The speech was too late for all the responses, but we do have a few:
But back to reality, as we wait to see of media will normalize fascism:
David A. Graham:
Trump’s speech was singularly—and perhaps excessively—focused on himself as a messianic figure.
Preceded by Evita’s speech to make him look normal. Note to self: she’s the dangerous one after he loses.
David Brooks:
But this is not a normal convention. Donald Trump is dismantling the Republican Party and replacing it with a personality cult. The G.O.P. is not dividing; it’s ceasing to exist as a coherent institution.
The only speaker here who clearly understands this is Ted Cruz. He understands that the Trump phenomenon is probably not going to end the way a normal candidacy ends. It’s going to end catastrophically, in November or beyond, with the party infrastructure in tatters, with every mealy mouthed pseudo-Trump accommodationist permanently stained.
Some rich children are careless that way; they break things and other people have to clean up the mess.
John Sides:
Everything you need to know about how political conventions affect the horse race
Which candidate is likely to benefit more? There is a decent chance it will be a wash, with maybe a larger bump for Clinton than Trump. Right now, Clinton has about a 3.5-point lead in the polls. This is just under what current forecasts suggest she will have on Election Day. For example, the forecasting site Pollyvote estimates that Clinton will win in November by about 5 points. So you could imagine that after both conventions, Clinton’s lead over Trump will be larger than it is now.
Of course, every election year has its idiosyncrasies — and clearly there is particular uncertainty about what the GOP convention will look like given Trump’s unorthodox candidacy.
But whatever transpires will be consequential. After the conventions, it becomes much harder for the candidate trailing in the polls to make up enough ground to win.
Ezra Klein:
Donald Trump’s nomination is the first time American politics has left me truly afraid
Back in February, I wrote that Trump is the most dangerous major candidate for president in memory. He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he's a racist, a sexist, and a demagogue, but he's also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante. He lies so constantly and so fluently that it's hard to know if he even realizes he's lying. He delights in schoolyard taunts and luxuriates in backlash.
He has had plenty of time to prove me, and everyone else, wrong. But he hasn’t. He has not become more responsible or more sober, more decent or more generous, more considered or more informed, more careful or more kind. He has continued to retweet white supremacists, make racist comments, pick unnecessary fights, contradict himself on the stump, and show an almost gleeful disinterest in building a real campaign or learning about policy.
Here is what we know — truly know — about Trump. Here is why he should not be president.
Tablet:
“What a memorable day!” wrote a middle-class Hamburg housewife in her diary on Jan. 30, 1933. She had just watched the parade of torch-bearing storm troopers celebrate Adolf Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany.
Frau Solmitz did not, however, extol only Hitler. She waxed melodic about Hitler’s cabinet, in which there were just three Nazis. All the others were upstanding conservatives, men like Franz von Papen, the aristocratic former chancellor and leader of the Catholic Center Party, and the career bureaucrat Constantin von Neurath, who was named to head up the foreign ministry. These were experienced men, reasonable men. They would contain Hitler’s excesses. After four years of economic depression and political paralysis, 14 years since the humiliation of the Versailles Peace Treaty, decades of an overweening Jewish presence in German public life, it was time for a new beginning. It was time to make Germany great again.
In the end, a small clique of businessmen, estate owners, bankers, high-ranking civil servants, and army officers prevailed upon the president, Paul von Hindenburg, to name Hitler chancellor of Germany. For these traditional conservatives, the Nazis were uncouth, low class, and undisciplined. Yet these same conservatives made a political bargain with the Nazi party. Developed over the 14 years of the Weimar Republic, the bargain was created and then sealed through a common political language of utter disdain for the Republic, contempt for Jews, opposition to the Versailles Treaty, and hostility to democracy and socialism.
Historical analogies are always fraught. No serious political movement today in the West is anything like the Nazi party. But the process by which traditional and radical conservatives came together through a common language carries numerous warning signals as we experience the surge of right-wing populism from Poland across the continent, on to the United Kingdom, and across the ocean to the United States.
Draw your own conclusions.
James Hohmann:
-- Not just Cruz looks bad: Convention organizers committed political malpractice by giving him such a prime speaking slot with no commitment to endorse Trump.
-- In the context of the next three months, Cruz’s speech showed the hollowness of GOP unity. The storyline coming out of Cleveland will be that Republicans are divided – exactly the opposite of what Trump’s campaign wanted and needed.
-- The Trump family sat stone-faced in the VIP box as Cruz spoke.
What Ted Cruz did took guts (and I am no Cruz fan). But let’s see if he has the courage to stay the course under withering counterattacks. In any case, Cruz and his story is a future draft choice, except for what it means about disunity now.
This is also part of Cruz thinking:
Ron Brownstein:
The Grand Old Divided Party
At the Republican National Convention, reactions to Donald Trump range from lackluster enthusiasm to outright defiance.
If one of the key questions heading into Cleveland was whether the party leaders who resisted Trump during the primaries could enthusiastically rally behind him once he secured the nomination, the convention’s first few nights have provided an unambiguous answer: no.
Cruz, as is often the case, pushed confrontation the furthest by refusing to provide the nominee with even a perfunctory endorsement…
Cruz, as usual, took the route of most direct confrontation. But the message Cruz sent about Trump by commission wasn’t all that different than the signal Ryan—as well as McConnell and Rubio—have sent by omission.
Jim Tankersley:
Some Reagan conservatives have long argued, privately, that Trump's populism and protectionism will give way to Reaganism if elected. That trade will be less important than tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.
What Trump is suggesting, in accepting the Party of Reagan's nomination, is that those arguments have been wrong all along. Trump is a longtime populist. He is a longtime critic of trade deals. He is a deal maker, with an unshakable belief that he alone can untangle what he calls the "rigged" economic system in America today. He is not Reagan. He is the Trump who hammered trade and immigration on his way to the nomination, and, by all appearances, would continue to do so as president.
As the song says, Lord knows, he can't change.
Michael Gerson:
There is a Trump effect or syndrome that forces his surrogates to live in a fantasy world. To avoid inner ideological and moral conflict, they must project an image of the nominee as they would wish him to be. And then they must learn to maintain that image by defending the indefensible. Their loyalty requires them to disfigure reality. So, in Pence’s account, Trump has a “colorful style” — which includes mocking the disabled and decades of casual misogyny. He “can be a little rough with politicians on the stage” — which includes accusing his Democratic opponent of complicity in murder.
Robert Schlesinger:
The evening's proceedings proved to be less focused on jobs and the economy than giving vent to decades' worth of Republican loathing of Hillary Clinton. Indeed, as much as Republican nominee Donald Trump has compulsively tried to focus the attention on himself (his brief video appearance Tuesday night seemed to serve no purpose other than to provide a vehicle for Donald Trump to appear), the session was about Hillary, Hillary, Hillary.
The question midway through the convention is whether the party can pivot and present a positive or even not-scary face to the country.
Indeed, NBC News tallied the evening's 19 talks and adjudged two-thirds of them – 13 of the night's speeches – to be anti-Clinton and only six being pro-Trump. "What do those six speakers have in common? They aren't GOP politicians or politicos," NBC's Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann write. "All of last night's pro-Trump speeches came from Trump's family, friends, and business associates."
TPM:
If it were a typical Republican convention, the convention speaker might attack Hillary Clinton's position on immigration, her record on health care, her plan to grow the economy.
In 2016, the GOP is accepting a new refrain to beat their opponent: "Lock Her Up."
As the Republican Party struggles to heal itself after a divisive, year-long primary that culminated in the nomination of Donald Trump, Republicans are finding it easier to rail against Clinton than rally around their own nominee.
"I think it just creates a sense of camaraderie that people are on the same page. I don't think anybody really expects that to happen," Ben Carson told TPM.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
It's Official: Hillary Clinton Is Running Against Vladimir Putin
Fulfilling what might be the Russian autocrat’s dearest wish, Trump has openly questioned whether the U.S. should keep its commitments to NATO.
After the anti-NATO comments from Trump, expect more “GOP for Clinton” announcements from the nat/sec sector. This is a long and worthy read.
Jonathan Cohn:
The Republicans gathering inside the Quicken Loans Arena don’t care too much about the nitty-gritty of policy. But if there’s one substantive issue that generates passion among convention delegates and party leaders, it’s Obamacare.
They think it crushes freedom. They think it’s a handout. And they think it’s a policy disaster.
At the Neighborhood Family Practice, which serves a racially diverse, low-income area about six miles west of downtown, the clinic staff has a slightly different perspective.
For them, the Affordable Care Act isn’t an ideological abstraction, to be loved or hated for what it represents. It’s a part of their daily lives, a program that has dramatically changed the way they conduct business. And they say it’s been a godsend.
Rick Hasen on the TX voter ID case:
The bottom line is that the majority of the 5th Circuit has done what the panel opinion had originally held: there is a remand on the question whether Texas acted with a discriminatory purpose, but there is enough evidence of a discriminatory effect so as to render the Texas id law a Voting Rights Act violation.
BUT, and this is a big but, the remedy is NOT going to be to strike the Texas voter id law as a whole, but instead to fashion some kind of relief that give people who have a reasonable impediment to getting an id the chance to get one. This might be like the affidavit requirement just approved yesterday in the Wisconsin case, or something else (like an indigency exception affidavit). Further, given the timing of the election, the trial court has to craft some kind of interim relief and then can figure out a more comprehensive solution after the next election.
BUT, BUT there is a very strong dissent from the 5th Circuit’s most conservative members, and that might give Texas a reason to go to the Supreme Court to try to get this emergency interim relief stayed.
BUT, BUT BUT: the Supreme Court has now lost Justice Scalia, and at best Texas could hope for only 4 votes to reverse what the 5th Circuit has done.