US Republican race: Donald Trump circus adds plagiarism to act

Melania and Donald Trump take to the stage at the Republican nominating convention in Cleveland.

Donald Trump never disappoints on theatre and the first night of the Republican nominating convention in Cleveland lived up to all Trump’s customary hype.

There were the rowdy demonstrations from anti-Trump ­Republicans, the powerful theme of Make America Safe Again, a stage entry from The Donald himself straight out of World Championship Wrestling, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani doing his version of “I’m Mad as Hell and I’m Not Gunna Take It Anymore”, and Melania Trump plagiarising her cliches from ­Michelle Obama. I didn’t know that anyone would bother to plagiarise cliches. After all, they’re cliches, right?

But Melania managed to bolt together a pretty standard Mec­cano set of political spouse specimens — Our word is our bond … Donald gets results … my parents brought me up to work hard.

And it turns out her lazy speech writer actually managed to use ­exactly the same sentences as ­Michelle Obama when she did her turn at the By Gosh, my hubby and I are the salt of the earth and he should be president schtick. It will be fascinating to see how the ­Melania speech kerfuffle ultimately plays out, but if Trump can’t turn any criticism of his wife into another episode of the media baddies-shoot-Bambi, I’d be very surprised. Overall the night was probably as good as you could expect from a Trump convention.

Raucous start to Republican convention

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These party conventions long ago lost their substance as decision-making events, but as theatre, and powerful consequential theatre at that, which can frame a candidate and their ­opponent, they are just about ­supreme. Tens of millions of voters are likely to watch Trump make his acceptance speech.

The theme of the night was law and order, and making America safe again. Like national security and economic management, this is typically a core brand strength for Republicans.

But Trump still has quite a lot of work to do with the Republican base. The absence of Republican presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and the last two presidential nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain, as well as local governor John Kasich, demonstrate that many mainstream, respectable Republicans still don’t want any association with Trump. They fear that he may be like the failed Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964, who not only lost by a record margin, but damaged the Republicans fearfully by opposing the Civil Rights Act.

So Trump is out first of all to secure his Republican base. He did that in part by choosing the highly conservative Governor Mike Pence of Indiana as his running mate. And then he focused most of the first night of the convention on ideas, law and order, and the wickedness of Hillary Clinton, with sub-themes of halting illegal ­immigration and being kind to veterans.

All American political professionals have imbibed the first commandment of successful journalism — humanise the story. So there were testimonies from ­victims of crime carried out by illegal immigrants.

There was also the genuinely moving testimony of former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, the “lone survivor” who made it back to safety after a week on the run in Afghanistan when every other member of his mission was killed.

The night also featured the mother of an American killed in the Beghazi embassy attack, who said she blamed Clinton for her son’s death. There was also an at times somewhat deranged sounding Giuliani, promising that Trump would make America safe again, just as Giluliani had made New York safe. Giuliani also attacked the Black Lives Matter rhetoric, in part by mocking President Barack Obama’s long ago declaration that there should not be a black America or a white America, just America.

The political correctness around Black Lives Matter, a movement which alleges — although the facts are far from clear — that US police more willingly kills blacks than whites, has become stultifying and absurd.

Jennifer Lopez was forced to retract a tweet saying that All Lives Matter because this was seen as disrespecting the Black Lives Matter campaign.

At the Republican convention, numerous speakers declared that Blue Lives Matter, in defence of the police.

Trump has secured important police endorsements — defending the police is now as powerful in US politics as defending the military.

Law and order, about which Americans have legitimate concerns, is surely one of the most prospective political lines for Trump to follow.