First night is a Trumpaloosa

Since Donald J. Trump ran for the presidency four years ago as a disrupter, and has spent 3 ½ years upsetting presidential precedents, it’s no surprise that he knocked down tradition in his convention, which began last night, from Charlotte, N.C., and elsewhere.

For better or worse, the Republican Party is the Trump Show. That’s why the speakers’ list contains a lot of Trumps (excluding his sister and a niece) and not a Republican ex-president, George W. Bush, nor presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. Nothing to deflect from the majesty of Trump.

Trump broke with the tradition that the candidate doesn’t show his (or her) face until the final night, providing the climax to the infomercial.

Trump smashed that in the afternoon after delegates named him their candidate and he showed up in Charlotte to spend about an hour talking to what seemed like several dozen people. As they chanted “Four more years!” he ad-libbed, “If you want to make them crazy, say ‘12 more years.’” 

During the evening telecast, which started at 8:30, a half hour earlier than the Dems, Trump was seen in two taped segments — one with “front line workers,” the ones we call essential, and the other with six Americans who had been held hostage by foreign governments, who he had gotten released.

In each case the group did not wear masks nor observe social distances — including two people in the first group who had contracted the disease.

The Monday night finale position was handed to South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the first Republican to be elected to the Senate from the Deep South, where he had grown up poor, living with a grandfather who had been a sharecropper and died at 99.

His family, Scott, said, “went from cotton to congress in one lifetime,” in his folksy explanation of the promise of America. Like many other speakers, he tried to handcuff Joe Biden to socialism, which is laughable if you ask Bernie Sanders.

Who was at the convention, by the way, as was Hillary.

Well, they were in a video, tying Democrats to socialism, which works for some of them, but not most. How can I say that? Because centrist Joe got the nomination, not Crazy Bernie or Elizabeth Warren.

Scott touched on race, but former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, put it in a bear hug. “America is not a racist country,” said the first woman and the first Indian-American elected governor of South Carolina. “This is personal to me… I was a brown girl in a black and white world,” said the daughter of an Indian immigrant father who wore a turban and an Indian mother who wore a sari. And look what she became, as a first-generation American. She said Biden would do the bidding of Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders and the Squad. 

Another immigrant story was told by Miami businessman Maximo Alvarez, who at 13 was brought to what he called “this blessed country” by his father, who pulled the family out of Cuba to escape Fidel Castro.

He said he sees “shadows” of some ideas he has has seen before, tying the Democrats to Castro. 

He praised Trump as being a family man and, with his eyes welling up, said that he if he gave up everything he now owns, “it would not be 1% of what I was given” by America.

Freedom, in a word.

Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump’s girl friend, and the daughter of immigrants, also had her say, but don’t let me leave this subject without asking when I will hear Alvarez’s kind of immigrant gratitude from Rep. Ilhan Omar.

Another side note about Guilfoyle: She is the ex wife of uber Left California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was also at the convention — in a clip thanking Trump for his help on covid-19, joined by New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, all of whom must be fit to be tied.

Someone must have told Guilfoyle that the mic wasn’t working, because she delivered her speech like the balcony scene in “Evita.”

Loud hardly begins to express it. It was passionate and dramatic and thematically pointed.

She said Trump always puts America first, while the socialist Democrats would offer open borders, closed schools, amnesty, job loss, defunding police and lawlessness. 

At the beginning of the evening, some “regular” Americans, who happened to be women, talked about topics individual to them, such as health care, aid to business, and education, each checking a subject box.

The Second Amendment box was checked by Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the couple who defended their St. Louis home against protestors by brandishing weapons. They face felony charges. 

They said the Marxist Democrats want to let criminals skate, while prosecuting citizens. 

Another Second Amendment entry was Andrew Pollack, the father of a senior slain at Parkland High, who said the system failed by not acting against the gunman when he had made threats.

It was good seeing former Eagle Herschel Walker, who said he has been a friend of Trump’s for 37 years, since he played for the USFL’s New Jersey Generals, which Trump owned. Walker declared Trump is not a racist,

The strongest declaration of night came from the first speaker, Charlie Kirk, co-founder of Turning Point USA. “Donald Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization,” he said. With a straight face.

Another rocket was fired by Georgia state rep Vernon Jones. “The Democratic Party does not want Black people to leave their mental plantation.”

Or as Trump might say, what do they have to lose?