FTA:

The prepared remarks, circulated to the national media, came in at a tight 3,000 words. The section in which Trump recounts his near-death experience is recounted in his own fourth-grade level vocabulary, making it highly plausible he personally wrote or dictated the section himself[.]

Trump's speaking style was indeed different--softer, slower, abandoning his carnival barker patter for the tone of a bedtime story. Reporters, following the assumption of a "transformed" Trump they brought into the event, began to write accounts of the softer statesman who had emerged from his brush with death.

But then he began to riff, first occasionally, then in ever-growing chunks of verbal diarrhea. All the familiar tropes from his stump speeches returned. He claimed the election was stolen, lavished praise on dictators, riffed about things he had seen on television ("I watched the other day on a show called Deface the Nation' ... ).

The actual remarks as delivered topped 12,000 words, or four times the prepared text. Trump's 2024 acceptance speech was the longest in recorded history, topping the next two entries (Donald Trump 2016, Donald Trump 2020, respectively). The result was paradoxically incendiary yet dull. The crowd's response was, by the standards of a convention acceptance speech, shockingly sedate.