

So Trump took a shot at Cruz: “Other than a small group of people who have suffered massive and embarrassing losses, the party is VERY united. Great love in the arena!”

There was clear majority support for Trump at the convention.

Yet many delegates expressed lingering doubt about his conservative convictions and his personal comportment. Less right-wing on some issues than the party base, Trump thanked the party base for applauding his promise to protect gays and lesbians — specifically from Islamic terrorists like the Orlando killer.

As for personality issues, they still had his primary runner-up chafing. 

Cruz admitted to lingering bitterness over Trump’s attacks against his relatives. Trump shared a social-media post insulting Cruz’s wife’s looks, spread a National Enquirer article about marital infidelity, and insinuated Cruz’s father may have been linked to JFK’s assassination.

“If you go and slander and attack Heidi… I’m (not) going to nonetheless come like a servile puppy dog and say, ‘Thank you very much for maligning my wife and maligning my father.’”

Alexander Panetta, The Canadian Press