Four Things Trump’s Speech Must Accomplish

CLEVELAND — Donald Trump’s big moment has arrived. For the sake of his campaign, he needs to make the most of it.

Even for a candidate used to a gaggle of media following his every move, his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention offers the biggest audience he will ever have to make his case, unfiltered by skeptical media and uninterrupted by his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

The convention has hardly been drama-free so far — from a media-hyped fight over rules, to a plagiarism snafu, to the show-stealing Cruz refusal to make an endorsement, the convention hasn’t stayed fully on message. Here are four things Trump needs to accomplish in his speech tonight:

1.) Avoid distractions.
It seems the campaign has had to put out one fire after another. First, it had to beat back an effort to change the rules to allow delegates hostile to Trump to attempt to dump him from the ticket. Then a flap erupted over a part of wife Melania Trump’s speech that mirrored words spoken by Michelle Obama in 2008. Then there was Sen. Ted Cruz’s speech declining to endorse the nominee — while urging Americans to “vote your conscence”

Each of these flareups knocked the convention coverage in the media off-message and distracted attention from the picture Trump wants to paint.

By his nature, Trump is loath to let anything to unchallenged. At times, that has led him to re-ignite negative stories that have died down. He needs to resist that urge Thursday night, ignore Cruz and other holdouts in the #NeverTrump movement, and rise above the fray.

2.) Focus like a laser on President Obama and Clinton.
There is nothing that unites fractious Republicans more effectively than Obama and Clinton. The biggest applause that running mate Mike Pence received in a speech full of them Wednesday night was his observation that Obama’s presidency ends in six months.

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Trump needs to tie Clinton to the Obama presidency — which should not be difficult, since she is openly running for his third term. That served her well in the Democratic primaries since Obama remains wildly popular among Democrats. But the public at large is much more skeptical of the Obama years.

Trump has plenty of material to work with. Wages for most Americans have declined while a smaller share of adults are working or looking for work. Even after bouncing back from the depths of the recession after the collapse of the housing market in 2008, the economy has never performed better than a slow crawl during the Obama years.

Trump can point to a Middle East that is even less stable and secure than the chaotic situation Obama inherited. And, of course, there is Clinton’s biggest liability — the widespread view that she dishonest because of her mishandling of classified information as secretary of state. Voters cannot hear that enough.

3.) Offer a positive vision
Nailing Clinton is important. But voters want more than a negative critique of current policies — they want plausible hope that things can get better. After so many years of slow growth and depressed wages, the risk is that Americans have accepted that this is simply the new normal.

Trump needs to channel his inner Reagan and inspire Americans to believe that the country’s best days are not behind it. He should combine soaring rhetoric with specific reforms — and perhaps  a real-world anecdote or two — to convince Americans that the economy really can return to the growth rates of the 1980s and 1990s.

4.) Appear “presidential.”
This elusive and hard-to-define standard was the stated goal of the convention. While the convention has not always lived up to that billing, no one can make Trump look presidential better than Trump himself.

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This requires a marriage of substance and style. When addressing large crowds like the one that will gather Thursday night, Trump has a tendency to wing it, feeding off the audience. What works well live, though, can come off as rambling on TV. And viewers will be judging his acceptance speech by a different standard.

On the other hand, Trump sometimes seems uncomfortable with scripted speeches read on a teleprompter.

Delivering a prepared speech and making it look natural is harder than it looks. The only way to master it is to practice. And since Trump has given so few of those kinds of speeches, he has hopefully spent convention week preparing.