The Angle

The Angle: Well, That Was That Edition

Slate’s daily newsletter on the last day of the Republican National Convention.

Donald Trump speaks, in front of a surfeit of flags, on the final day of the Republican National Convention.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump‘s acceptance speech on Thursday night was strangely “un-American,” Franklin Foer writes. “He didn‘t ground his narrative in American history; he didn‘t invoke any leaders or episodes from the national past,” Foer points out. “There was little sense of American exceptionalism … No talk about a light unto the nations.” Just Trump.

Rachael Larimore kept hoping somebody would step in to keep Trump’s nomination from happening. On the day after the convention, the longtime Republican is coming to terms with the fact that it‘s over, and she’s full of angry despair. “It will be a long time before I will feel any loyalty to a party leadership that was so tunnel-vision focused on ‘winning’ that it sidled up to Trump the second it became clear he was going to get the required number of delegates,” Larimore writes.

Trump’s speech was full of exaggeration and fearmongering about crime, Leon Neyfakh writes. But his recitation of homicide statistics from American cities wasn’t entirely incorrect. While violent crime has been steadily declining since 1991, we have seen a startling spike in urban homicides in the past couple of years. “These numbers are good fodder for fearmongering because they are legitimately scary. It should be possible to acknowledge them as reality while rejecting Trump’s craven and hollow attempt to leverage them for his own purposes,” Neyfakh argues.

The RNC was notably godless this year, Ruth Graham writes, and social conservatives noticed. “This week’s Republican convention in Cleveland barely tried to pretend that its candidate cares about abortion, sexuality, or God,” Graham writes. “The truth is that Trump does not need to speak the language of white evangelicals in order to earn their votes.”

Fox News chairman Roger Ailes’ resignation on Thursday has left Christina Cauterucci feeling “a bit of a letdown” at what should have been a satisfying comeuppance. Ailes showed no self-awareness in his resignation, scored a handsome payout, and, worst of all, as Cauterucci points out, “there is little evidence to suggest that Fox News will learn its lesson or change its culture of sexism, even with Ailes gone.”

For some (admittedly dark) fun: Has 2016 really been the worst year in history? Ten historians propose alternatives; you vote.

1492 is pretty persuasive,

Rebecca