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Media Matters / Molly Butler |Trump photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Creative Commons

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Media outlets touted MAGA spin that Trump's RNC speech would be unifying. After, they admitted it was divisive and disjointed.

Written by Chloe Simon, Pete Tsipis & Torri Lonergan

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Leading up to Donald Trump’s Thursday speech accepting the presidential nomination at the 2024 Republican National Convention, many in mainstream media predicted the former president would tone down his rhetoric, calling him a “more disciplined candidate” who has “responded commendably” after he survived an assassination attempt just days before. In reality, Trump devoted much of his more than 90-minute-long acceptance speech to attacking Democrats, promoting election denial, and fearmongering about migrants — continuing longtime themes of his political career and undermining suggestions from mainstream outlets that he had finally pivoted to embrace “a message of unity.” 

  • The Trump campaign promised a pivot toward unity, but his presidential nomination speech was chock-full of divisive language and attacks

    • Following an assassination attempt against Trump during his July 13 rally, right-wing media and campaign figures attempted to rebrand him as a “changed man.” Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said that Trump became “the leader of this nation” after the shooting and is no longer the “selfish guy I’ve been hearing about for nine years.” Donald Trump Jr. also claimed that his father has been changed “permanently” following the attempt. [CNN, 7/18/24; USA Today, 7/18/24, 7/16/24]
    • Days after the attempted assassination, Trump spent a large portion of his RNC nomination speech attacking migrants and spreading 2020 election fraud conspiracy theories, among other false claims. Trump pushed several falsehoods that migrants are coming from “prisons” and “mental institutions” and that El Salvador is sending “their murderers” to the U.S. He also continued promoting 2020 election denialism, saying that Democrats “used COVID to cheat.” [Poynter, 7/19/24; The New York Times, 7/19/24; Media Matters, 7/19/24]
    • Referring to his multiple ongoing criminal cases, Trump said, “If Democrats want to unify our country they should stop these partisan witch hunts.” The former president, who was recently convicted on 34 felony charges in his New York hush money trial, further called for Democrats to “immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and labeling their political opponent as an enemy of democracy.” [Time, 7/19/24; The Associated Press, 5/31/24]

  • Prior to Trump’s acceptance speech, mainstream media were anticipating a “different” tone and “message of unity” from Trump

    • CNN anchor Kasie Hunt compared Trump to former President Ronald Reagan, saying Trump has embraced “a message of unity.” After showing a clip of Reagan “thanking his fellow Americans for their message of support and communicating a message of unity,” Hunt claimed that “this is one that former President Donald Trump has also embraced in the days after Saturday's assassination attempt against him.” [CNN, CNN This Morning, 7/17/24]
    • NBC News’ Kristen Welker said she would be “surprised” if the RNC did not reflect “the call for unity that former President Trump says he is now going to deliver.” Welker argued that “something has fundamentally shifted here at the Republican National Convention and, quite frankly, throughout our country. So I would be surprised if we do not see reflections of this, the emotion of it, the terror that it instilled, the call for unity that former President Trump says he is now going to deliver, quite frankly, infused into much of what we see unfold here this week.” [NBC, Today, 7/15/24]
    • NBC News contributor Jonathan Alter claimed that the announcement that Trump would be “rewriting his speech” was an indication that other speakers at the convention “ will be toning down the rhetoric some.” Alter further alleged that “you’re not going to see attacks, for instance, on Nancy Pelosi with the viciousness that they might have had, you know, before this incident, for obvious reasons.” (During Trump’s speech, he referred to Pelosi as “crazy Nancy Pelosi.”) [MSNBC, NBC News Special Report, 7/15/24; Mediate, 7/19/24]
    • MSNBC anchor Katy Tur claimed Trump looked “serene” after the assassination attempt and suggested that he may finally change his tone. Discussing Trump’s expressions during the first night of the convention, Tur said, “I've never seen Donald Trump with a look like that on his face.” She noted that while there’s “quite a bit of skepticism out there because there have been so many moments before where people have said he'd make a pivot” and he didn’t, a near-death experience can “change a person in a way that maybe nothing else can.” [MSNBC, Chris Jansing Reports, 7/16/24]
    • NBC News anchor Savannah Guthrie said she had been struck by “what we have not heard” during the RNC, claiming that “no one’s mentioning” 2020 election lies and suggesting political grievances had been “excised from what the Republican Party is trying to portray.” [Twitter/X, 7/17/24]
    • Citing an interview with right-wing media, CNN reporter Steve Contorno said he expected a “very different” tone from Trump at this year’s RNC. Contorno said, “We've seen him talk about tossing his convention speech and bringing in some new material. Let me read you exactly what he told the Washington Examiner: ‘The speech I was going to give was a real humdinger. Had this not happened, this would have been one of the most incredible speeches. Honestly, it's going to be a whole different speech now.’ We are expecting a very different convention, at least the tone of it.” [CNN, CNN News Central, 7/15/24]
    • CNN senior political analyst Mark Preston claimed Trump “has been a much more disciplined candidate” since the debate. Preston went on to say that Trump “physically looks different post-Saturday. I guess the point I'm trying to make is, this has been a much more disciplined candidate than we saw in 2016 or 2020.” [CNN, CNN This Morning, 7/16/24]
    • The Washington Post editorial board wrote that “Donald Trump has responded commendably to his harrowingly close encounter with a would-be assassin's bullet in Pennsylvania on Saturday.” The board added that “Mr. Trump's words tended to de-escalate rather than inflame — even if some of his allies and advisers regrettably indulged in the opposite impulse.” [The Washington Post, 7/15/24]
    • Politico Playbook wrote “we’re told Trump personally drafted his own Truth Social post adopting the ‘unify’ messaging and clicked send. To understand the difficulty of this pivot is to understand just how badly Trump’s team wants to win.” The piece added, “Right now, Trump has the potential to become a much more sympathetic figure in the eyes of undecided voters.” [Politico, 7/15/24]
    • Axios wrote, “Yes, Trump has shown little appetite for changing his ways, tone and words." “But his advisers tell us Trump plans to seize his moment by toning down his Trumpiness, and dialing up efforts to unite a tinder-box America, when the Republican convention opens Monday in Milwaukee.” [Axios, 7/15/24]

  • Following Trump’s speech, mainstream media noted that his unity pivot never materialized

    • Immediately following Trump’s speech, MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff noted that instead of delivering a unifying message, Trump had delivered “a deeply divisive message” about “kicking millions of people out of the country.” Soboroff criticized Trump for talking “about deporting more people than President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954, an operation with a name so racist that it's not appropriate to say on television.” Soboroff also described experiencing a “bizarre feeling” in response to hearing Trump talk “about removing more than 10 million people from this country” before the convention started “throwing balloons around as if this is a party.” [MSNBC, Republican National Convention: 2024 Republican National Convention - Day 4, 7/18/24]
    • CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins noted that even though Trump promised “a totally rewritten speech focused on unity,” he ultimately delivered “a typical Trump speech.” Collins said that while the Trump speech was billed as being “focused on unity,” it eventually started to sound “like a normal, typical Trump rally that would have happened before Saturday. He called Nancy Pelosi ‘Crazy Nancy Pelosi.’ He talked about ‘they’ are trying to destroy our country. He called the 2020 election ridiculous. … He exemplified Hungary’s authoritarian strongman leader who has, you know, scaled back democratic norms in that country. And a lot of that was exactly as a typical Trump speech is.” [CNN, CNN Republican National Convention: Night 4, 7/18/24]
    • Washington Post columnist Philip Bump wrote that “the imaginary Trump ‘unity’ pivot” predictably never came to fruition. Bump wrote that from the beginning “it was clear that Trump’s ‘unity’ message did not mean he was embracing an opportunity to reconsider his divisive politics. It was, instead, a potential opportunity to absorb the sympathy being expressed by Democrats in the moment and use it to demand that they be nicer to him.” Bump went on to note that in the end “Trump gave the same speech he always gives.” [The Washington Post, 7/19/24]
    • CNN anchor Jim Acosta explained how Trump “returned to his usual red meat rhetoric, attacking Democrats, demonizing immigrants, and spewing lies about the 2020 election.” Acosta added, “If I had a nickel for every time they were talking about Donald Trump taking on a new tone, I would have a lot of nickels. A lot of nickels. What happened to that message of unity that we were supposed to hear?” [CNN, CNN Newsroom with Jim Acosta, 7/19/24]
    • Katy Tur said that while the Trump campaign promised a “different Donald Trump,” his speech was “very much the same Donald Trump, painting a nation in decline, pushing false claims about the 2020 election, and promising a massive — the massive and the largest deportation of immigrants.” Tur concluded, “The content of the speech was not a unifying message. It was a very divisive message and one that Democrats will find, frankly, scary, especially when he is talking about immigration. ” [MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell Reports, 7/19/24]
    • MSNBC commentator Charlie Sykes said that Trump is “not a man who’s going to change who he is.” Sykes explained, “What you had was your typical rally ramble, with hitting all of the greatest hits of Donald Trump, including, as you highlighted, this proposal that would result in the forcible mass deportation of maybe 10 million people.” [MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell Reports, 7/19/24]

  • Mainstream media have been falsely predicting a Trump “pivot” since his 2016 campaign

    • Since first launching his candidacy in 2015, Trump has relied on divisive, racist, and xenophobic rhetoric — and he’s pushed policies to match his statements. Mainstream media have been predicting for years that a “more serious and sober Trump” would someday emerge, but as Media Matters’ Parker Molloy put it during the 2020 campaign: “Members of the press contort themselves in an effort to find something positive they can say about Trump, and that often comes at the expense of accurately portraying what’s happening in the world. Instead of providing context for what is happening, these analysts find still frames completely detached from time and meaning from the Trump presidency.” [Media Matters, 7/27/20]
    • The New Republic’s Greg Sargent pointed out that initial claims of a Trump pivot post-assassination attempt were immediately undercut by a rant posted on his Truth Social platform, making the idea of a “unity” pivot “a sick joke that merits nothing but mockery, derision, and contempt.” [The New Republic, 7/18/24]