Unlike most Americans who aspire to the Presidency, Donald Trump would like to break the world’s kneecaps with a ball-peen hammer. 

The 2016 GOP convention, political torture porn, has at last concluded, and its main kooky message lingers: The world is a dangerous place, especially for those white and blue, and at an extremely evil time like this, we need someone even more evil, a remorseless figure who will do unthinkable things, and that person is strongman Trump. He will protect us, this orange supremacist, this synthesis of Mussolini and Mayor McCheese. 

Never mind that the GOP flag-bearer’s behavior resembles that of a mentally ill person, a delusional sociopath, or that crime and economic statistics make it plain that the last eight years have been very good to America, from low murder rates to high Wall Street earnings. Even wealth distribution, that stubborn ill, has been adjusted somewhat under President Obama. Wage rates remain sluggish as they’ve long been, but it’s a mistake to view this election as one about money. It’s identity politics to the utmost and the attempt by one awful person to sell a violent culture war. It could work. If Trump loses horribly, it’s a death in the gutter for the modern GOP. If he wins, our entire country will have fallen from the curb.

The opening of Ezra Klein’s sobering Vox piece about the horrifying rise of an American fascist:

Tonight, Donald J. Trump accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for president of the United States.

And I am, for the first time since I began covering American politics, genuinely afraid.

Donald Trump is not a man who should be president. This is not an ideological judgment. This is not something I would say about Mitt Romney or Marco Rubio. This is not a disagreement over Donald Trump’s tax plan or his climate policies. This is about Trump’s character, his temperament, his impulsiveness, his basic decency.

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.

He has, instead, run a campaign based on stoking fear and playing to resentment. His speech tonight invoked a nightmarish American hellscape that doesn’t actually exist. His promise to restore order made him sound like the aspiring strongman his critics fear him to be. “I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,” he said. “Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.”•