Welp, my twitter to blog app seems to be, uh, not working, so my “live” comments from last night’s Republican National Convention, may not ever show up.  Just as well, I suppose.

So, yeah.  It seemed like all was going well.  You actually had some good speeches last night — ones that (if they were to believed) showed a softer side of Trump.  Ivanka Trump got out there and talked about how her father had fought for womens’ rights in the workplace, equal pay, etc. — stuff that Trump has NEVER talked about.

She introduced this warm nice father of hers, but out came this hulking red-faced angry man.  The speech wasn’t as interesting as his usual ad-libbing boastful person. But … this was much darker, much uglier. There was little to laugh at. Less to mock. His ego was subdued by his speechwriter, which must’ve been quite the feat in itself, but still, holy shit this was nasty.

At moments he starts screaming just to raise his bile up to wake himself up. To get that bit of rage-high. He’s bored to death otherwise. Trying desperately to contain his ADD.

Now, nobody expected a wonkish policy speech, but he promised EVERYTHING with no details as to how to do it.  “We’re going to defeat Islamic terrorism with our allies. Quickly. Fast.” How? He won’t say. He promised some reforms earlier in the speech. None has emerged. Surely those open to his blandishments can see he has nothing specific to offer.

Get rid of crime.  Trump yelled “I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end… Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.”  How?  Sign an executive order?

It got more and more insane as he went on.  So much about law and order, clearly trying to capitalize on recent police shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge.  But oh so fact free.  Crime has been trending down for years.  It spiked up in a few cities last year, and that’s the part that Trump focused on, failing to mention the overall trend.

At no point in the entire exhausting, tedious, repetitious series of barks and growls did Trump say he would go to Congress to ask for something. Not once did he even hint that he understood that he couldn’t just clap his wee hands and make it so. In fact, everything in his acceptance speech was pointedly about how he and only he can solve the problems in the country.

What is going to happen if Trump is elected and Democrats in the Senate block a bill to build the stupid border wall? Or a bill to change the Affordable Care Act? What is he going to do? Trump would say that he’ll make deals with them, as if that never occurred to President Obama, who gave Republicans nearly everything they asked for in many negotiations while still getting stabbed in the gut by them when it was time to vote. Senators have a long memory, and Democrats will want payback. So what will Trump do? He’ll do what his idiot hordes demand, up to and including violence. Because when you have a cult of personality, the leader of that is the only thing that matters.

And he went on. 75 minutes — the longest nomination speech in presidential history.

At times, he would seem to be inclusive of all races and religions and thoughts.  And then he would pivot back to “We don’t want them in our country.” An unscripted eruption from Trump’s gut. I can’t imagine any other nominee in my lifetime speaking so crudely, and evoking so much fear and loathing of immigrants.

This may have been my favorite tweet of the night:

I’ve heard this sort of speech a lot in the last 15 years and trust me, it doesn’t sound any better in Russian.

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2016

For those waiting for him to pivot to a more centrist message, this was not it.  He is playing to his base.

And more importantly, playing to fear.  Fear of crime.  Fear of other.  Fear of THEM taking the country from US.  It wasn’t so much about fixing healthcare as much as it was locking up (or shooting) Hillary Clinton.

What is important to keep in mind is that this is what authoritarians always do. They capitalize on fear as a way to get people to give them power. That is why so many people have zeroed in on what might have been the most important line of Trump’s speech.

I am your voice, said Trump. I alone can fix it. I will restore law and order. He did not appeal to prayer, or to God. He did not ask Americans to measure him against their values, or to hold him responsible for living up to them. He did not ask for their help. He asked them to place their faith in him.

My natural inclination is to remain calm and avoid hyperbole. But even from that frame, I have to say that this is the root of fascism. Here is how Suderman described it:

The essence of that argument is that America is unsafe and decline, and that as a result it should be cut off from the world, plunged into fear, and managed by a simple-minded strongman whose ego and bluster know no limits. This was the argument that Trump made last night. It is his pitch for the presidency. And it is a lie—a fictitious, nightmarish vision that a power-hungry narcissist invented for the purpose of acquiring power for himself by being elected president.

At the end of Donald Trump’s interminable acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last night, CNN commentator Ana Navarro had this to say:

I am getting texts from Republican congressmen who are saying “I’m embarrassed of my party,” “he sounded like a fearmonger,” “this is not Republicanism.” A lot of Republicans today are cringing by what we’ve seen tonight…. Go listen to the words of the chief of police of Dallas, that’s the kind of thing that will get us past this crisis not this fearmongering, not this disgusting speech that we heard tonight that does nothing but bring out the darkness in America. It is terrifying to me.

Other reactions? Yglesius says (correctly) that the problem isn’t Trump, but the Republican Party (or specifically, what it has become):

Not everything in American conservatism is toxic, but the convention has revealed a profound and genuinely unusual intellectual and moral rot in the Republican Party: a weakness for outlandish conspiracies and a preference for talk-radio antics over the necessarily-somewhat-dull work of practical politics. Trump is not so much the cause of this rot as the man who simply has the daring to punch the tree and send it tumbling down. The run-of-the-mill elected officials and the rank-and-file delegates who cheered them on did the damage.

Lost in the debate over the propriety of the convention’s loud and lusty “lock her up” chants, for example, has been insufficient focus on the basic ridiculousness of the argument.

Hillary Clinton’s email server, after all, has already been extensively investigated by a team of FBI agents and federal prosecutors. She’s not going to be locked up because she’s not going to be put on trial because James Comey, a Republican and George W. Bush administration veteran, determined that, given the facts, “no reasonable prosecutor would file charges.”

Under the circumstances, why on earth should she be locked up? Are Comey and the whole FBI in on the cover-up? Why?

They don’t know and they don’t care to ask. Or they do know and they just don’t care that they’re wrong. Or something.

Daniel Pipes, who has served in five presidential administrations, quits the GOP and writes why:

Here’s why I bailed, quit, and jumped ship:

First, Trump’s boorish, selfish, puerile, and repulsive character, combined with his prideful ignorance, his off-the-cuff policy making, and his neo-fascistic tendencies make him the most divisive and scary of any serious presidential candidate in American history. He is precisely “the man the founders feared,” in Peter Wehner’s memorable phrase. I want to be no part of this.

Second, his flip-flopping on the issues (“everything is negotiable”) means that, as president, he has the mandate to do any damn thing he wants. This unprecedented and terrifying prospect could mean suing unfriendly reporters or bulldozing a recalcitrant Congress. It could also mean martial law. Count me out.

Third, with honorable exceptions, I wish to distance myself from a Republican Party establishment that made its peace with Trump to the point that it unfairly repressed elements at the national convention in Cleveland that still tried to resist his nomination. Yes, politicians and donors must focus on immediate issues (Supreme Court justice appointments) but party leaders like GOP committee chairman Reince Priebus, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wrongly acquiesced to Trump. As columnist Michael Gerson wryly notes, Trump “attacked the Republican establishment as low-energy, cowering weaklings. Now Republican leaders are lining up to surrender to him – like low-energy, cowering weaklings.”

Fourth, the conservative movement, to which I belong, has developed since the 1950s into a major intellectual force. It did so by building on several key ideas (limited government, a moral order, and a foreign policy reflecting American interests and values). But the cultural abyss and constitutional nightmare of a Trump presidency will likely destroy this delicate creation. Ironically, although a Hillary Clinton presidency threatens bad Supreme Court justices, it would leave the conservative movement intact.

Not surprisingly, during the convention, the RNC displayed a tweet by a white-supremacist account. The tweet, written by the account @Western_Triumph, appeared on four large screens in the Quicken Loans Arena Republican after the halfway mark during Donald Trump’s acceptance speech on Thursday night. It was one of a series of tweets by Twitter users that appeared in the hall that were curated by the Republican National Convention.

Well, what are you going to do?  You cook with racism, it’s going to taste that way too.

I haven’t even mentioned the lies.  Oh my God the lies.

How should Clinton respond?  Not in the same way obviously.  And she can’t pretend there are no problems.  She just has to show that she has the temperament to fix things rather than scare people about them.  Be efficient, entertaining and patriotic.  And stick even harder to STRONGER, TOGETHER.  Great theme.

One good thing- this brought Jon Stewart out of the woodwork:

UPDATE: Trump, true to form, bragged about the assumed high TV ratings of the speech.  Turns out…. not so much.

DNC ’12 (final night): 35.7 million viewers
RNC ’12 (final night): 30.3 million viewers
DNC ’08 (final night): 38.4 million viewers
RNC ’08 (final night): 38.9 million viewers

An average of 29.9 million people watched Donald trump accept GOP nomination during 10 PM hour last night on broadcast, CNN, FOX, MSNBC.