After Ted Cruz told the assembled audience to “vote your conscience” on Wednesday night, the Trump faithful were furious. But Reihan Salam thinks Cruz’s nonendorsement was an extremely canny political move. “If Trump goes down in November,” Salam writes, “Cruz’s Wednesday night speech could make him the GOP’s conservative standard-bearer for years to come.”
An interview touching on Trump’s perspective on NATO, published in the New York Times on Thursday morning, reveals the candidate to be a real threat to national security, Fred Kaplan writes. “If Trump is elected president, and if he actually does what he says he’ll do, every ally in Europe and Asia will scramble to form partnerships that do not include the United States,” Kaplan warns. (Putin would love it, Franklin Foer adds.)
The choice of one Wednesday night speaker, Michelle Van Etten, who works for a company called Youngevity, was shameful even by Trump standards, physician Jeremy Samuel Faust writes. “The CEO of Van Etten’s company is a man named Joel Wallach. He’s not a medical doctor, and yet, according to him, he’s cured several diseases the rest of medicine has yet to crack,” Faust reports. “These ‘scientific ideas’ actually could be funny if they weren’t being associated with a major political party’s national convention. But given that Trump and the GOP have such a history of denying any actual science, the inclusion of this pseudoscience is all the more infuriating.”
The convention has revealed that Trump really doesn’t have that firm of a grasp on one of his supposed skill sets, Willa Paskin writes. The “great showman Donald Trump” was supposed to “use his vaunted reality TV know-how to give the RNC a glitzy makeover,” Paskin points out. Instead, the convention has been a mismanaged mess: last-minute, low-wattage guests; the wrong speakers appearing during primetime; embarrassing blunders hogging media focus.
Michelle Goldberg photographed some choice evidence of the misogyny percolating beneath the surface at the RNC. Warning: It’s not pretty.
For fun: Why wouldn’t Republicans like Lucifer?
He’s a disruptor,
Rebecca
