At 70 minutes, President Trump's Republican convention speech went on way too long

CNN

According to C-SPAN, Trump now has the two-longest convention speeches by a Republican or Democratic presidential nominee since 1984. On Thursday night, Trump spoke for 70 minutes, coming close to matching the length of his 75-minute speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention. "The billionaire businessman won the White House, at least in part, because of his free-wheeling style and his uproarious campaign rallies," says CNN's Chris Cillizza. "He didn't win the White House by reading speeches off of a teleprompter. And his acceptance speech Thursday night proved why. His delivery -- particularly in the first 30 minutes or so of this way-too-long speech -- was without emotion and decidedly flat. As for the speech itself, there just wasn't all that much new to it. Trump spent the first 35 minutes rattling off his accomplishments in his first three years in office -- repeating long-disproven claims about how he built the greatest economy in the history of the country and how he has done more for African Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Anyone who caught a Trump speech or a Trump TV interview over the past year (or so) would have recognized virtually every line in his acceptance address. 'This speech is pretty standard issue so far for Trump, absent the lyricism and poetry -- and just different rhetoric -- of many convention speeches,' tweeted Washington Post politics editor Cathleen Decker. And then there was the second half of the speech, which was entirely dedicated to promulgating the idea that, in Trump's words, 'no one will be safe in Biden's America.' But again, the vast majority of these attacks were rehash. Taken in total, the speech felt like a mash-up of a State of the Union address and an opposition research dump. And one that you'd seen and heard before. "

ALSO:

• Fox News ripped President Trump's speech: “I have to say in his delivery, I thought the president—who we have seen really turn on a crowd—was surprisingly flat and didn’t seem to have the bite that he usually does have in his speeches,” said Chris Wallace. Brit Hume agreed, saying: “Chris has a point. The speech was very, very long. I don’t know that any speech that is an hour and ten minutes uninterrupted by anything visual can work very well.”
• Jim Gaffigan went on an anti-Trump Twitter rant over the president's convention speech: The famously apolitical profanity-averse comedian tweeted "I don't give a f*ck if anyone thinks this is virtue signaling or whatever. We need to wake up.  We need to call trump the con man and thief that he is." He also responded to a follower who complained about his rant: "hey f*ck you karen."
• Trump's speech used the White House as a backdrop to toxic advantage
• The optics of Trump speaking at the White House were powerful, even if the speech was a mess
• Noting that hundreds of audience members were sitting close together, CNN's Jake Tapper called Night 4 a “potential super-spreader event”
• The Daily Show took advantage of Melania Trump wearing a green dress for some greenscreen mischief
• Twitter also made memes out of the first lady's green dress
• What would Leonard Cohen think of Trump using "Hallelujah"?: The song has another Trump connection: Kate McKinnon mournfully performed "Hallelujah" on SNL as Hillary Clinton after Trump's victory in 2016.
• Night 3 of the Republican convention dipped 13% from Tuesday, attracting 15.8 million viewers
• How TV networks covered what amounted to a four-day Trump rally