Welcome to The Spectator podcast. Subscribe from just £1 a week at spectator.com.com. Welcome to the Spectator podcast. I'm Isabel Hardman. A little more than a year ago, Donald Trump began his campaign to be the president of the United States to the world's disbelief. But since then,

Trump has come from being the joke candidate to being on the threshold of the White House,

and here he is speaking to the Republican Convention.

I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration,

to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities.

So what is next for the presidential contender and for American politics?

I'm now joined from the Republican Convention in Ohio by Freddie Gray,

the Spectator's Deputy Editor and by Scott McConnell, founder of the American

Conservative magazine. So, Freddie, you write in your cover this week that Donald Trump

has turned the American right inside out. Is a Republican establishment now prepared to

throw its weight behind Donald Trump? Now he's their only option. Well, the funny thing is

they sort of have to, but I mean, a lot of the Republican top brass, as it were, have stayed away. But essentially now the

party has had to come behind him. But it's a rather sort of funny and slightly disgusting

spectacle to what them trying to pretend that this is a normal candidacy, because it's not. It's

a very strange. And,

I mean, as you said in the beginning, it's a joke candidacy that's become the real thing.

Does that mean that the party itself has stopped being a serious party as well? It's no longer

a normal party. Well, I mean, it's still a huge, the Republican Party is still a huge beast.

It feels this week as though it's a sort of decaying beast, but it's still a huge, the Republican Party is still a huge beast. It feels this week

as though it's a sort of decaying beast, but it's still this huge institution. So it will

either adapt and change to Trumpism or it will die. But the question is, how does it change

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