Donald Trump’s Disturbia

“No matter what your feelings, whether you’re the governor of Ohio, whether you’re a senator from Texas, or any of the other people that I beat so easily and so badly, you have no choice,” he crowed. “You’ve got to go for Trump.”

.. Ivanka offered her father’s hero-myth at the beginning of her convention speech Thursday night: “He prevailed against a field of 16 very talented competitors.”

“No matter what your feelings, whether you’re the governor of Ohio, whether you’re a senator from Texas, or any of the other people that I beat so easily and so badly, you have no choice,” he crowed. “You’ve got to go for Trump.”

And on the distaff side, we are bound to hear more about “Crooked Hillary” and “Pocahontas” as the ladies celebrate making history in Philly this week.

.. “This idea that America is somehow on the verge of collapse, this vision of violence and chaos everywhere, doesn’t really jibe with the experience of most people,” the president said.

He added: “When it comes to crime, the violent crime rate in America has been lower during my presidency than any time in the last three, four decades. And although it is true that we’ve seen an uptick in murders and violent crime in some cities this year, the fact of the matter is, is that the murder rate today, the violence rate today, is far lower than it was when Ronald Reagan was president — and lower than when I took office.”

The rate of killings of police officers is also much lower since the Reagan years, he said. “Those are facts. That’s the data.”

.. Trump said The Enquirer, owned by a friend of his, should be “very respected” and should have won a Pulitzer for breaking the John Edwards love child story.

.. As Pence looked on with smiling trepidation, Trump asked him if he could set up a “super PAC” while he was serving as president to destroy Ted Cruz but didn’t wait for an answer.

Donald Trump’s Sham Patriotism

In his bid for the White House, Donald Trump is playing many roles: law-and-order strongman, sky’s-the-limit builder, dealmaker extraordinaire. But perhaps none is more emphatic than all-American patriot.

 .. His patriotism brims with grievances.
..Last week he suggested to The Times’s David Sanger and Maggie Haberman that if Russia invaded a NATO ally that wasn’t pulling its weight financially, he might not rise to its defense.
..On one hand, it leads him to echo conservatives’ longstanding charge that President Obama belittles our country by apologizing too much for it. On the other, Trump told Sanger and Haberman that he’d refrain from reprimanding allies with poor records on civil liberties because the United States is no paragon
.. And he attacked Ted Cruz anew, again mentioning the National Enquirer story that linked Cruz’s father to John F. Kennedy’s assassination and saying that the Enquirer deserves more respect than it gets.
.. I’m suspicious of two of the most commonly used yardsticks. But by both of those measures — a readiness to serve in the military and a devotion to domestically made goods — Trump isn’t much of a patriot.
.. And there’s nothing simple about a patriotism that’s really an amalgam of nativism, racism, isolationism and xenophobia and that denies this country’s distinction as a land of fresh starts, its arms open to a diverse world.
.. Patriotism,” the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson once said, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” It’s also a convenient cloak for a narcissist.

Ted Cruz Might Be the Only Republican Who Understands Donald Trump

If that wasn’t clear before the lights went up in the Quicken Loans Arena on Monday, it certainly was by the time Trump made his from-the-shadows entrance that night. Within minutes, you could find photos of the scene paired with shots of “the Undertaker” entering a crazed arena that made overt what we already suspected: that this week’s festivities were going to be as much W.W.E. as R.N.C.

.. And that’s what I like about what Cruz did last night: He embraced the professional-wrestling ethic that Trump has so fully imposed on this campaign. He leaned full-on into the spectacle.

.. But Cruz played the arena, as Triple-H or the Donald would. He understood that Trump doesn’t just want his former opponents to endorse him — he expects them to submit to him. This nominee does not consider it his job to reach out and favor his vanquished opponents with magnanimity and grace. His willingness to humiliate the likes of Christie, mocking his weight (“No more Oreos”), among other things, should make that obvious.