Well, Donald Trump said words at us again. He didn't do it well, or even manage to get his tie on straight, and his speechwriter seems to have pasted most of the effort together from dried leaves and used gum, but at this point the presidential bar is so low he could roll over it on roller skates.
Now for the sorting-out part. As usual, much of the evening appeared to be a deliberate effort to murder the nation's fact-checkers outright. Among the first claims being flagged by still-living fact checkers:
• Trump claimed the economy has added almost 600,000 manufacturing jobs. That's about 150,000 more than the actual number, which is not substantively different from the numbers achieved during the Obama administration.
• Trump claimed no president has cut regulations as much as he has and in such a short time. This is one of his hobbyhorses, to be sure, but ... nope. Not true.
• Trump said this nation now has the "hottest economy" in the world. Nope, not true.
Trump also attempted to claim El Paso, Texas became "one of the safest cities" in America after installing a border wall. Nope. It was one of the safest cities before that wall was constructed.
This is only the first few bits of the fact-checking that will come out tomorrow; we'll have to wait for a final tally to see whether he broke his previous records. In particular, claims of a new "caravan" menace, claims about giving a damn about AIDS while flanked by a man who, by himself, created a new AIDS epidemic in the state of Indiana, prescription drug claims, NATO spending claims and other assertions are going to get raked over the coals by the morning.
This is, for Trump, the standard routine. The man is forever claiming superlative performance, making it up wholesale when needed in order to flatter himself, and claiming the world was a hellhole before he graced it with his ideas and his presence.
In the whole, this was a kitchen-sink speech. Throw a bunch of things against the wall; see what sticks. The only part that was written with any internal consistency was the racist part; the rest was fluff that will be forgotten in days. Token words about childhood cancer from an administration and party that has fought aggressively to strip healthcare from its victims; a few fat-fingered words condemning the "socialism" of expecting our country to do the things it used to do perfectly adequately, before a generation of crooks and kleptocrats took over. None of it is meant to be taken seriously.
Which is good, because it's impossible to do so.