CLEVELAND — Donald Trump, unconventional from the start, did the unprecedented on the first night of the convention poised to nominate him for president: He showed up onstage.
"We're going to win," he told the arena. "We're going to win so big."
He emerged late in the evening to introduce his wife, Melania, who offered a testimonial to her husband's warmth and humanity. "Like me, he loves this country very much," the Slovenian-born model said, describing her own decision to immigrate to "the greatest country on Earth."
She was enthusiastically cheered, but the Republican National Convention had opened hours earlier in protest.
On the convention floor, a revolt had erupted after the presiding chairman gaveled quick approval of the party rules over the shouts of Donald Trump opponents who believed they had gathered enough signatures to demand a roll-call vote. ("Brownshirts," former New Hampshire senator Gordon Humphrey raged, saying they were "acting like fascists.") Trump leaders already had been blasting such senior Republicans as the Bush family, the GOP's most prominent dynasty and one noticeably absent from the conclave. ("Part of the past," Trump convention manager Paul Manafort scoffed.)
And in the wider world, the deadly ambush of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La., another terrorism attack in France and a failed coup in Turkey set a grim backdrop that underscored the high stakes of the presidential election — one that already has left many voters dismayed by the country's direction and dissatisfied with their choices in the November election.
Not in a generation has an American political convention opened amid such open turbulence.
The convention didn't seem to hit its stride until former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered a vigorous and extended defense of Trump and his policies, speaking just before the Trumps. "I am sick and tired of the defamation of Donald Trump by the media and by the Clinton campaign," Giuliani said, bringing the convention to its feet. He described Trump as "a good man" who would "make America safe again."
"Who would trust Hillary Clinton to protect them?" he asked to a chorus of "no's!" "I wouldn't, would you?"
To be clear, Trump's nomination, scheduled for Tuesday, was never in peril. Still, he had a bumpy start to what is typically a nationally televised infomercial for the party and its nominee. His strategists hope it will help persuade skeptical voters to see Trump as a president they could trust.
But if his wife's description of Trump as "kind and fair and caring" was intended to soften Trump's image, most of the program on the opening program was an unrelenting barrage of criticism of Clinton and of the Obama administration she served: for violent crimes committed in the United States by illegal immigrants, for one thing, and for the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead.
"I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son, personally," Patricia Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, one of those killed, said in emotional remarks. "Donald Trump is everything Hillary Clinton is not. He is blunt, direct and strong. He speaks his mind, and when it comes to the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorism, he will not hesitate to kill the terrorists who threaten to kill American lives."
Fighting back tears, she said, "Hillary for prison. She deserves to be in stripes."
There were a series of speeches guaranteed to gin up the conservative base but, until Melania Trump spoke, few that seemed designed to appeal to the more moderate and swing voters who typically decide elections. Speaker after speaker described tragedies in their own lives, including the loss of their children, with accusations that the Obama administration's policies in general and Clinton in particular bore responsibility.
The controversy over Benghazi alone, the subject of eight separate investigations over the past four years, consumed more than a half-hour of the convention's prime time.
The evening's theme was "Make America Safe Again," a turn on Trump's ubiquitous slogan, "Make America Great Again." It was chosen weeks before the recent terror attacks and policy ambushes, but campaign advisers believe those ambushes and attacks may reinforce his message and its appeal for voters alarmed about a world that seems to be spinning out of control, a threat even to their own families.
There is "the anger in America, the frustration of the system being broken, that is in all of these states," Manafort said at a breakfast with reporters hosted by Bloomberg News. "You put on top of that current events and it creates even more angst and opportunity." He said Trump has been particularly drawn to the acceptance speech Richard Nixon delivered at the 1968 Republican convention in Miami Beach. At the Democratic convention in Chicago that year, chaotic demonstrations against the Vietnam War fueled a backlash that helped elect Nixon that November.
Trump offered his own preview of his Thursday speech on Fox News, calling in to Bill O'Reilly in an inexplicable interruption of his own convention, prompting the network to cut away from Smith's remarks. His speech will focus on law and order, border security, fixing the "depleted military" and other issues, he said. “It’s going to be a pretty large speech."
