The day before the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was asked if he was worried about violent protests disrupting the event. “Frankly, that impact will probably help the campaign because it’s going to show a lawlessness and lack of respect for political discourse,” he replied.

By the end of four chaotic days, in which Trump and his surrogates were repeatedly called on to defend the indefensible, Manafort must have been praying for a busload of anarchists with molotov cocktails to arrive, an overzealous police response caught on film, anything to distract from the fiasco unfolding in the convention hall.

There were two conventions in Cleveland this week. In and around the newly-renovated Public Square, the city hosted a supremely well-organised, peaceful event, in which opposing political viewpoints were expressed loudly but mostly without rancour. Inside the Quicken Loans Arena, Trump presided over an angry, confused pageant, full of fear and hatred, that laid bare the divisions in the Republican Party and exposed how unprepared he is to hold the office he seeks.

In his pitch to voters, Trump presents himself as an experienced chief executive, a deal-maker and problem-solver. The convention - marred by own goals, half-hearted cover-ups and fits of pique - damaged his brand. As basic mistake followed basic mistake, Republican operatives wondered whether a team of incompetents is steering the party towards a calamitous defeat up and down the ticket.

On the final night, Trump shared his terrifying vision of the United States of America: a country of declining ambitions and rising crime rates, threatened by terrorists and roaming gangs of immigrants. “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored,” he swore.

Ronald Reagan assured voters that it was Morning In America. Trump warned that as it’s dark outside, it would be wise to lock the door. He promised to halt immigration from nations “compromised by terrorism” - let’s say France and Belgium, although he never would - and to renegotiate the USA’s membership of NATO. Only by withdrawing from the world, he suggested, can America be great again. The themes of the convention were clear: fear, hate and isolationism of type not seen in America since before World War Two.

The last three Presidents of the United States, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, all projected hope. In declining to make a positive affirmation of American exceptionalism, Trump committed himself to a narrow general election strategy that is dependent on shocking acts of violence, at home and abroad. Project Fear may turn out to be a shrewd bet, but in the short term, it drew comparisons with Mussolini.

David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and the most famous white supremacist in the USA, raved that it was a great speech: “America First! Stop Wars! Defeat the Corrupt Elites! Protect our Borders! Fair Trade! Couldn’t have said it better!”

Trump has explicitly encouraged violence at his rallies, and would surely have been buoyed by rioting in Cleveland. Many reporters brought gas masks, helmets and bullet-proof vests in the hope of witnessing pitched battles, but the violence never kicked off. The disagreements in the streets, though, never came close to the apocalyptic images on the teleprompter.

Partly, this was on account of the overwhelming police presence, including hundreds of volunteers from across the country. One officer from Utah said he had met colleagues from twenty states. The out-of-towners lacked the authority to make arrests, but this was a moot point when no arrests were being made. By the fourth day, only twenty-three people had been detained, all on minor charges.

On Wednesday, Bikers For Trump marched into the square. “We heard there was going to be some flag burning here today, and that’s only going to happen if I’m lying dead beside it,” spokesman Chris Cox said. Although Ohio’s 'open carry' law permits guns in public places, the only weapon he carried was a fire extinguisher. When a gaggle of protesters from the Revolutionary Communist Party showed up, the chief arsonist merely succeeded in setting fire to his shirt before being dragged away.

In making his case to lead a “law and order” administration, Trump relied heavily on the recent murders of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. The response on the streets was a truce. Black Lives Matter’s Cleveland chapter steered clear of the convention. The city’s notoriously violent police force has been under federal supervision for the last two years, but this week at least, the officers on view, at least, were friendly and restrained, and received more words of support than heckles.

“The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,” Trump claimed, citing a recent rise in homicides in urban areas and ignoring how much safer the country’s cities have become since Richard Nixon pioneered a presidential campaign based on similar scare tactics in 1968. Trump accused his opponent, Hillary Clinton, of proposing “mass amnesty, mass immigration, and mass lawlessness.”

To judge by the convention, hatred of Clinton (and Obama) is the only thing that truly unites Republicans. On opening night, Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn led a chant of “lock her up,” arguing that she should be sent to prison for storing classified emails on her personal server during her time as Secretary of State.

This became the convention’s unofficial refrain, often starting up spontaneously at the mention of Clinton’s name. Patricia Smith, whose son died in the terrorist attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, told the audience: “I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son,” adding “Hillary for prison. She deserves to be in stripes.”

On Tuesday, New Jersey Chris Governor Chris Christie staged a mock prosecution. “Let’s do something fun tonight,” he said, before presenting a list of Clinton’s supposed crimes. As he accused her of coddling dictators from Syria to Cuba, selling out American workers for Chinese cash, and being an “apologist for an al-Qaeda affiliate” in Nigeria, the crowd roared “guilty!” to each charge.

Former presidential candidate Ben Carson suggested that Clinton’s undergraduate dissertation about left wing activist Saul Alinsky shows that she is in league with Satan. Trump surrogate Al Baldasaro, a Republican state representative from New Hampshire, said she “should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.”

Stalls along Euclid Avenue sold t-shirts reading read Trump That Bitch!, Life’s A Bitch, Don’t Vote For One, and KFC Hillary special: Two Fat Thighs, Two Small Breasts, Left Wing. Casual misogyny passes without comment in the Republican mainstream. Others showed Trump as Iron Man, Captain America and Muhammad Ali, with Clinton in the role of Sonny Liston prone on the canvas.

Political conventions have two main goals: display party unity and make the nominee appear presidential. Trump’s failed on both counts. Worse, for a candidate who promises to surround himself with the best people and strike the sweetest deals, it brought to mind past missteps. Were Trump’s bankrupt Atlantic City casinos managed this badly?

On the first night, Lieutenant-General Flynn rambled on for so long that Senator Joni Ernst, one of the party’s rising stars, delivered her speech to an empty hall with the major network cameras switched off.

Melania Trump couldn’t come up with a single anecdote revealing the kindness and humanity of her husband, but her speech was well-received until it was found to contain passages lifted verbatim from Michelle Obama’s address to the Democratic Convention in 2008. By flatly denying plagiarism, then repeatedly changing the story about who had written the speech, the Trump campaign prolonged the scandal for two days.

Before the convention started, Manafort angered Ohioans by saying that John Kasich, the popular Republican Governor, was “embarrassing the state” by staying away. On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign allowed his bitter rival Senator Ted Cruz to speak without securing the promise of an endorsement, and then orchestrated booing in the arena when Cruz told Republicans: “Vote your conscience.”

The long list of absentees was indicative of the deep unease felt by many Republicans, but such a direct attack on the party’s standard bearer is almost unprecedented at modern conventions. When Cruz twisted the knife, the response in the hall was anger more than shock. Given the acrimony between the two men, plenty of people saw it coming. For Trump’s campaign to allow it to happen was outright negligence.

On Tuesday, Trump granted an extensive foreign policy interview to the New York Times, promptly trampling all over the next day’s schedule by suggesting that as President, he would assess whether NATO’s Baltic allies have “fulfilled their obligations to us” before deciding whether to defend them from Russian attack.

This threat to abandon the country’s strategic partners, and rip up the post-war alliance which has kept the peace for generations, was met with widespread condemnation. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said his party’s nominee was “wrong” to question the value of the alliance. "NATO is the most important military alliance in world history,” he told Politico. “I want to reassure our NATO allies that if any of them get attacked, we'll be there to defend them."

Retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander, tweeted that Trump’s comments were “deeply dangerous,” adding “I can hear Vladimir Putin chortling from here.”

On the convention floor, delegates shrugged. “When you have an organisation that America has been supporting and they have not been contributing their fair share, we need to renegotiate. Mr Trump is going to walk away with a better deal,” said Charlotte Bergman from Tennessee. “Everybody wants something for free,” said Missouri delegate Thomas Mendenhall. “I mean, look at the NATO countries. How many times have we freed them?”

As he spoke, the house band played a medley: Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash, Stay With Me by the Faces, Gimme Some Lovin’ by the Spencer Davis Group and the Knack’s My Sharona - at thirty-seven years old the youngest song in the repertoire. This year’s convention was the whitest for a century - Bergman was one of just fourteen African-American delegates among almost 2,500 - but the paucity of young people, the millenial generation, was almost as striking.

The prosperous, ruddy-cheeked, good old boys and the courteous ladies in their hats and heels, the Fox News cut-outs and bow-tied fogeys, the professionals and the faithful, winners all: surely they did not belong in Trump’s world of “poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad.”

“Libya is in ruins… Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons, Syria is engulfed in civil war,” he shouted. “Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.” His speech played loose with the truth, as always, but in the era of post-factual politics, it hardly mattered.

“This idea that America is somehow on the verge of collapse, this vision of violence and chaos everywhere, doesn’t really jibe with the experience of most people,” pointed out President Obama the following day. He evidently doesn’t watch Fox News.

Trump can only win in November if events confirm his bleak world-view. He feeds off the “lawlessness” that Manafort longed for in Cleveland, and needs Islamic State even more than it needs him.