Donning the mantle

IN THE run-up to the Republican National Convention, held in Cleveland between July 18th and 21st, Donald Trump lamented that its predecessor, in 2012, was “the single most boring convention I’ve ever seen”. As the party’s prospective nominee, he planned to prevent a repeat of that tedium, mainly by injecting “some show-biz” into the proceedings. On the evidence of the convention’s first three days, Mr Trump triumphed. The convention was one of America’s strangest and most compelling political set-pieces in decades. This was notwithstanding the C-grade celebrities, including a star of the reality television show “Duck Dynasty”, a golfer and a martial-arts impresario, whom Mr Trump wheeled out to praise him.