This isn't the convention Trump really needs

Trump’s convention is harder-edged, with no discernible political strategy behind the speakers list except to excite Trump and the viewers who are going to vote Republican anyway. There have been a few exceptions. Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, gave an earnest speech in which she talked about her Indian heritage and her family’s immigration story. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina explained how his grandfather left elementary school to pick cotton. Still, the roster is sprinkled with people who are on Trump’s payroll or in his will. It includes culture warriors and Fox talking heads, aides who owe him everything and politicians looking to inherit his devoted base once he’s left office…

“If you’re an undecided voter, you’re looking at this and it has the lineup of a festival concert that you just don’t want to go to, because there’s not a single band you want to see,” Douglas Heye, who was a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee from 2010 to 2011, told me. “It makes it difficult for the campaign to make a case to those voters, because they are most likely going to tune out.” Television viewership in the 10 p.m. hour on the first night of the convention amounted to 17 million, nearly 3 million below that of the Democrats’ opening night last week.