“LOCK her up! Lock her up!” a section of the crowd began to chant. But Donald Trump, slowly shaking his head, wasn’t playing that game today. “Let’s defeat her in November,” he said of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. This was impressive restraint; several previous speakers at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, which Mr Trump’s address brought to a close on July 21st, had recommended jail for her; one delegate said she should be shot. It was also untypical of Mr Trump.
While campaigning for the Republican nomination, which is now officially his, he mocked women over their menstrual cycle and looks; performed a gurning impression of a disabled journalist; implied that one of his opponents had something to do with child molestation; slandered the wife and father of another; said he wanted to beat up a protester; and many times recommended porridge for Mrs Clinton. His most devoted supporters, somewhere around 45% of Republican primary voters, appreciate, if not always the sentiment, then the unvarnished manner of such attacks. Unlike fork-tongued professional politicians, they say approvingly, Mr Trump speaks his mind.
But most voters find Mr Trump’s troublemaking and offensiveness off-putting; 67% say he does not have the “temperament or character” to be an “effective president”. In his speech in Cleveland, which was by far the most important of his year-old political career, Mr Trump tried to change that perception.
He needs above all to change it among university-educated whites, for his hopes of beating Mrs Clinton probably rest with them. Having insulted and frightened non-white voters, with his imprecations against immigrants and Spanish speakers and the naked racism of some of his supporters, Mr Trump must, at the least, win more white votes than his unsuccessful predecessors did. Among whites without a degree, he is on course to manage that. In 2012, 61% of whites without a degree voted for Mitt Romney; now, 65% say they will vote for Mr Trump. But those with a degree are less keen on him. In 2012, 56% voted for Mr Romney, giving him a lead with them of 14 percentage points over Barack Obama. Yet only 46% say they are for Mr Trump—just a percentage point more than back Mrs Clinton. Unless Mr Trump can woo enough college-educated whites to significantly widen that gap, most obviously by coming across as less impulsive and divisive, it is hard to see how he can win.
It is possible that his performance in Cleveland will help him in this effort. It was the most honed and disciplined of his brief political career. Earlier in the convention, he had appeared on-stage, to introduce his wife Melania, shrouded in smoke and light and to the deafening sound of “We are the Champions”. This time he paced slowly into view, under simple stage lighting, wearing an expression of inscrutable seriousness—which he maintained for most of the nearly 80 minutes it took him to get through his speech. Reading from a teleprompter, which he had previously done rarely and badly, he delivered his speech at a steady pace, with none of the windy diversions he is known for. It was an impressive performance, and also by far the longest nomination acceptance speech on record. The crowd, of several thousand delegates and party donors and hacks, nonetheless listened rapt, and sometimes cheered wildly. Its members liked Mr Trump’s grim diagnosis of America’s problems and his promise to fix them. At the end of a fairly shambolic convention, they were perhaps also celebrating the fact that Mr Trump suddenly looked like a winner.   
He was a bit less antagonistic than he has been, too. He reiterated that his proposed ban on foreign Muslims would apply to anyone, Muslim or otherwise, coming from a country riven by terrorism. (Though this is not necessarily an improvement; it makes his proposal slightly less offensive but also less likely to be ruled illegal.) He swore to protect American lesbians and gays—communities that Republicans generally do not feel much sympathy for. His lead scapegoats in this speech, illegal immigrants, free-loading foreigners (including Chinese currency-manipulators) and America’s allegedly corrupt political elite, had clearly been chosen to cause maximum anger and minimum alarm to his audience. He did not stoke America’s rising racial tensions. He did not identify the illegals as Mexicans or Spanish-speakers, as he has before; neither did he spell out, as many likeminded Republicans would, that a recent spate of killings in Chicago, Detroit and Washington, DC mainly involved blacks.   
Such were Mr Trump’s efforts to sanitise his politics. Yet they left a lot of muck in place. The speech was violent and bleak. It described an America torn by crime and joblessness, weakened militarily and stitched up by every multilateral agency or agreement it is involved with: NATO, the World Trade Organisation, the North American Free Trade Agreement. There was once a theory that, having bagged the nomination, Mr Trump would abandon dystopian politics for a more moderate and sunny message—the sort of thing general elections are usually fought on. But in this speech he mainly added a few facts—on America’s rising murder rates, for example; though violent crime is at a historic low—to the wild and sketchy claims he has made about America’s problems during the primaries. The result was a decent speech; but, for the extra voters Mr Trump needs, perhaps an unconvincing vision of America.
Whites with a degree are gloomier than non-whites—but a lot more upbeat than whites without a degree. Some will find Mr Trump’s extreme pessimism off-putting, or implausible. They should certainly be unimpressed by the solutions he offers. His flatulent claim that renegotiating America’s trade deals will lead to millions of new jobs is typical of them: Mr Trump’s proposals—a border wall, Muslim ban, protectionism and so forth—tend to be awful or unimaginable.
A third reason why Mr Trump’s speech, though well-written and powerfully delivered, might not give him the sustained polls bounce he needs, concerns the claims he made for himself in it. To the doubts that he can be an effective president, he responded, with eye-watering audacity, that he alone can play that role. This went far way beyond a hoary boast about his business prowess. Mr Trump’s speech depicted him as an indispensable strongman-visionary, called to clean up a system gone bad: “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” It would be wrong to say this sounded like the argument of a coupster—for that would not do justice to the regal, which is to say quasi-sacred, qualities Mr Trump appeared to imbue himself with. “My greatest compassion,” he graciously said, “will be for our own struggling citizens”.
Having blessed his family and business towards the end of his speech, he bade them a figurative farewell—thus to be free to shoulder the yoke of patriotic service that history has called on him to hoist from the mud. (Presumably, Mr Trump’s shoulders are yuge.) “To my sisters Mary Anne and Elizabeth, my brother Robert and my late brother Fred, I will always give you my love. You are most special to me. I have loved my life in business. But now, my sole and exclusive mission is to go to work for our country—to go to work for all of you.”
This really is silly. Many Americans say they want a powerful president. Many say they have had enough of politicians. Many also admire Mr Trump; he is charismatic and a successful builder. But can they seriously want a man with a messiah complex in the Oval Office? Amid the high pomp of a great political event in Cleveland, Mr Trump’s megalomania almost seemed congruous. But there is surely a chance, as the campaign turns serious, that more and more Americans are going to find him ridiculous.