The irony of the Melania Trump plagiarism is that she was the only element of Monday night’s low-rent infomercial tableau that wasn’t saturated in violence, revanchism, Dolchstoss myth-making, and darkness — but it was tainted, too.

Tierney Sneed and Lauren Fox are spearheading our coverage in Cleveland, and their report from the scene captures much of what made the first day so disturbing. Here’s how Vin Weber put it when talking Trump:

“He has projected since day one kind of this broad image of strength. Not very concrete, not very specific, but a strong guy. That’s what scares me about him, too. I don’t want an authoritarian figure as president, but that will appeal to people in an insecure environment.”

Worth your read once you have plumbed the depths of the plagiarism ridiculousness.

A significant chunk of Melania Trump’s speech was lifted from Michelle Obama’s convention speech in 2008. Check it out.

Anthony Sabato, the soap star who was one of the evening’s major speakers, later told ABC news that President Obama is a Muslim who was raised in the Middle East. Watch.

Gen Flynn: “We have enemies in our homeland and abroad.”

Ever since the late and great Molly Ivins quipped that she thought Pat Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 GOP convention sounded better in the original German it’s been sort of a parlor trick to compare a ‘hot’ Republican speech to one from this or that fascist dictator. But this speech was really febrile and unhinged. Setting aside the content, consider the wild hand gestures, frequent screaming, the agitated and febrile manner. It was disturbing but also brought together all the themes of violence, death, betrayal and rage that shaped the evening.

It’s like Giuliani has spent the last fifteen years living together with 9/11 in a two bedroom apartment of his mind. It’s a dark picture. He’s lost his balance and maybe his mind.

Scott Baio says he’s not sorry he tweeted that meme calling Hillary Clinton a “c**t.”

The last year for which full FBI statistics on the national murder rate are available is 2014.

The first half statistics for 2015 show a small upturn. But this has happened more than half a dozen times in the last 20 years in the course of the overall fall of the murder rate.

It’s important to note during Sheriff Clarke’s speech that in fact crime of all sorts is at its lowest levels in almost half a century.

Ken Cuccinelli, a prominent stop-Trumper, told reporters tonight that the Trump campaign went as far as to threaten to take away Iowa’s first in the nation caucus if they didn’t back don’t on the rules vote on the convention floor.

Let’s just say it: the theme of tonight’s program is death and devastating loss caused by national outsiders and made possible by the betrayals of political enemies.