As our Jeff Charles reported, former President Donald Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago Tuesday night after his New York City arrest to deliver a blistering speech attacking everyone from rogue prosecutors to President Joe Biden.
While discussing Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump called it “the most embarrassing time in our country’s history, in my opinion.”
In perhaps his strongest line of the night, he decried the devastation the Biden Administration has wrought upon our country:
If you took the five worst presidents in the history of the United States and added them up, they would not have done near the destruction to our country as Joe Biden and the Biden administration have done.
Incredibly, we are now a failing nation. We are a nation in decline.
Watch:
"We are now a failing nation.
We are a nation in decline." pic.twitter.com/EWYYdVNWiK
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 5, 2023
Trump was forceful, angry at times, but controlled. His passion was obvious but he seemed calm and undeterred by the litany of legal woes he faces, not the least of which is the incredibly dubious 34 charges of falsifying business records that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg finally revealed Tuesday.
I thought it was an extremely effective speech, and while it did not have the same raucous energy as one of his rallies, it showed a very serious and thoughtful side to the current Republican frontrunner for 2024.
I wrote in November 2022 that I found Trump’s speech announcing his 2024 presidential run to be lacking in energy and was a wasted opportunity. I took a lot of heat in the comment section for that one, with tons of folks vehemently disagreeing. Tuesday, however, he did not need excessive theatrics or incendiary rhetoric—his calm yet biting words were enough.
He didn’t shy away from the many investigations he’s facing—the classified documents, the Georgia election interference, the Stormy Daniels hush money payment, etcetera—and explained in detail why they were legally suspect and how other politicians like Biden and Hillary Clinton did much worse things and faced no consequences. (Hillary deleted 33,000 emails from her illegal homebrew server after the State Department had requested them; Hunter Biden’s laptop appears to show that Joe was involved in seriously questionable international business dealings with China and Ukraine while he was vice president. That’s just for starters.)
Trump speaks about Hunter Biden’s laptop pic.twitter.com/3QR3EePO5i
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) April 5, 2023
Several of my colleagues joked that Trump’s lawyers were probably screaming in their heads, “SHUT UP, DONALD!” while he spoke—because lawyers never want their clients speaking if they don’t have to—but from a public relations standpoint, Trump’s defense was persuasive.
Equally effective was his reminding voters of the seemingly endless array of accusations that have been thrown at him by hyper-partisan Democrats and rogue prosecutors since the moment he announced his run in 2015:
From the begininning, the Democrats spied on my campaign, remember that?
They attacked me with an onslaught of fraudulent investigations, Russia, Russia, Russia. Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. Impeachment hoax #1, impeachment, hoax #2, the illegal and unconstitutional raid on Mar a Lago, right here. The lying to the FISA courts, the FBI and DOJ relentlessly pursuing Republicans…
And just recently, the FBI and DOJ, in collusion with Twitter and Facebook… [censored news outlets] in order not to say anything bad about the Hunter Biden laptop from hell, which exposes the Biden family as criminals…
And we remember the 51 intelligence agents who said Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. It didn’t exist, it was Russian disinformation…. Remember that? And that was all confirmed strongly by the FBI when they all knew that it wasn’t Russian disinformation. And so much more.
As RedState’s Mike Miller points out, Trump has been under near-constant investigation for 50 years. And yet, out of all the investigations and trials and accusations, Bragg’s weak case seems the most blatantly political and partisan.
Many have been predicting the end of Trump as a political force, with his lame attacks against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (sorry folks, “DeSanctimonious” is not one of The Donald’s better monikers), and with his apparent falling out of favor with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Trump, though, it’s that you should never count him out—he is an expert at defying expectations.
As former Obama advisor Rahm Emmanuel once said, “you never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Trump seems to have listened and has taken this flawed indictment and used it to rally supporters with this powerful speech.
Many pundits claim that this is the Democrats’ and Bragg’s intention—to make sure Trump wins the Republican nomination because he will then surely go on to surely lose the presidential election. They might just find this strategy will come back and bite them in the tuchas, however, because if Trump is able to build on this new momentum, it might just take him all the way back to the White House.
