You also don’t really need to think for a speech. You’ve got a friendly audience who won’t challenge you and you know exactly what the next topic is, so you can focus on inflection and timing and emotion. It’s good to see him have some life in the speech, but it’s not really much of a counter to his terrible debate performance.

And incidentally, that’s probably why Trump’s performance sounded better. He also didn’t really need to think about substance because he was just speaking to whatever topic he felt like and making things up without concern for truthfulness or challenge.