A dark and stormy night

CLEVELAND — Well, that was … bleak.

The official theme of the first night of the 2016 Republican National Convention was “Make America Safe Again.” But Yahoo News Senior National Affairs Reporter Liz Goodwin nicely captures the actual vibe in the Quicken Loans Arena when she writesthat “an alternative title could have been ‘America Is a Scary Place,’” with “a series of grieving parents, politicians and law enforcement officers [making] the case that the country and the world are frightening and under siege from illegal immigration, crime and terror.”

“Sadly, for a growing number of communities, the sense of safety that many of us once took for granted has been shattered,” said David Clarke, the sheriff of Milwaukee, who strongly opposes criminal justice reform and the Black Lives Matter movement.

“The vast majority of Americans today do not feel safe,” added former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. “They fear for their children, and they fear for themselves.”

“Terrorists from ISIS are in every one of our 50 states,” explained Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst. “They will use every weapon they have — guns, trucks, knives, poisons and bombs — to kill innocent people.”

“What keeps me up at night is the sobering realization that evil exists,” concluded retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

The program’s one bright spot was Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, who strutted onstage in a cotton silk, off-white Roksanda “Margot” dress with bell sleeves to deliver anuplifting call for unity and inclusion.

Melania’s speech — only the second the Slovenia native has given on the trail — won rave reviews from the pundits, perhaps because it sounded like other, more traditional convention speeches they’d heard in the past.

The only problem?

It may have sounded a little too much like one other convention speech in particular…