ArcaMax

"Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it," he said. "I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against (former Democratic candidate) Bernie Sanders." How? Trump did not say. He didn't have to. He apparently figured it was enough that he extend the olive branch to disappointed Sanders voters.

Instead of the "Morning in America" politics of optimism that Ronald Reagan perfected and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama emulated, Trump preached doomsday darkness -- be afraid, very afraid.

If there was a pivot in Trump's speech, compared to what we have heard on the campaign stump, it was in his pivot toward that dark side. The world's going down the tubes, he emphasized, all because of -- guess who?

"The irresponsible rhetoric of our president," he shouted, as if he did not know how microphones work, "who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment than, frankly, I have ever seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seen."

He went on to claim that the Obama "administration has failed America's inner cities" and described the problems of "Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit and Ferguson" like every other self-styled expert who has spent little or no actual time in the communities he was talking about. Thanks for the thoughts, Mr. T, but where are your remedies?

The same goes for his daughter Ivanka Trump, who delivered more effectively than her dad a message of hope, particularly to women and her fellow millennials -- two groups in which Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton holds double-digit leads over Trump.

Trump's speech lasted an hour and 15 minutes, the longest in more than 40 years, but for all its scary litany of problems -- which have given professional fact-checkers much to debunk -- Trump offered no solutions.

He promises to destroy the Islamic State and "do it quickly," he says. But how? He'll tell us after he's elected, he says. "Believe me."

He says that a lot. But as I learned long ago, when someone says "believe me" all the time, you probably should not believe them.

There's nothing new about the use of doomsday rhetoric in politics. Check out historian Richard Hofstadter's classic 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

Trump apparently follows the Machiavellian view that you can win more supporters with fear than with love. But in one authoritarian regime after another, we have seen how the politics of fear often leads to more problems that people should be fearful about.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.