The editorial page of the Washington Post, though chronically hawkish in foreign policy, usually ends up endorsing the Democratic candidate for president. But it doesn’t usually end up doing something like what it did today. To the best of my knowledge, it has not previously run an editorial like this:

It didn’t say this about Richard Nixon in 1972, when the Post was beginning the Watergate investigations that would help lead to his resignation. As far as I can tell, it didn’t issue similar Red Alert warnings about Barry Goldwater in 1964.

But this year it has. Sample:

Donald J. Trump, until now a Republican problem, this week became a challenge the nation must confront and overcome. The real estate tycoon is uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament. He is mounting a campaign of snarl and sneer, not substance. To the extent he has views, they are wrong in their diagnosis of America’s problems and dangerous in their proposed solutions.

Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.

Any one of these characteristics would be disqualifying; together, they make Mr. Trump a peril.

And this conclusion:

We have criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the past and will do so again when warranted. But we do not believe that she (or the Libertarian and Green party candidates, for that matter) represents a threat to the Constitution. Mr. Trump is a unique and present danger.

Good for the Post — and continued shame on the “responsible” Republicans who are acting as if this were a normal candidate in a normal year.

***

When I saw this online video last night, I assumed it was a parody, perhaps a less fantastical version of the sublime “Trump World President 2016” Japanese-ad knock-off that Mike Dahlquist, aka Mike Diva, released last month.  

But apparently this one is “real.”

If Donald Trump's stated aim had been increase doubts about his mental state and temperamental balance, he could hardly have done better than by putting this out. Especially by doing so a few hours after Tim Kaine’s debut as a normal-seeming person who was comfortable with himself.

#MakeAmericaGreatAgain#TrumpPence16 pic.twitter.com/gCzHX1nyxD

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2016

Just to say it for the thousandth time: all this evidence about Donald Trump’s neediness and abnormality is in plain sight for everyone to see. And “responsible” Republican “leaders” are still trying to put him in command.

If you’d like to see a marvelous intentional-rather-than-inadvertent parody, please scroll down for “World President.”

There’s a special “debut” category for vice-presidential selections who very suddenly find themselves in the world’s media glare.

VP picks who had mounted serious runs for president don’t quite fit this category. They already knew what it was like to handle big audiences and the press. For example: the elder George Bush became Ronald Reagan’s VP candidate in 1980, but only after running against Reagan in the primary campaign. The same was true of Joe Biden, who had run against Barack Obama (and Hillary Clinton) for the nomination in 2008 before becoming Obama’s running mate, and had run 20 years earlier too. In electoral politics, Dick Cheney had gotten only as far as Wyoming’s seat in Congress when George W. Bush picked him in 2000. But Cheney was already internationally known as Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff and George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense during the Gulf War.

Then there is the gray zone. Lloyd Bentsen, who ran with Michael Dukakis in 1988, was not well known outside Texas before his famous “You’re no Jack Kennedy!” encounter with Dan Quayle in the VP debate. But he had actually run for president in 1976. (I did my very first Atlantic article about that run.)  Al Gore was a relatively fresh face when Bill Clinton chose him in 1992, but Gore had staged a precocious presidential effort four years earlier. Jack Kemp, who ran with Bob Dole against Clinton-Gore in 1996, had run briefly on his own in 1988, and had a national Republican-party and sports-star reputation to draw on. John Edwards had run against John Kerry in 2004 before becoming his (very unfortunate in retrospect) VP pick.

The list of modern-era true-surprise debuts includes:

• Spiro Agnew, with Richard Nixon in 1968;
• Thomas Eagleton, with George McGovern in 1972. (His replacement when he left the ticket, Sargent Shriver, was already relatively well known.)
• Geraldine Ferraro, with Walter Mondale in 1984;
• Dan Quayle, with George H.W. Bush in 1988;
• Joe Lieberman, with Al Gore in 2000;
• Sarah Palin, with John McCain in 2008;
• Paul Ryan, with Mitt Romney in 2012; and now
• Both Mike Pence and Tim Kaine in 2016.

As you look up and down this list, you can think of better and worse first appearances in the spotlight. Poor Senator Eagleton’s was the most unfortunate, as you can read about here. Agnew’s worked fine at the time; eventually he became on the only VP ever to resign because of criminal charges. Sarah Palin — well, you remember. Both Dan Quayle and Geraldine Ferraro had rough starts, for reasons I’ll let you go look up. Joe Lieberman let Dick Cheney roll right over him in their VP debate.

***

Tim Kaine’s debut was the best of these I’m aware of, or can remember. (Barack Obama’s 2004 convention speech obviously put him on the map, but that was a one-time standalone performance rather than the extended attention that comes with running day after day on a national ticket.) You’ll get the idea about Kaine if you watch the first few minutes below. Points about why I thought it worked, after the jump

***

Why this worked:

Donald Trump sent out the second tweet, saying people should never be mocked for their heritage, thirteen minutes after the first, in which he called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.”

Reality eclipses the ability to comment on it.

Think of the degree of self-knowledge required to be able to do these back to back. Or impulse control. Or ability to deal with complexity.

Last night Stephen Hayes, of the Weekly Standard, wrote about that morning’s press conference, in which Trump revived the idea that Ted Cruz’s father was involved with Lee Harvey Oswald:

The Republican nominee for president made comments Friday that one might expect from a patient in a mental institution, the kind of stuff you might read on blog with really small print and pictures of UFOs. And yet his remarks barely register as news. There are no condemnations from fellow Republicans. His supporters shrug them off as Trump being Trump.

What we are hearing from a major party’s nominee is not the behavior of a mature, stable, lucid, fully functioning person. All the evidence is on the table, as Trump for now continues his rise in the polls.

***

For three days now, Donald Trump has been the official nominee of the Republican party.

For many decades now, almost all major party nominees have released their federal income tax returns, as part of the implied bargain of running for president. The bargain is this: candidates are asking the public to grant them the enormous discretionary powers of the presidency. (Yes, presidents get frustrated by what they can’t do. What they can do is still vast.) In exchange, the public asks to know as much as it can about the person assuming this role.

So major-party nominees in modern times have released some version of their medical records, and their federal tax returns. You can see the returns for presidents going back to FDR here. (FDR’s records, which were released after his death, start in 1913 — which was when the Sixteenth Amendment first authorized the income tax!). Nominees began routinely releasing records before the elections in the 1970s. You can see the history of modern-era Republican returns here.

Donald Trump has flat-out refused to accept this obligation. “Flat-out” in the sense of telling George Stephanopoulos in May that the returns were “none of your business,” your meaning the press’s and public’s; and less directly in saying that the ongoing-audit status of the returns means he can’t disclose them. (No actual tax expert agrees.)

Is there something embarrassing or explosive in Trump’s tax returns? Who knows. Geoff Colvin, of Fortune, suggests that there might be. Many people have speculated that the real embarrassment might be evidence that Trump is nowhere near as rich as he has claimed. Another hypothesis is that returns would show that he has given very little to charities, or has managed to pay no taxes at all. The real point is that all of these remain hypotheses, as long as Trump shirks an obligation that modern-era candidates have recognized. As Colvin says:

Until he releases his returns or offers a plausible reason not to, voters must speculate on why he’s withholding them. None of the potential reasons will be good. Hillary Clinton is in a strong position to pound him on the issue, since she and her husband have routinely released their returns for years (though she may not want to remind voters of her speaking fees from Goldman

Now that he is officially the nominee, the press, his opponents, and for that matter his supporters as well should ramp up insistence that he do what nominees over the past half century have done.

***

No one will ever be able to say, looking back, that Donald Trump was concealing the kind of leader he wanted to be.

His convention speech last night, as discussed in a range of Atlantic coverage, was especially notable for the trait Yoni Appelbaum identifies here: what would be called in any other system a cult-of-the-personality Messianic tone. As Yoni says at the end of his piece:

The most striking aspect of his speech wasn’t his delivery, even though his tone often strayed over the line, from emphatic to strident. It wasn’t the specific policies he outlined, long fixtures of his stump speech. It was the extraordinary spectacle of a man standing on a podium, elevated above the surrounding crowd, telling the millions of Americans who were watching that he, alone, could solve their problems.

And the crowd cheered.

How different is this? Let’s choose two examples from presidents who otherwise usually stand as complete contrasts.

***

Months ago I published a note from a reader whose work, in the TV industry, involved exposure to virtually all of Donald Trump’s recorded interviews of the past few years. The reader said that the experience left a deep impression. Sample:

I have now been through dozens of interviews with Trump with a variety of interviewers, and I have never once—not once—heard him discuss anything, any subject of any kind, with any evidence of knowledge, never mind thought. None. Zero. He’s like a skipping stone over a pond. He doesn’t even come close to the level of dilettante.

You’d think at some point, something, anything would have engaged his interest enough to read up on it and think about it, but as far as I can tell, nothing has. Much more so even than George W., he appears to lack anything resembling intellectual curiosity. Maybe he’s faking it, but while understanding can sometimes be faked, you can’t fake ignorance convincingly.

I suggest bearing that assessment in mind as you read the bombshell interview Trump has (inexplicably, by any normal logic) given to David Sanger and Maggie Haberman of the NYT. This is the interview in which he:

• says he’d make a judgment call on whether it was economically worthwhile for the U.S. to fulfill its treaty obligations to other NATO countries, if Russia were to invade. These treaty guarantees, by the way, have been the bedrock of security in Europe since the end of World War II.
• describes the majority of U.S. alliances and relationships as if they were real-estate negotiations, in which “you always have to be prepared to walk.”
• when pressed for details on how he would resolve any complex issue, falls back on variations of “we’d make terrific deals” and then treads water when asked to elaborate.

I’m tempted to quote the whole, long, transcript, but here are two illustrations of significant recurring leitmotifs. The first is Trump’s “Yes, but what about ...” problem. He is prepared with a first-round talking point on a range of topics, like “we never win any more” or “we’ll make terrific deals.” But when asked “But what about,” he’s in trouble. For instance:

TRUMP: Well, I thought the approach of fighting Assad and ISIS simultaneously was madness, and idiocy. They’re fighting each other and yet we’re fighting both of them. You know, we were fighting both of them. I think that our far bigger problem than Assad is ISIS, I’ve always felt that. Assad is, you know I’m not saying Assad is a good man, ’cause he’s not, but our far greater problem is not Assad, it’s ISIS.

SANGER: I think President Obama would agree with that. [Translation: Duh!]

TRUMP: O.K., well, that’s good. But at the same time – yeah, he would agree with that, I think to an extent. But I think, you can’t be fighting two people that are fighting each other, and fighting them together. You have to pick one or the other. And you have to go at –

SANGER: So how would your strategy differ from what he’s doing right now? [“But  what about …?”]

TRUMP: Well I can only tell you – I can’t tell you, because his strategy, it’s open and it would seem to be fighting ISIS but he’s fighting it in such a limited capacity. I’ve been saying, take the oil. I’ve been saying it for years. Take the oil. They still haven’t taken the oil. They still haven’t taken it. And they hardly hit the oil. They hardly make a dent in the oil.

***

The first convention I remember watching, on television at home as a kid, was the 1964 Republican convention, featuring Barry Goldwater’s fiery “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” speech.

Four years later, in 1968, the Democrats were tearing themselves apart at their Chicago convention, as the country was self-rending as well.

The 1980 Democratic convention was a nightmare, with Teddy Kennedy barely deigning to greet incumbent president Jimmy Carter on the platform after Kennedy’s unsuccessful (but gravely wounding to Carter) campaign against him.

But even 1968 was no match for the personal rancor of this evening in Cleveland, with Ted Cruz’s cold dissing of Donald Trump in front of the delegates who had just chosen Trump.

Again the theme of recent posts has been: conventions and national campaigns don’t “matter” in any profound sense (although they can make a difference in whether you get elected). But if you can’t manage a four-day convention, let alone a four-month national campaign, you’re facing steep odds in managing a very complex national government for four or eight years.

And — except for the effective Mike Pence speech, which began near the end of the 10pm-11pm EDT prime time bloc — this was another chaotically managed convention night. The Skyped-in-looking 90-second video by Marco Rubio was the minor indication. The cold, outright subversion by Ted Cruz — the man whose wife’s looks Trump had mocked, the man whose father Trump had accused of involvement in the JFK killing — was unlike anything on a national campaign stage in modern times. You can read about it in the papers tomorrow. To put it Donald Trump’s terms, the great deal-maker was publicly snookered and humiliated by his beaten opponent, “Lyin’ Ted.”

***

On the morning after Donald Trump officially became the Republican party’s nominee, we learned these two things about his approach to the doing that goes with the presidency, as opposed to the being of ultimate-winner status.

I’m not claiming that signs like these will dissuade Trump’s supporters or necessarily change any votes. But they further raise the stakes, and the warning signs, about what to expect if he actually took office.

***

1) Division of labor. According to Robert Draper’s inside-look piece in the NYT Magazine, which has so far gone unchallenged by the ace Trump communications team, Donald Trump Jr. made the following offer to Gov. John Kasich before Trump Sr. settled on Gov. Mike Pence as the VP pick:

But according to the Kasich adviser (who spoke only under the condition that he not be named), Donald Jr. wanted to make him an offer nonetheless: Did he have any interest in being the most powerful vice president in history?

When Kasich’s adviser asked how this would be the case, Donald Jr. explained that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.

Then what, the adviser asked, would Trump be in charge of?

“Making America great again” was the casual reply.

Perhaps I speak for many in saying that I’d be more comfortable with an administration in which John Kasich was in charge of “domestic and foreign policy” that one in which Donald Trump had any role in either. But this is yet another reminder that a major party has chosen a nominee who views the presidency essentially as a beauty pageant or an Oscar contest, which matters only as a prize to win.

Of course every successful politician thinks this way to some degree. But most of them think about other things as well. Illustration: think of a president whose policies you generally disagree with. For me, it might be George W. Bush. For someone else, it might be my one-time employer Jimmy Carter, or perhaps the current president. But whoever you choose and however much you disagree, you will still recognize that the person had policies, and cared about them, and took the job seriously.

Three and a half months before election day, here is another piece of for-the-record data that a person who might become president doesn’t have policies and doesn’t really care about the job.

***

2) You’re not fired. A Trump aide has taken the fall for the plagiarism in Melania Trump’s speech on Monday night, as discussed in installments #44, #45, and #46. Rather, she has taken the fall without taking a fall. Here is the heart of the statement from Meredeith McIver, an “in-house staff writer for the Trump organization,” which you can read in full here: