His speech was pure sleight of hand. Lots of misdirection. Its inner logic, when you really start parsing it, is just plain sneaky. Like you say, it will be received in two ways by people. You’ll either glance off of it and love it, or you’ll dig into it and probably be PO’d.
On the other hand, maybe the “throw granny under the bus” aspect is blatant enough that it’ll throw up some flags for folks who otherwise wouldn’t notice.