LIKE NOBODY’S EVER SEEN: The cult of Donald Trump with appearances by pro-wrestler Hulk Hogan, gun-loving rocker Kid Rock, and a call to God by Franklin Graham anointed the former president as their nominee to be the 47^th president of the United States at the flag waving, red, white and blue Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

  Trump walked out as Lee Greenwood sang “God Bless the USA” and the lights came up on a set that portrayed the façade of The White House. Trump opened with a call for national unity sounding rarely presidential. “The discord and division in our society must be healed — we must heal it quickly,” he said. “As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together — or we fall apart.”

  Then went on to split and divide.

  In his acceptance Trump talked at length about himself and his attempted assassination last Saturday evening in Pennsylvania. He said that as he was covered on stage by the bodies of Secret Service agents willing to sacrifice their lives, “There was blood pouring everywhere, and yet, in a certain way I felt very safe, because I had God on my side,” feeding the belief of many followers that he is the chosen one for America.

  Moving on to issues, Trump fired off lies like a machine gun, that the 2020 election was stolen from him, that he had the most secure border in history, and the greatest economy. “We had the greatest economy in the history of the world … nobody had seen anything like it,” he said. All untrue.

  Mentioning President Biden only once, Trump said, “The damage that he’s done to this country is unthinkable.”

  He bragged about getting along with dictators and said no one dared start a war while he was President. “I could stop wars with a telephone call.”

  He claimed political persecution in his criminal indictments and felony conviction.

  Trump said the streets of cities are flooded with illegal aliens and promised the largest deportation operation in the history of the country.  He derided “the green new scam,” and promised to “drill baby drill,” bringing down the price of oil and the overall cost of living. “The middle class is going to prosper like never before and we’re going to do it very, very rapidly,” he promised.

  Over four nights the convention was a powerful show filled with fantasies and falsehoods, hatreds and insults bolstering a political base that will be difficult for Democrats to beat in November.

REALITY SETTING IN:  President Biden is beginning to accept the idea that he might have to bow out of the race to avoid an overall election disaster for the Democrats, the NY Times reports according to its sources.

  The paper says the President has not made up his mind but that one source said, “reality is setting in” and that he might soon endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for the party’s nomination.

  The latest public defection comes from Montana Sen. Jon Tester who said, “While I appreciate his commitment to public service and our country, I believe President Biden should not seek re-election to another term.”

  Earlier, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a member of the House January 6^th investigating committee, announced that he had bailed on Biden. In a July 6^th letter to the President just made public, Raskin compared the Biden to a tiring baseball pitcher and said, “Everything we believe in is on the line in the next four and a half months.” 

  Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi privately told Biden that polling shows the President losing to Donald Trump and destroying the Democrats’ chances of winning the House in November, The Times reports according to four sources briefed on the call.

 The President pushed back, telling Pelosi he has seen polls that indicate he can win, the Times reports. The paper says none of the sources indicated whether Pelosi outright told Biden that she believes he should drop out of the 2024 race. White House officials still deny that Biden is considering getting out.

THE CROSSHAIRS: Matthew Crooks, the shooter who wounded Donald Trump, wrote on the popular gaming platform Steam that “July 13 will be my premiere, watch as it unfolds,” CNN reports. Crooks also conducted searches online about major depression disorder, administration officials told Congress during briefings. 

THE OBIT PAGE: Bob Newhart, the comedian of droll and dry wit whose humor was first distributed on record albums before he became a guest on the old Ed Sullivan variety show and moved on to his own sitcom, “The Bob Newhart Show,” has died at age 94. Of his often understated humor he said, “I like to get laughter out of the least and I think one way you do it is by giving the audience some credit for some intelligence.” 

— Lou Dobbs, the conservative television and radio host who was a dominant presence on CNN and Fox Business before becoming a proponent of conspiracy theories and supporter of Donald Trump, has died at age 78.

THE SPIN RACK: A massive global technology outage yesterday took down airlines, medical services, TV broadcasts, banks and other businesses and services. The trouble was attributed to CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, which updated its software. — A drone attack in central Tel Aviv killed one person. Houthi militants claim responsibility.

BELOW THE FOLD: South Korean soccer star Hwang Ui-jo is embroiled in legal trouble and a national scandal in which he is accused of secretly filming himself having sex with two women.

 This isn’t normally our kind of story except for the linguistics. The case evidently has intensified a national debate in South Korea about the practice of “molka,” secretly filming sexual encounters. “Molka” is short for “mollae-kamera,” meaning “sneaky camera.” Evidently the practice is so common that it not only has a name, it has a nickname.

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