I watched Trump’s acceptance speech on Thursday night; it was the only part of the RNC that I watched, other than a random 15 seconds of Vance’s speech the previous night. It lasted 92 minutes, breaking the modern record for “major party Presidential nomination speech length” previously held by… Trump.

That 92 minutes appeared to be two-thirds prepared remarks read from the teleprompter, and one-third digressions on topics he typically covers at his rally speeches. As noted in a Brookings article: “The last hour saw him continuing to claim several times that the 2020 election was stolen, praising authoritarian leaders around the world, saying he would lead the most massive deportation in the history of the United States, bizarrely mentioning the serial killer Hannibal Lecter, and promising that Russia and China would fear him so much they would stop their aggressive actions.” That was on top of the customary level of misrepresentations and falsehoods generally seen in a Trump speech.

The general view afterwards was that if Trump had somehow found the mental discipline to stick to the speech on his teleprompter, it could have been a very powerful and effective moment for his campaign. Instead, he delivered a performance that, as one MSNBC host said right afterwards, would have had people talking about invoking the 25th Amendment if it had been given by Biden.

Speaking of the President, the situation around his candidacy remains in flux but there have been fewer developments in the past 48 hours than I was expecting. Since Trump’s speech 4 more Senators have joined Senator Welch in calling for Biden to drop out, including two prominent red-state moderates, Tester (up for re-election this fall) and Manchin (who declined to run for re-election this fall). My former Representative in Chicago, Chuy Garcia, recently became one of the first minority members of Congress to join the call for a new candidate. The Biden contract on PredictIt has been pretty stable in the low $0.30s so far this weekend, after having dipped into the teens on Thursday.

A fact-check on the situation around Ohio ballot access, which I had previously discussed: It turns out that on June 2nd the Ohio governor did sign legislation that, on its face, moved the deadline for inclusion on this fall’s Presidential ballot from August 7th to September 6th. However, the Ohio state Democratic party chair appears to distrust that Ohio Republicans are operating in good faith and still is advocating for a virtual roll call to settle the Democratic nomination before August 7th.