Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) said voters will see former President Trump as a “genuinely decent guy” following his speech Thursday evening to close the Republican National Convention.
“I believe that a lot of Americans saw him in a way that the press doesn’t usually allow him to be seen,” Huckabee told NewsNation’s “Morning in America” in an interview Friday. “And that’s that genuinely decent guy.”
Trump formally accepted the GOP presidential nomination Thursday via a long and rambling speech. His remarks went on for longer than an hour, making the speech the longest one given by a major party candidate in RNC history.
“I thought he had the right tone, especially in the beginning part of the speech,” Huckabee told host Anna Kooiman. “He had to address the assassination attempt and he did that with a great sense of grace and class.”
The former president and his advisers said this week that he had scrapped his original convention speech draft in the wake of the assassination attempt against him last weekend for something more restrained.
However, Trump still took swings at former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and President Biden in his speech.
CNN anchor Chris Wallace criticized Trump’s speech early Friday morning.
“It seemed as if he couldn’t keep up the act,” Wallace said on CNN, referencing the former president’s call for “unity” and a “lower temperature” in the days after the shooting, where a bullet grazed Trump’s ear. “And so, we started hearing about ‘crazy Nancy Pelosi’ and cheating on elections and talking about Biden.”
“Frankly, it was a long speech, it was a rambling speech, it was a speech by an older man,” he continued. “And I couldn’t help but think that the people that are gonna be happiest tonight are not the people at Trump headquarters, but the people — the Democrats, maybe at Biden headquarters, maybe at the headquarters of other people who think they’re gonna replace Joe Biden.”
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