You can read my live blog here, and then there’s this news report, Donald Trump just gave an amazingly surreal speech in Las Vegas from which I will quote a bit to see how surreal the attitude of the headline writer is. The story is pretty accurate, and is worth reading through. The Drudge headline for the link is “Trump Rocks the House in Vegas”. It begins:

Donald Trump just gave one of the most bizarrely captivating speeches of his several-weeks-old campaign.

Standing in front of an animated screen in Las Vegas on Saturday, Trump spoke passionately for almost a half an hour, hitting some of his main talking points: President Barack Obama’s weakness, a ‘porous’ southern border, his business successes, and even Benghazi.

It was one of two similarly themed speeches in the day. Later, he spoke before a crowd of what his campaign said was more than 15,000 in Phoenix.

Trump made illegal immigration the primary focus of both speeches, railing against the Mexican government for supposedly sending undocumented immigrants to the US.

Although others like to compare him with Ronald Reagan, the closer comparison for me is with Dwight D. Eisenhower for whom his first elected office was also that of President. I thought it was a very effective speech, and while there are still lots of questions that must hang in the air for a while, there was nothing flaky about how he behaved or what he said. What made him different was that he was willing to take issues head on and not pussyfoot around. Hillary won’t take questions from reporters, all of whom are her friends and supporters. Trump took questions from the floor and answered every single question that the audience was willing to put up, both friendly and hostile. And while there were some vacant areas that he will have to think through more carefully, he made no mistake on the night. You would not want to write him off, at least not yet. For me he was much more impressive than Marco Rubio had been the day before.

UPDATE: Trump’s speech has had wide circulation here in the US. I am now at Stanford for the next couple of days and saw an AP story in the local press, garbled of course, and negative, but still mentioned. This, however, is the take from Breitbart: TRUMP IN VEGAS: SLAMS OBAMA, HILLARY, JEB… CROWD GOES WILD. Some of the flavour:

LAS VEGAS, Nevada – Republican candidate Donald Trump addressed the FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas, telling delegates of his underestimated wealth, his passion for securing America’s border, the slanted portrayal of him in the mainstream media, and how he believes that China and Mexico have “smarter leaders” than the United States.

Some libertarians, who the conference is aimed at, believed that Trump would receive a hostile reception at FreedomFest. But the crowd was generally supportive, or at least open-minded, to Trump’s run. One delegate told Breitbart London, “He doesn’t pretend to be anything. People were surprisingly supportive of him.”

The report captures the essence of the surprise in finding Trump make sense about the issues he dwelt on. But his trying to locate his support within the Tea Party movement, as discussed in the report, may be the largest surprise of all.