Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker reviewed Trump’s acceptance speech and quickly discovered that there was no new Trump. Some thought, after he narrowly escaped assassination, that Trump would lower the temperature on his rhetoric. No way, she reported.

Despite promises to tone down the rhetoric, it didn’t happen.

Soon enough on Thursday night, the audience was back to its comfort zone, booing as Trump criticized “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and warned that the hated Democrats were “destroying our country,” cheering him on as he demanded the firing of union leaders and rambled about the “China virus” and the “plunder” of our nation by rapacious foreigners. The second coming of George Herbert Walker Bush this was not. All the Trump standbys were there: the supposed “invasion” at the southern border, the “caravans” and the illegal alien crime wave, the 2020 election that was stolen from him by Democrats “who used covid to cheat,” the weakness and incompetence of everyone else. The theme of the speech, of the night, of the campaign, was the same theme of Trump’s entire life, summed up in the one word that he had shouted in Pennsylvania on Saturday, before he was carried off the stage, bloodied but intact: “Fight!”

…listening to Trump talk on and on and on this Thursday evening, more than an hour and a half of strange and untruthful and incoherent freestyle rambling, it was hard to think that America was truly on the brink of reëlecting this man. He may have had a brush with death but he has not been reborn. He is the same Trump, only four years older, angrier, and far, far more incoherent than anyone who has any business being President of the United States. If Biden can’t beat him, then surely someone else can—and must.