President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

After four nights of scalding and often shouted slash-and-burn attacks directed at Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, it was quite a shock on Thursday night when Donald Trump nearly lulled America to sleep with his Republican National Convention speech on the south lawn of the White House.

It's not that Trump delivered a soothing address filled with warmth and good feeling. During long passages he savaged Biden as a Trojan Horse who would deliver America-hating socialists and anarchists to power. Those were the more lively sections of the speech. The trouble is that the charges against Biden had been made at the convention by many others before Trump, sometimes in identical language.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.