Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (R) said during his closing speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night that voters will see former President Trump as a “genuinely decent person.”
“I believe a lot of Americans saw him in a way that the media doesn’t typically show,” Huckabee said on NewsNation’s “Morning in America.” In an interview Friday. “And he’s a really decent guy.”
Trump formally accepted the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday in a lengthy, rambling speech that lasted more than an hour, making it the longest speech by a major party candidate in the history of the Republican National Convention.
“I thought he struck the right tone, especially in the opening part of his speech,” Huckabee told host Anna Kooyman. “He had to mention the assassination attempt, and he handled it with great grace and elegance.”
The former president and his advisers said this week that in the wake of last weekend’s assassination attempt, he had withdrawn his original draft speech to the party convention and replaced it with a more muted one.
But Trump still criticized former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and President Biden in his speech.
CNN anchor Chris Wallace criticized President Trump’s speech early Friday morning.
“It seemed like he couldn’t keep up the performance,” Wallace told CNN, referring to the former president’s calls for “unity” and “calmness” days after the shooting that left Trump with a bullet grazed his ear. “And then we started hearing about ‘Crazy Nancy Pelosi,’ and election fraud and Biden.”
“Frankly, it was a long speech, it was disorganized, it was an older guy’s speech,” he continued. “And I couldn’t help but think that the people who are going to be most pleased tonight are not the people in Trump’s headquarters, but the people in the Democrats’ headquarters, maybe the people in Biden’s headquarters, or whoever else they think is an alternative to Joe Biden.”
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