DONALD TRUMP’S MESSAGE: “I AM YOUR VOICE:”

The Manhattan mogul sold himself as the champion of a downtrodden working class — “America’s blue-collar billionaire” as one speaker had called him earlier in the evening — promising to restore “law and order” and casting himself as a change agent against presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

“I am your voice,” he boomed, pointing straight toward the television audience.

“Hillary Clinton’s message is that things will never change. Never ever,” Trump said. “My message is that things have to change and they have to change right now.”

Trump delivered a deeply negative speech that described a darkening America. He spoke of spiking crime, “third-world” airports, growing trade deficits, “chaos in our communities,” and terrorism on the home front. Abroad, he said the situation was “worse than it has ever been before.”*

“This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism and weakness,” he said.

The political jujitsu in the bolded passage is key — if Trump can paint Hillary as the voice of reaction and a continuation of an Obama administration that’s exhausted both domestically and (especially) abroad, not least of which, when it comes to fighting terrorism both home and abroad — he’s halfway home to being able to tell Hillary…

* Apparently from the Politco’s point of view, it’s time to cue Reagan’s “Morning In America” reelection ad to describe the current happy-go-lucky state of a fundamentally transformed country. That’s some powerful hallucinogenics they must consume there.