The crowning of a nominee, like the coronation of a king, is an irreversible experience.

As we hear in Richard II, not all the water in the rough, rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king.

The convention reaches its final day with Anodyne intros

and a meandering hour-and-a-half-long peroration from Donald Trump.

Less than commanding, it made the marathon speeches of Fidel Castro seem like haikus.

I'm Andrew Hagan, editor-at-large of the London Review of Books.

And I'm Deborah Friedale, contributing editor.

It's day four of the Republican National Convention.

Andrew, we made it. It's morning in Milwaukee.

How long were you at the convention center, like in total yesterday?

Like 14 hours? And you know, I'll never get those 14 hours back. But I did learn something about the monstrosity of human eagle yesterday.

What came to mind was something George W. Bush was overheard saying by multiple people at Trump's first and I hope only inauguration after the 2016

election, you know, Bush said that was some weird shit.

If you had to sort of, if you had to write the play, weird shit is the obvious title.

Let's talk about some of the speeches running up to it, though.

We'll come back to Trump's mega speech.

I think all these speakers, you know, some have got the same memo.

Like, you must humanize Trump.

Give us the anecdotes of him being a sweetheart.

And the problem, though, of course, is that people didn't have the anecdotes to back it up.

Maybe you've had this experience of, like, being at a funeral or a wedding wedding where people just start damning with faint

praise because they don't have good enough. But they're trying. And so like it'll be like,

...