Having used up most of the party's remaining Hollywood star power on Monday—and the party again thanks you for your service, Scott Baio—Tuesday's primetime Republican Convention lineup consisted mostly of Republican functionaries, Trump's own family, and people who Donald Trump has had business relationships with. The theme of the night was allegedly Make America Work Again, but viewers looking for any evidence of such a theme would be hard pressed. Instead, tonight was the night the Republican Party collectively bit the head off a live bat onstage.
The centerpiece of the evening was, literally, a mock trial of the opposition candidate. The central theme of the evening was, to quote the repeated chants from an otherwise-dispirited audience, Lock Her Up. For what? It remains unclear. On what evidence? On none that even the top party investigators, armed with all the resources their government offices can provide, can produce.
But the fact remains, according to the pronouncements of one of the two dominant political parties of the most powerful nation on earth, that it is not enough to elect Donald J. Trump, declared earlier in the day to be the new leader of the party after a vote in which the party head patiently explained to objecting delegates that the rules did not allow them to vote for anyone else. It is also necessary to jail the opposing candidate, who was declared to be an ally of the devil. Or, barring that, have her executed.
A review of the preliminaries:
• The evening started off with a Trump-promoted businessman relating how grateful he was that Donald Trump promoted his business. In this particular instance the business was the Ultimate Fighting Championship; Trump's involvement consisted of hosting events and being, we are told, nice to their proprietor. This would be the sum total of the party's economic message tonight—sporadic bits of testimony from those surrounding Trump stating that they are happy to have done business with him, or to have witnessed him doing business with others, and have no complaints they find worthy of relaying to the convention crowd.
• Bush-era Attorney General Michael Mukasey managed to do the impossible: bore a lynch mob to sleep. He valiantly attempted to make Hillary Clinton's email server sound interesting to a crowd who has based its new political existence on the theory that we should be jailing the opposition candidate for something having to do with that infraction—to the point where it chanted Lock Her Up, as demanded by the crowd during multiple speeches both this day and the last. It didn't work. They were uninterested.
• NRA functionary Chris Cox was there to promise the crowd that even though Obama did not, in fact, confiscate America's guns as the NRA had so breathlessly foretold during every single year of his presidency, Hillary Clinton would be sure to do so.
• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was there to promise the crowd that the current sitting president would not be appointing any further members of the Supreme Court, Constitution be damned. Instead, he said, the vacancy would be reserved for President Trump. This was a far cry from previous Republican reluctance to even admit that a Trump presidency would, one presumes, result in Trump court nominations. Now that the man was officially nominated, it seems, the link can no longer be dodged.
It was then on to the main event. The main event was, in this case, Trump's personal butler and still-theoretical governor of New Jersey Chris Christie, who dispensed with plausible deniability, and shame, and everything else party leaders had so desperately clung to. Do you want two minutes of hate? Fine, have it ten times over. Do you want every last Republican conspiracy theory rolled up tight and spit back out in tight, wet wads of rage? You've got it. You want show trials? We'll give you show trials.
Christie devoted the entirety of his speech to reading fake "charges" against Hillary Clinton, and after each one asked the crowd to render their verdict. GUILTY!, screamed the convention floor after each. The same charges that Mukasey could not muster more than a smattering of polite applause for became incendiary, now that Chris Christie had placed the mob in charge of declaring guilt or innocence. The same claims that the entire Republican Congress could not muster evidence for were re-read and embraced eagerly by the crowd, now that no evidence was needed.
I am not making this up, by the way. You can watch it on video. You can watch the Republican speaker rile the crowd to a froth; you can watch the Republican National Convention melt and reform itself as a hot, sweaty sea of invented infractions and imagined justice, shrieking GUILTY! over and over again as their self-appointed judge reads charges of the party's own invention against the criminal who dares stand against them. We shall call it a witch trial, because that is the generous interpretation. We are not to call it a fascist rally, a demand to discard the rule of law and act upon the blind rage of the oppressed white angry crowd, because that would be too incendiary for the both-siders of the punditry pages to handle. No, it was merely a witch trial.
On the radio the same day, a Trump adviser demanded more. The opposing candidate should be "shot for treason,” he spit. Even a mock trial was an unnecessary formality.
Then Tiffany Trump got up to tell the crowd that her father was a kind and decent man. The manager of Trump's personal winery stood up to tell the crowd that her employer was a kind and decent man. The son of Donald Trump, also named Donald Trump, walked onto the stage to tell the crowd that his father was a kind and decent and generous man.
And then we moved to Ben Carson. Ben Carson, once a serious contender for the Republican presidency himself, at least until he started campaigning for the job, was there to finish what Chris Christie started. Chris Christie had staged the witch's trial; the floor of the Republican National Convention had rendered their verdict. He spoke briefly, and badly. He told the crowd that their new leader was a kind and decent man. As for their opponent? She was not merely not a conservative. She was not merely a bad person, or a criminal, or someone worthy of being put before a firing line and shot. The opponent, the man told the collected luminaries and delegates and hangers-on of the Republican Party, was in league with the devil himself.
This is a nation where our Pledge of Allegiance says we are one nation under God! This is a nation where every coin in our pocket and every bill in our wallet says 'In God We Trust!' So are we willing to elect somebody as president who has as their role model someone who acknowledges Lucifer? Think about that!"
The evening was closed out by another soap opera star, this one now pursuing a second career as a job-creating avocado farmer. Donald Trump was a kind and decent man, she told the crowd. As president he would do great things.