The floor might have been a prop for TV, but it was beautiful. Spotlights danced off the red, white, and blue bunting, off the tall, triangular signs spelling out the names of the states and territories, off the delegates themselves, equal and unruly, a republic made flesh. To stand on it gave one a feeling of chaos and joy.

The states were defined by red carpets running between them, and by their costumes. Guam wore tropical-print shirts. Texas had Lone Star flag shirts and cowboy hats and super-sized enamel pins. North Carolina seemed patrician and slightly aloof in their seersucker suits. West Virginia wore hardhats and pinstripes, waving “Trump Digs Coal” signs. Chunks of Colorado displayed a mutinous, die-hard love for Ted Cruz by walking out of the convention on Monday afternoon. The many-footed whip was walking up and down the aisles, handing out Trump/Pence signs, whipping up cheers of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” often settling for “USA! USA! USA!”

Moving around the Floor, delegates could brush past such legendary statesmen as Jeff Sessions, Newt Gingrich, and Orrin Hatch. They could attempt to peer into the epicenter of a 40-foot, 30-legged, many-cabled monster, at the center of which Chris Christie was milking the last few hours of his celebrity. They could catch a glimpse of Trump’s three-trunked family tree, a genetic menagerie seated like princelings in tiered opera boxes, before being admonished by an officer to “keep moving.” They could ride elevators with the party elect and watch longingly as they disappeared into the closed-off upper levels of the Quicken Loans Arena, known as the Q, on their way to the Founders Room, the 45 Club, the Senate Cloakroom, the House Cloakroom, and the Grand Old Party Suite.

Two rifts in the Republican Party still needed patching up. The first rift was between Trump and Cruz. The serious Tea Partiers considered Cruz to be more reliable than Trump, a “Democrat in disguise.” The Day 2 Melania/Michelle plagiarism flap didn’t help on this front, nor did the high drama of Day 3, when Cruz himself took the stage, espoused a fusion doctrine of Tea and Trumpism, slammed Obama for exporting jobs and importing terrorists, but, in the end, failed to endorse Trump. This might not have come as a complete surprise to the inner circle of Trump’s camp, but whatever information they had was closely held. The rest of the convention was stunned by Cruz’s impertinence and nearly drowned the end of his speech out with boos.

The Floor was choppy as the sea in changing weather. “All he [Cruz] had to say was Make America Great Again,” said Adrienne King, delegate of Hawaii, who was furious about Cruz’s betrayal. “He would have brought the house down.”

“Get off the stage!” hollered Clifford Young, an alternate delegate from California. A few minutes later, I asked him why he was so angry at Cruz. “It’s sour grapes,” he said. “He needs to go back to Texas. And stay in Texas.”

Cruz was finally out of the way. Trump had the nomination, but it would take some time before the hearts and minds of his people would belong to Make America Great Again, shortened to MAGA. Late on Day 3, after Cruz’s speech, one Cruz die-hard fired a text message off to her friend as she fled the Floor by elevator: “I’m done with these A-holes who are angry with Cruz.” Even at her moment of greatest anger, she did not type out the full expletive. It would be hard for her to come around to a man like Trump.

The second rift, a deeper one, though less conspicuous, was between Trump and the old-guard establishment of the Grand Old Party, many of whom had decided not to show up. John Kasich, Ohio’s governor, had skipped the convention after reportedly spurning Trump’s offer of the vice presidency. So had the Bushes, a blue-blooded, white-shoe mafia of bankers and oilmen. Trump had bullied Jeb Bush with merciless brilliance during the primary debates. Now he risked being shut out from the family’s fundraising apparatus, relationships that had been accumulating interest for three generations. There was no Mitt Romney, no Henry Kissinger, no John McCain. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, the varsity captains, did show up and give serviceable speeches, and Marco Rubio appeared by video. The grandest old party man who Trump’s people could drum up was Bob Dole, who gave no speech, just a private luncheon at Morton’s steakhouse. It was said to be for his 93rd birthday.

Vox Populi

Few have explained the essence of Make America Great Again with the clarity of Grandpa Simpson. “I used to be with it,” he said, to his son Homer and his son’s friend Barney, having caught them rocking out in front of a mirror. “But then they changed what it was. Now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary to me.” Then came the curse: “It’ll happen to you.” Grandpa Simpson’s words echoed the two questions that Rudy Giuliani asked on Day 1: America! What happened to it? Where did it go? I looked to the delegates for answers.

John Rosado, an Arizona delegate who had kitted himself as George Washington, complete with breeches, buttoned topcoat, and a tricorn hat, blamed it on Teddy Roosevelt’s progressivism. I asked for something in his lifetime. He offered Lyndon Baines Johnson. If only Johnson had been willing to stick it out in Vietnam, Rosado said, we would have won the war. “Walter Cronkite gave it away,” he said. “It was when he said, ‘We can’t win this war.’ We were winning. The politics gave it away.”

Thomas Stark, a middle-aged lawyer and delegate from North Carolina, wore white suede bucks and a seersucker suit. A few minutes into our conversation, Stark told me that he was the general counsel for the state party, an unpaid position. He said this with such humility that it almost sounded like an apology. He said the Democrats were the party of Hobbes — fear and top-down government. The Republicans were the party of Locke — government leaves man alone, man rises to his best. Stark’s enthusiasm for Trump was solid, but the mortar was still hardening. Trump was “transitioning,” Stark said, from businessman to policymaker. “I hope the country doesn’t lose its spiritual base,” Stark said in a quiet voice, one that held its own field but made no claim on others. “It really rounds things out.” I asked Stark what he meant by spiritual base. He seemed slightly taken aback, as though I ought to know the answer. “I don’t know if I can put it into words,” he said.

Drew Danford, a younger delegate from Texas and party precinct leader, makes his living selling insurance. He said that America’s decline began when people started identifying with a “subculture” or “microcosm” before they identified as Americans. A subculture could be a sport, a hobby, a race, or a religion, he said. Some were explicitly contrary to American values. “Disenfranchisement” was his name for this phenomenon. As a young man, he said, he had suffered at the hands of some police. “If I was black,” he said. “I would have thought it was racism.” As we spoke, Danford went out of his way to be courteous to passersby, but he was also watchful. He had heard stories of protestors throwing urine-filled balloons at police, something that was widely reported but difficult to confirm.

Sitting beside us on the concrete lip of Cleveland Public Square was Danford’s fellow Texas delegate Joshua Sanders, a forklift operator. Sanders told me that “the politicians have decided it’s suitable to give them —” by which I took him to mean Danford’s subcultures “— preferential treatment, in order to appease their cultural values.” I asked him for an example. He brought up sanctuary cities, where undocumented immigrants can live without fear of arrest. “In a sanctuary city, you can drive with no license and no insurance,” Sanders said. “Whereas if I were to drive with no license or insurance, I’d be arrested.”

Al Baldassaro, delegate and state representative from New Hampshire, Marine Corps veteran, adviser to Trump on veterans’ affairs, constant wearer of a camo Make America Great Again hat, is best known for advocating during a radio interview the killing of Hillary Clinton by firing squad “for treason.” He is now under investigation by the Secret Service. One night outside the bar of the Westin hotel he told me that some of his nieces and nephews were African-American and Puerto Rican. When he heard them speaking against the police, he knew America was on the wrong track. He blamed Obama. “He should be their mentor,” Baldassaro said. “Instead of this Black Lives Matter business, he should be standing up for the police.” He moved on to trade, and immigration.

I told Baldassaro about a study by the World Bank that found that immigration does not cause a significant decrease in host-country wages, and that it takes a generation or two for new immigrants to start competing with the rest of the labor force. By that time, most have gotten the right papers. Many have changed their names, Drumpf to Trump, or given their children first names from the dominant culture, like Rudolph William Lewis Giuliani. Some of their descendants may choose to dye the roots of their hair, shave the bumps off their daughters’ noses, and slick their sons’ hair back into a helmet, a haircut I saw on the heads of delegates of all races. The essence of the Trump brand is conformity, a genetic conversion from loser to winner.

Baldassaro parried away my beloved World Bank study with an anecdote about the undocumented immigrants he had seen gathering around open-air labor markets in New England towns. As for the Drumpf stuff, I didn’t have the wherewithal to say it at the time.

There were not many Muslims to be found in the Q. To the RNC’s credit, the Day 2 benediction was delivered by Sajid Tarar, founder of American Muslims for Trump. One person reportedly chanted “No Islam!” but these three syllables failed to catch fire. On Day 4, I spoke on the Floor with Amjad Bashir, a British Muslim born in Pakistan, and a member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire. As a member of the Conservative Party, he had come to observe the proceedings of his Republican cousins. He had a neat gray beard, glasses, and a dark suit. He said he had been displeased when Obama weighed in on Brexit, which he supported. Brexit was the business of the U.K., not the U.S.

Of Trump, he said, “Whoever you choose, we will respect.” He said that Islam was a religion of peace, and that “any sort of terrorism has to be condemned.” I brought up Giuliani’s speech, and his repeated use of radical Islamic terrorism. “Speaking generally,” Bashir said, “I am critical of anyone who singles out any community, or any faith. … I think people should be very careful.”

The Ultimate Ringmaster

Some have compared Trump to Hitler. I think that’s a stretch. When Hitler spoke, he was feeling it. He was buying his own bullshit, as the saying goes. Nazi rallies, I imagine, had the vibe of a really good rock-and-roll show, something like the Beatles or the Monks during their Hamburg club years. “The applause was so loud and insistent that I had to respond with several encores,” wrote Leni Riefenstahl, who directed “Triumph of the Will.” “I was numb with happiness.”

The applause for Trump at the Q was loud. Sometimes it was insistent. But at other times it had an obligatory, whipped-up feeling. There were no encores. Like late Chavez, late Castro, and late Dylan, Trump seemed to be going through the motions, expending just enough energy to convey a virtuoso image to his fans, those who are unwilling to look and see the tired man on the stage in front of them. On TV, it might have looked like charismatic ecstasy between the altar and the pews. On TV, whipped-up might have passed for fired up.

Did I see what I saw, or what I wanted to see?

Trump took the stage around half past 10 on Day 4, Thursday, to deliver a speech that the next morning’s papers would call “dark.” (Giuliani’s was “fierce.”) By now, I had heard Trump boosted up as a “blue-collar billionaire,” “a true patriot and champion of the common man,” and “the ultimate ringmaster.” Giuliani, in video form, got a massive cheer. “He [Trump] can make us feel like what we should feel like,” Giuliani said.

In addition to clumsily grafting a bit of Michelle Obama onto Melania Trump, whoever was writing the teleprompter copy was trying to soften up Trump the man while hardening his platform. It wasn’t easy. The many members of Trump family who appeared on stage all emphasized the father’s kindness, but other than Giuliani’s testimony about Trump’s de-anonymized donations to police and firemen, specific examples were hard to come by. Ivanka, the lady-scion, who could pass for the Princess Diana Kardashian, who had Manafortian influence over her father and his business, talked about Trump’s habit of clipping out stories from the newspaper. The stories, she said, were about people in some kind of distress. Trump would then summon them to his office to give them charity. Not one of these recipients could be found to testify firsthand about the goodness of their alleged benefactor.

Trump’s life, Ivanka said, was one of deals, of building. “Judge his competency by the towers he’s built,” said Ivanka. “Only my father will say, ‘I’ll fight for you.’”

TRUMP. The five letters of #MAGA’s chosen one manspreaded on the high screen. The low screen offering a digital backdrop crowded with flags hanging slack on their poles. I had never seen Trump’s face projected at such size. I was most taken by his mouth, expressive and elastic. The mouth had only two expressions, satisfaction and contempt. One for profit, one for loss. Then there was the automatic smile when he felt obliged to display some warmth. I thought of the way that Donald had hugged Melania, grabby and abrupt, then the stagy ‘Look at her!’ point of the finger, accompanied by a half-smile. The half-smile had a diamond shape, like a kite. The chin formed the bottom point and the mouth formed the cross-spar. The creases running up and down, on either side, were the sides.

… I am your voice … I know the time for action has come …

Trump’s eyes were small and blank. They looked to be blue-green. The face, red, elastic, and now rather sweaty, was trying to compensate for the deadness of the eyes with its reluctant caricatures of unfelt emotions. At times, Trump’s patronizing manner threatens to simmer over into outright mockery of his audience, as though he can’t quite believe they are actually stupid enough to buy into such a weak charade.

Then came the rhetorical scalpel, the heart of the speech, the keystone that was held back from the pre-released remarks. In 66 words, Donald turned Drumpf to Trump, loser to winner, immigrant self-hatred into nativist superiority.

America is the nation of believers, dreamers, and strivers that is being led by a group of censors, critics, and cynics! Remember, all of the people telling you, “You can’t have the country you want,” are the same people that wouldn’t stand — I mean, they said, “Trump doesn’t have a chance of being here tonight. Doesn’t have a chance!” Oh, we love defeating those people, don’t we?

Those people. Naysayers. Terrorists. Anarchists. Barbarians. Hippies. Bill. Hillary. The Islamic State. The media. The ones who say, “Trump can’t win.” Against this universal enemy, Trump offered himself up as the embodiment of a universal grudge.

Day 1, Giuliani: You know who you are and we’re coming to get you!

Day 3: Cruz: What if this right now is our last time? Did we live up to the values we say we believe? Did we do all we really could?

Day 4, Trump: History is watching us now. We don’t have much time.

Of course Trump can’t win. Everyone from both parties knows this is true. It must be true. It can’t be otherwise. Is it a fact? Or is it a wish?

One hundred and twenty thousand balloons fell from the ceiling, particles in the void. We don’t have much time. They spread across the Floor in tricolor drifts, knee-high, waist-high. Two security men hustled Giuliani by me. The three men moved like a conga line. Giuliani was in the middle, his hands draped on the shoulders of the man in front, the man in back holding him up by the waist. I thought of a question that it would have been good to ask Giuliani, although now it was too late. Two days before, my colleague Alex Emmons, who is sure-footed enough to capitalize on such moments, caught Giuliani in the hallway leading to the Floor and interviewed him for three minutes. Emmons asked Giuliani to name one useful lead, one terrorism plot that had been thwarted by the years of Muslim profiling in New York City. “Of course I cannot,” Giuliani said, almost immediately. “That’s top-secret information.”

Giuliani told Emmons that Hillary Clinton might reveal that sort of thing. Rudy Giuliani, the former No. 3 in the Department of Justice, would not. He would release a dead man’s sealed juvenile arrest records to help win a seat in the U.S. Senate. But he would not explain what was gained by surveilling thousands of New York City Muslims in their restaurants, businesses, and places of worship. On Sunday, Trump suggested that he might issue a ban on Muslims from certain countries, including France and Germany, from entering the U.S.

The working-class delegates were loading onto their buses. The fancier people, the ones with downtown hotel rooms, were bottlenecking up around the exits. For a few minutes we were packed in between high walls of black steel mesh. Somewhere, people with better credentials were being whisked away to the Founders Room, the Grand Old Party Suite, the Senate Cloakroom, and the House Cloakroom, to their awaiting jets, borne in the back of their Chevy Suburbans, their pathway cleared by the motor officers’ sirens, gliding through the hidden over-world, a world with no lines or walls. The walls that trapped us upper-mid-level delegates and press had been intended to keep the un-credentialed protestor/barbarians from violating the party’s sanctuary. Now we were the ones who wanted to get out. The walls were making it harder.

Martian Hoplite & the War on Islam

On the train out from Cleveland I traded seats, aisle for aisle, with a young man in a Trump T-shirt. We knew which side of the line the other was on and treated each other with the grim courtesy that had kept the peace throughout the week. As the train approached Pittsburgh five hours after midnight on Friday, I saw the young man looking at a feed on his phone. I asked if I could follow him.

Sure, he said. I’m Martian Hoplite.

Hoplite, I asked. Is that a Vonnegut thing?

A hoplite is a citizen-warrior, he explained.

On his Twitter profile, Martian Hoplite describes himself as a “working class aristocrat. Partisan for truth. Pro-western. Aspiring Martian. Shitlord.”

Martian Hoplite’s avatar is Marv, the gun-toting noir hero from Frank Miller’s “Sin City.” One of Miller’s other graphic novels, “300,” is about 300 Spartans — hoplites, citizen-warriors — who kill many hordes of Persian barbarians at Thermopylae, not one of them a civilian. The 2007 film adaptation of “Sin City” grossed nearly half a billion dollars worldwide. My guess is that the runaway success of “300” may have given Miller the freedom to devote his energies to connecting with a slightly narrower audience, what is known in Hollywood as a “passion project.” Miller’s 2011 graphic novel, “Holy Terror,” is about a war undertaken by a Batman-like superhero who graphically slaughters terror-minded Muslims. “For some reason,” Miller once said in an interview with National Public Radio, “nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth-century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw peoples’ heads off.”

These people. 

Only my father will say, “I’ll fight for you.”

The train was pulling into Pittsburgh.

I asked Martian Hoplite if I could ask him a question for the record. He agreed.

“Are we at war with Islam?” I asked, the question that I had wanted to ask Rudy Giuliani. Martian Hoplite took a moment to think it over.

“We’re not,” he said. “But we should be.”

To read Part One, click here

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
— Milton’s Satan

I am not a servile puppy dog.
—Ted Cruz (paraphrased)

I will be your champion.
—Donald Trump

 

“America! What happened to it? Where did it go? How has it flown away?” Three questions thrown down from the altar of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, by Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, patron saint of 9/11, to the 2,472 Republican delegates assembled on the Floor of the Quicken Loans Arena, also known as the Q. The day’s theme was MASA, Make America Safe Again, part of #MAGA, a popular hashtag among Trump’s online supporters, who call themselves the #TrumpTrain. MAGA is an acronym for the candidate’s slogan: Make America Great Again. The sound of MAGA, said aloud, brings to mind a pagan deity. Like: In the name of all that is good and decent, MAGA commands you, go forth and slay the barbarian hordes!

Before last week, I would have thought it naïve to ask what happened to America. But the holy terror of Giuliani’s speech (and please do watch it in full) has made the question worth asking.

Video of Rudy Giuliani’s address to the RNC remixed by internet satirist Vic Berger.

 

Near the edge of the Floor of the Q, I found myself talking to Laurence Schiff, an Arizona delegate from the Kingman area. Schiff is a psychiatrist who heads up mental health programs in seven prisons, a Tea Party man, an early convert from Cruz to Trump, and a self-styled historian with his own talk radio show. He looked like a country doctor in late middle age, his neat, formal clothes neither new nor worn, his mouth turned slightly downward. His moist, earnest eyes fixed me through his glasses.

Schiff quickly turned our conversation to the breadth of MAGA’s appeal. “Donald Trump appeals more than you’d suspect to Latins and to minorities,” he said. “My wife is Latin. She is the biggest Trumpster around. Latins are extremely family-oriented. They tend to be pro-life. With African-Americans, they tend to be very law and order.” At this point, I hushed Schiff. Giuliani had taken the stage. He began by thanking the police officers in Dallas, Baton Rogue, and Cleveland. Giuliani’s love for the police was absolute and ecumenical: “Black, white, Latino, of every race, every color, every creed, every sexual orientation …” His questions came as an improvised solo, capping a steady build with a flourish of aggravation:

“It’s time to make America safe again. It’s time to make America one again. One America!”

Giuliani verified the count with a wag of his index finger. One.

“There’s a war on the police,” Schiff said, turning to me.

“What happened to …” Giuliani began, his pistons turning over once, not starting, and firing back up. “There’s no black America,” he said, waving to his left. “There’s no white America,” he waved to his right. “There is just … Ah-mehr-ick-ahh!” Two hands stretched out and throttled the air, as though Giuliani was a sorcerer and America a chimera or genie that he was summoning up from the depths. Then came his three questions, shouted over the cheers. “America!” The voice high and thrillingly urgent: “What happened to it? Where did it go? How has it flown away?”

“This is the most electrifying speech of the night,” said Sandra Dowling, an Arizona delegate. She had cropped red hair, an assortment of pro-Trump pins, and a steady, self-assured voice. She was around Schiff’s age, with a doctorate in education, and she had once served as Maricopa County superintendent of schools.

“I like the passion, the intensity,” she said of Giuliani. “The whole way that he sucks everybody in. He’s not lecturing to people here. He’s pulling them in and making them part of it.”

By this time, Giuliani had moved on, from domestic to foreign, police to military. “To defeat Islamic extremist terrorists, we must put them on defense,” he said. “If they are at war with us, which they have declared. We must commit ourselves to unconditional victory against them!” And from there, to the Iran deal, to Hillary Clinton, to Benghazi. He paused, taking in the thunderous chants of “USA! USA! USA!”

The followers of MAGA tend toward three-syllable chants, with equal and forceful emphasis given to each syllable. The “USA!” chant is a sunny reprise from more issue-specific chants like “Lock Her Up!” and the edgy “All Lives Matter!” (Matter, as delivered, sounds more like “Mahrr!”) Of the three letters in USA, it is the A, America!, that matters most to them, not the States, certainly not the United. The “U.S.” part of the chant may be a case of linguistic atavism, an immigrant’s nostalgia for the country she has long since left. That country is, to put it plainly, the past — some of it experienced, some of it romanticized, most of it imagined.

“Now listen to this!” said Dowling. “This is the only time, all day long, that all of the delegates have come together. This is what a convention is supposed to be about.”

“Overcoming your differences, you mean?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Look at this like a pie. You may not like the taste of the rest of the pie. But if you can find just one little sliver that you can latch onto, then you can latch onto the campaign. And that’s what I think he’s doing. He’s going through here and he’s just pulling in slivers. For everybody here. You can feel it.”

“To a certain degree, we’re props,” Schiff said, cutting in. “Something that’s made for television.” He seemed to be suggesting that the convention wasn’t really about the Floor. He might or might not have been suggesting that it was a televised simulacrum of a bottom-up democracy, with the delegates shipped in on coach flights and diesel buses to be fed at the Marriott and spurred into partisan ecstasies by the ship. “Whip” was the word on the door of a kind of control room in the hallway behind the Floor, where a few tall and formidable-looking men in suits marshaled an army of cheerleaders in orange baseball hats (convention ops), white hats (regional whips), yellow hats (state whips), and green hats (alternate whips). Many looked to be college age. They all had earpieces and “Making America Great, Est. 1776” stitched on the back of their color-ranked hats. Like the Borg on Star Trek, the word “whip” can refer to any single member of the operation, or the machine as a whole.

Schiff seemed to have an internal whip, a governor who guided him back to the party line. After referring to himself as a prop, he paused and shifted gears. “You need 50, 60 million votes to win the presidency,” he said. “I’ve made a study of this. That’s why I think Donald Trump is the only one who can win.”

Giuliani, amplified, skull-headed, enormous on the screen: … She is in favor of even taking Syrian refugees, even though the Islamic State has told us they are going to put their operatives in with the Syrian refugees, operatives who are terrorists …

I asked Dowling which sliver of the Trump pie was hers. She said: “I want somebody, when they walk into the room, he or she, I want everyone in the world to know that they’re in charge …”

… they come into Western Europe, they come here, and kill us!

Dowling: “I want everyone to know that when they speak, the rest of the world listens.”

… there’s no next election. This is it! There’s no more time for us left!

“And with Donald Trump, the rest of the world will listen, and they will pay attention. National security is a big issue for me. I’m looking for strength, courage, and chutzpah.”

… No more time to repeat our mistakes of the Clinton-Obama years. Donald Trump is the agent of change.

“I want somebody to go in and go toe to toe with the president of North Korea and tell him the way it is and not be told, ‘Get on your hands and knees and beg me.’”

… He will be the leader of the change we need.

“I don’t want to be begging anymore.”

Altar Boys

Rudolph William Lewis Giuliani did not serve as one of the principal investigators of the 9/11 attacks. He did not kill the man who carried them out. As New York City’s mayor on 9/11, Giuliani led the response, the cleanup, and the first phase of rebuilding. He came on the scene as the leader of a wounded city-state and emerged from the ashes a minor Republican statesman. His main role was to speak about the tragedy on TV. His first September 11, 2001, press conference was given while walking down the street, heading downtown less than an hour after Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower. “People should remain calm,” he said. He gave two more press conferences that afternoon and evening. On September 23, he appeared at a prayer service at Yankee Stadium alongside Oprah Winfrey, who called him “America’s Mayor.” On September 24, he went on David Letterman. On October 1, he gave a moving and humane address to the United Nations. On that day, he did not talk about radical Islamic terrorism. Just terrorism — that one word was enough.

Having established a solid link with 9/11 in the public mind, Giuliani’s relationship with the event underwent a shift, from mourner to owner. By 2004, his finances and connections and political prospects much improved, Giuliani was talking about 9/11 as though it were his property, an exotic pet, an exhibit that could be packed up into a suitcase and displayed at his pleasure. He showed it off with a victim’s righteousness and a prosecutor’s zeal, and started doing some heavy spiritual lifting for the Republican Party. Last week in Cleveland, he extended his proprietary 9/11 halo to Trump, “a man with a big heart.” Trump, Giuliani said, had donated money to injured police and firefighters. Trump had done so anonymously, and he wasn’t going to be happy with Giuliani for revealing his kindness in public. “Every time New York suffered a tragedy,” Giuliani said, “Donald Trump was there to help.”

Giuliani had assumed the mayoralty by mastering big-city racial politics. He was the electoral embodiment of Travis Bickle’s “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets” and Howard Beale, the-mad-as-hell news anchor. Giuliani had no problem with people of other races. His problem was with the panhandlers, the thugs, and the squeegee men. Patrick Moses Dorismond, who was shot by a plainclothes NYPD officer, was an actual altar boy. But to Giuliani (then running against Hillary Clinton for the Senate), he was no altar boy, he was a man with a propensity to violence and a sealed juvenile court record, which Giuliani proceeded to release. An arrest that happened more than 10 years before, when Dorismond was 13 years old, was, to Giuliani, highly relevant. The case of Amadou Diallo, the unarmed immigrant from Guinea who was shot 41 times by plainclothes NYPD, was, meanwhile, unfortunate. All four shooters were acquitted. Some years later, when Giuliani was no longer mayor, one of the officers was promoted.

(And yes, it is worth remembering the thousands of crime victims, disproportionately African-American, who died in New York and other big cities during the crime wave that ran from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s. Crime rates fell in those cities, most dramatically in New York, during Giuliani’s 1994-2001 mayoralty. How much credit Giuliani deserves for that life-saving reduction is the subject of much debate. Less debatable is the effect of his “get tough” approach on the incarceration rate of black men, the killings of black men by police, and his attempts, in the Dorismond case and others, to turn those dead black men into votes.)

As for the Muslims, Giuliani said, he would limit his rage to the barbaric terrorists who attacked us … people and forces who hijacked not just airplanes, but a great religion and turned it into a creed of terrorism dedicated to killing all of us. Those last words are from his previous red-meat speech, delivered on the first day of the 2004 RNC, in New York City. Giuliani didn’t want to kill all the Muslims, only the bad ones, the ones who are with the terrorists. He compared the pre-9/11 view of Islamic terrorism to Europe’s appeasement of Hitler during the run-up to World War II.

Long before Cruz dreamed aloud about carpet-bombing the Islamic State, Giuliani had taken the semi-sublimated racial animus of the Republican Party’s George Wallace wing (“Stand Up for America” was Wallace’s 1968 slogan) and attached it to a new and more fearsome target, al Qaeda. He used it to frame the country’s Bush-era adventures as a kind of war of righteous vengeance. The new war sounded at times like a holy war. Once, George W. Bush used the word “crusade.”

On Monday night, standing on the high altar of MAGA, Giuliani defined America’s enemy this way:

“For the purposes of the media, I did not say all of Islam. I did not say most of Islam. I said Islamic extremist terrorism. You know who you are and we’re coming to get you.”

For the purposes of the media. Either Giuliani wanted to make it clear that he was only talking about a subset of Islam. Or he wanted to make clear his wish to declare war on all of Islam, and his frustration at not being able to raise this flag in public. I believe that he was doing both, at once. Unlike Trump, Giuliani has a prosecutor’s mastery of rhetoric. He knows how to communicate a message and deny it at the same time.

Here is Giuliani on Larry King talking about Iraq during his brief run at the presidency in 2006:

The whole strategy has to be a strategy of not just pacifying places but holding them, and holding them for some period of time. It reminds me a little, on a much bigger scale, of what I had to do to reduce crime in New York City. We had to not just go into neighborhoods and make them safe, which the city had been doing for years, but the city had been going in there, making them safe, and then leaving. … I’d take out Saddam Hussein in a second again … here’s what I would change. Do it with more troops. Maybe 150,000.

Making them safe. We need someone to bring law and order to the neighborhoods.

Trump, who has taken advice from Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, two of Richard Nixon’s henchmen, has borrowed from Giuliani’s classic obsessions and added illegal immigration to his witch’s brew. Trump may not know or care to know that Barack Obama has spent eight years pounding on al Qaeda, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but also through the use of drones and other covert campaigns in Syria, Somalia, and Yemen. In his two terms, George W. Bush ordered 49 drone strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban-associated targets in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Obama, during his first two years in office, ordered 174. These are facts, but to Trump and Giuliani, they may not matter. After all, what good does killing radical Islamic terrorists do if Obama refuses to call the enemy by its name?

The crowd in Cleveland was primed for Giuliani. They howled with pleasure upon hearing from Milwaukee’s sheriff, David Clark, that “blue lives matter.” The slogan sounded more credible when enunciated by an African-American. Clark has told the people of Milwaukee that obtaining their own firearms is preferable to calling 911, part of “a duty to protect yourself and your family.” On Monday, he lumped together Ferguson and Baltimore (mass street protests) with Baton Rouge (the lone-wolf murder of three police officers) as “a collapse of the social order … I call it anarchy.”

This was Giuliani’s task on Monday: Raise the emotional temperature. Melt down the differences that separate the factions. Fuse them into a mass. Political conventions customarily open with red-meat speeches, but providence saw fit to disrupt the opening nights of 2012 (Tampa, Florida) and 2008 (St. Paul, Minnesota) with hurricanes (Isaac, Gustav). The opening night of the RNC’s 2004 convention had also featured Rudy Giuliani, at Madison Square Garden, with a presidential run still in his future. “They heard from us,” he said, claiming victory in Iraq in Afghanistan.

The Giuliani of 2016 was more familiar, with less to lose. The climax of his speech came about a minute in, just before the three questions about the whereabouts of America. He was talking about the police and the firemen:

… when they come in to save you. They don’t care what color you are! When they come to save your life, they don’t ask if you’re black or white. They just come! To save you!

Save you from who? Was Giuliani talking about Ferguson, or Baton Rouge, or Dallas, or the World Trade Center, or al Qaeda, or the Islamic State, or Benghazi, or the mother whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant, or the Islamic State operative who had come in over the porous border with Mexico? (This last scenario has never actually happened.) Giuliani was talking about all of these things, and injecting into each of them the image of two burning towers, and the wall that Trump would build around his republic of Make America Great Again to keep all of them out.