Well, that was fast. Immediately following the past weekend’s shocking assassination attempt on Donald Trump, reports stated the former president had an epiphany. Out was the demonization, recrimination, and incendiary rhetoric that had characterized partisan politics in the Trump era, and which some charged had created an atmosphere that led to the attempt on the former president’s life. In was a message of unity, reportedly by personal order of the candidate himself, who saw a chance to meet the national mood, take the higher ground, and bring the nation together.

That would have likely been a refreshing and appealing message to the millions who tuned in last night to watch the Republican National Convention. But that’s not what was offered.

The RNC’s second night was instead among the grimmer few hours of political television, as speaker after speaker painted a relentlessly bleak (and often dishonest) vision of a country ravaged by skyrocketing crime and overrun with violent foreigners, criminals, rioters, and terrorists bent on the country’s destruction. This was all the doing of Trump’s political opponents in the Democratic Party who — in one of their many cynical efforts to steal elections, in this case by flooding polling places with illegally voting migrants — have deliberately unleashed an invasion of bloodthirsty rapists and terrorists across the border who are now murdering, raping, and sex-trafficking their way across American neighborhoods.

To be sure, some abided by Trump’s memo. Ron DeSantis warned only that large numbers of migrants would “burden our communities” rather than terrorize them. Marco Rubio, whose lengthy opening remarks on the rallygoer slain on Saturday signaled some urgent rewriting, took the task most seriously, telling the crowd that they “must fight — fight not with violence and destruction, but with our voices and our votes; fight not against each other, but for the hopes and dreams we share in common and make us one.”

But these were outliers for the most part. The night’s tone was set by an opening video — clearly put together before last Saturday’s incident — of fearful Americans glued to screens in the dark of their homes, intercut with footage of terrorists, packages of drugs, police cars and crime scenes, and nondescript brown people streaming through turnstiles. News anchor–style voices read out frightening statistics: “One in four Americans now say they live in fear of being attacked in their own neighborhood”; “Crimes against children are increasing rapidly”; “The border crisis poses a major homeland security threat.”

At the end of it all, a bat-signal-like searchlight projected a single word onto the black sky: “TRUMP.”

A later video claimed that Biden had “told illegals to come here and surge our border,” misleadingly editing a September 2019 debate clip of Biden saying he would “immediately surge to the border” — a line that, in context, referred to upping the number of government workers to deal with and process asylum seekers. “Biden’s open border became an open invitation for violent Venezuelan gang members, sex traffickers, and now confirmed ISIS terrorists,” the narrator said. Not only that, but hundreds of thousands of Americans were dead thanks to the fentanyl he allowed to come in, “enough to kill every single American . . . including young children,” who were also among the victims of “horrific crimes,” including sex crimes, carried out by undocumented migrants.

“America should never forget who was responsible: Joe Biden and America’s border czar,” the narrator concluded, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris.

In spite of his directive, the president himself got in on the action, albeit via a prerecorded video. “[Democrats] are destroying our country,” he warned. “Keep your eyes open. These people want to cheat and they do cheat, and frankly, it’s the only thing they do well.”

All were themes hit on again and again by the speakers, who, unlike those in the prerecorded videos, had time to change their speeches.

Democrats’ “pro-criminal” policies have fueled a wave of violent crime, said Representative Elise Stefanik, while “corrupt Democrat prosecutors and judges waged illegal and unconstitutional lawfare against President Trump in an effort to do Joe Biden’s political bidding.” Reality TV star Savannah Chrisley warned that “the Democrats are releasing actual violent offenders who have hurt innocent people” and “consistently punish their enemies” through “rogue prosecutors.”

Vice President Harris encouraged “the criminals and the rioters” to destroy Minneapolis, charged House majority whip Tom Emmer, and she freed a man who went on to murder someone in St Paul. “The heart of today’s woke Democrat Party is with the criminals, not with their victims,” said Dallas mayor Eric Johnson. Describing the horrific incident in Afghanistan that left him disfigured, Nevada senate candidate and veteran Sam Brown told viewers, “Look at my face. This is the high cost of war. If Joe Biden stays in office, more service members will pay this price.”

Two of the speakers were relatives of those lost to this blizzard of violence that GOP officials charged was unleashed by Democrats, one the mother of a teenager who overdosed on fentanyl and the other the brother of a woman raped and killed by an undocumented immigrant. Each directly blamed the sitting president for the deaths of their family members.

Some speakers even altered their prewritten lines to more harshly point the finger at their political opponents. US House majority leader Steve Scalise added a line that “prisons are being emptied” to a speech that, elsewhere, charged that the other side wanted undocumented immigrants to illegally vote in elections. When Florida senator Rick Scott spoke, he dropped the word “unite” from the teleprompter’s call to “rally around [Trump] to rescue and unite our great country.”

As he listed several incidents of people who had been killed by undocumented immigrants, Senator Ted Cruz added one not on the teleprompter: “Rachel Morin, a beautiful mother of five, raped and murdered in suburban Maryland by an illegal immigrant Democrats released.” It would have been a disturbing speech even without this addition, with Cruz warning of a “literal invasion” of migrants that was only happening “because Democrats cynically decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children,” and luridly describing how “teenage girls and boys wearing colored wristbands are being sold into a life of sex slavery.”

This is not even to get into the attacks on the press, from Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake telling the “fake news” that “lie about everything” that it has “worn out [its] welcome,” to former housing and urban development secretary Ben Carson’s charge that “the free press . . . has abused the public trust and resorted to lies, deception, and disinformation.”

Many of these claims were misleading or outright untrue. Violent crime, especially murder, has significantly dropped over the past year, and is lower than it was in 2020. Far from being hordes of violent criminals, undocumented immigrants carry out crimes at significantly lower rates than native-born Americans. US prisons are not being “emptied,” and, shamefully in fact, under Biden the US prison population rose for the first time in nearly a decade. These are just a few of the wild claims speakers made.

When it comes to the political implications, it was already questionable that Democratic criticisms of Trump — that he is an authoritarian and a dictator-in-waiting, for instance — led to Saturday’s attempt on his life, seeing as the shooter was a registered Republican who came from a Trump-supporting household and was described by one classmate as a conservative. But even if we grant this, it’s hard to see how any of the rhetoric from last night’s event was any better: speakers and prerecorded videos charged their political opponents with trying to steal elections and put their enemies in prison and that, to this end, they had deliberately “invited” and “empowered” a range of evildoers to carry out unspeakable violence against innocent Americans, including young children. Republicans have now quickly ceded the high ground they briefly occupied after last weekend’s events, making their continued complaints about Democratic rhetoric against their candidate plainly hypocritical.

But beyond that, the night’s programming starkly clashed with both Trump’s own reported attempt to meet the political moment after his near-death experience and with what rank-and-file Republicans tried to convey to observers during the rest of the event. Many attendees I spoke to over the first two days wanted to stress that the atmosphere at the RNC was a joyful one, with one telling me just before the event started that the mood was “positive and upbeat.” This was decidedly not what came across to viewers at home from the night’s programming, which was luridly fixated on violence, particularly sexual crimes, and more closely resembled the RNC program from Trump’s losing 2020 campaign.

Trump and the GOP’s saving grace here may be that they have a political opposition in disarray that is unable to capitalize on this. Despite Biden’s major new policy announcement of a national annual rent cap of 5 percent on large landlords, the Democratic news cycle on Tuesday was dominated by Congress members’ outrage at the Biden team’s plans to lock the embattled president in early as the party’s nominee over their objections, and saw the Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison get into an extended Twitter argument with Nate Silver over a lie Harrison told to justify the move. Between this and Trump literally dodging a bullet, Republicans may have good reason to believe there really is a guardian angel watching over their nominee.