Christian Lorentzen

It’s strange to be in a bar where the coolest guy is Newt Gingrich. The Westin Hotel is the headquarters of Team Trump, and its shock troops were outside smoking Cuban cigars and reminiscing about their efforts to win the Indiana primary, the contest that at last vanquished Ted Cruz. The delegates and GOP operatives at the bar not lining up for selfies with Newt felt the Tuesday proceedings had been an improvement on Monday in that none of the speakers seemed candidates for being sectioned. I was disappointed by the absence of Roger Stone, the former Nixon dirty trickster and longtime Trump confidant, who had been holding court the night before. Stone began his career at age 16 on Nixon’s 1968 campaign. He smeared the opponent, Hubert Humphrey, by making a donation to his campaign in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance and giving the receipt to the Manchester Union-Leader. He is also a longtime business partner, in the international political consulting racket (speciality: Eurasian dictators and elected Putin clients), of Paul Manafort, who has emerged as the Cromwell to Trump’s Henry VIII.

‘Fragments were used,’ Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort said of Melania Trump’s plagiarised Monday night speech. It was a Tuesday morning press conference, and Manafort, chief bulldog of Trump’s vintage Nixonian thug braintrust, was ceding no ground. 'Obviously Michelle Obama feels similar things about her family. The American people focused on her message. You people are trying to distort that message. The plagiarism charge was first spread by the Clinton campaign. Whenever Hillary feels threatened by a woman she tries to destroy her.’ Melaniagate occupied the day’s news cycle even though no one would expect her to write her own speech or to say what she actually thinks. Whether anyone cares what she actually thinks is another question.

I woke before dawn on Monday in Parma, a Ukrainian neighbourhood south of downtown Cleveland, and watched a lightning storm flash for half an hour over Lake Erie. In a world governed by the pathetic fallacy, the storm might have signalled that Donald Trump was angry or doomed or both, or that the Republican Party was angry or doomed or both. Trump has demonstrated that the GOP primary electorate can do without the three main planks of the conservative movement that’s had the party in its grip since Reagan. For a hawkish interventionist foreign policy, he has substituted a ban on Muslims entering the US. In place of globalised free-market fundamentalism, he has engaged in the rhetoric of nationalist protectionism and a xenophobic paranoia when it comes to the border with Mexico. Unschooled in the catechism of social conservatism, he has railed against the catch-all of political correctness. He made scorched earth of the party’s new policy of outreach to Hispanic Americans. Trump’s pick last week of the Indiana governor and former talk radio host Mike Pence as his vice-presidential candidate was seen as a sign of reconciliation with doctrinaire conservatives – at least until it was reported that Trump was making midnight calls to see if he could get away with ditching him.

Acquiescence, co-option, appeasement? It’s hard to tell what’s been going on between Donald Trump and the American right since he became the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Tuesday saw Trump’s final Foxwashing, the end of the feud between the candidate and Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly.

An old friend of mine told me that watching the first plane hit the World Trade Center from a commuter bus in Queens he assumed pilot error was to blame. (If only.) Like many editors, my friend saw the world as a conspiracy of errors and believed, despite my attempts to convince him otherwise, that emailing manuscripts resulted in digital corruption – the sort of thing where ‘too’ replaces ‘two’ or ‘to’. But mistakes do happen, sometimes with dire consequences, especially if they involve planes and missiles. The seventh deadliest aviation disaster in history – the tenth if you’re counting 9/11 – is the downing of Iranian Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes on 3 July 1988.