Analysis: GOP establishment offers lukewarm endorsement of Trump

CLEVELAND - Mitch McConnell mentioned Hillary Clinton 24 times and Donald Trump five times in his speech to the Republican National Convention. Paul Ryan named Trump just twice in a 1,400-word speech and only to say that enacting the House GOP's agenda is contingent on him becoming president.

"Only with Donald Trump and Mike Pence do we have a chance at a better way," he said.

Both congressional leaders sought to frame 2016 as a referendum on Clinton and implicitly made the case that Trump is the lesser of two evils. In their telling, presidential elections are really binary choices between the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.

McConnell focused the bulk of his speech on explaining why the former Secretary of State is untrustworthy and unacceptable.

"She lied about her emails," the Kentuckian said. "She lied about her server. She lied about Benghazi. She lied about sniper fire. She even lied about why her parents named her Hillary."

Then he argued that Clinton would represent nothing more than a third term of Barack Obama. "We put an Obamacare repeal bill on the president's desk. He vetoed it. Trump would sign it," McConnell added toward the end of his speech. "We passed a bill to finally build the Keystone Pipeline. He vetoed it. Trump would sign it. We passed a bill to defund Planned Parenthood. Obama vetoed it. Trump would sign it. And on that sad day when we lost the great Antonin Scalia, I made another pledge that Barack Obama would not fill this seat. That honor will go to Donald Trump. With Donald Trump in the White House, Senate Republicans will build on the work we've done and pass more bills into law than any Senate in years."

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, who also spoke, named Trump just once, opting instead to attack the Democratic nominee as "the definition of the status quo."

- The Clinton campaign sent several news releases highlighting negative comments Ryan and McConnell have made about Trump since he clinched the nomination. The Speaker called Trump's attacks on a judge's Mexican heritage "the textbook definition of a racist comment," criticized his use of the Star of David in a Twitter post, opposed the Muslim ban and chastised him for praising Saddam Hussein. The Majority Leader said last month, "It's pretty obvious he doesn't know a lot about the issues."

- But Ryan and McConnell are both political animals whose primary concern is retaining their majorities. "They know how to count and they know better than to challenge the will of the voters," The Post's Dan Balz explained in his column. "They were not losers so much as they have become hostages to Trump. For the sake of their respective conferences, they have decided they must embrace him ... Even so, McConnell was met with scattered boos from the convention floor, another sign that this gathering is in the hands of Trump and not the party establishment." And it's an uneasy truce: "Republican leaders are prepared to insulate themselves from his candidacy, to cut him loose, if that becomes necessary."

- McConnell's speech was receiving much better reviews than Ryan's. Chris Cillizza, for example, put the senator in the winner's column and the Speaker in the loser's column. "Ever the savvy pol, McConnell found a way to thread the needle ... offering what I thought was the most convincing case for Trump by an establishment politician," he explained. "It was a Reagan-esque attempt to point to the 80 percent of agreement rather than focus on the 20 percent of disagreement." But Cillizza wrote Ryan's "speech felt flat - filled with attempts at reaching rhetorical heights that the Wisconsin Republican never came all that close to."

Buzzfeed's McKay Coppins said Ryan "seemed at times like a beleaguered dad pleading with his kids to stop fighting."

From the conservative columnist Ross Douthat at The New York Times: "Paul Ryan's palpable discomfort with his nominee? Not funny. He chose to be part of this, to bless and accept it. He should feel disgrace."

- The spin everyone is mocking: Ryan presented Trump's hostile takeover of his party as evidence of its vitality. "Have we had our arguments this year? Sure we have," he said. "You know what I call those? Signs of life. Signs of a party that's not just going through the motions!"

- Only one of the 11 GOP senators who took the stage as a show of unity after McConnell's speech represents a state Mitt Romney lost in 2012: Iowa's Joni Ernst, who is not up for re-election until Nov. 2020. The other freshmen come from some of the reddest places in America: Alaska, Arkansas, West Virginia, Montana, Oklahoma, Louisiana, South Dakota, etc.

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, perhaps the most vulnerable incumbent in Cleveland, mentioned Trump just once during a speech earlier in the evening. He mainly focused on Clinton and his opponent Russ Feingold.

Notably absent from the Quicken Loans Arena altogether was Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, who is locked in a neck-and-neck re-election race.

- Not everyone said his name.

Less than two months ago, Trump went to New Mexico and attacked Gov. Susana Martinez - the chair of the Republican Governors Association and the nation's first Latina governor - for the state's weak economy, the growing number of food stamp recipients and not doing more to reject Syrian refugees. The billionaire said he might even run to the state to run for governor himself. "She's got to do a better job," he said.

Martinez came to Cleveland anyway. During the roll call of the states, the governor took the microphone to talk up "diversity" in "The Land of Enchantment." She carefully avoided mentioning Trump or even "the nominee," whom she has still not formally endorsed. Then she introduced a young delegate to say the state was casting its votes for Trump.

Trump supporter Bob Dole - the only former GOP nominee who is attending the convention - says his "biggest area of disagreement" with the nominee is the way he's disparaged Martinez. "I want him to go to New Mexico and meet with the governor and apologize for anything that may have been said," Dole told Yahoo's Katie Couric on Tuesday. "We need Latinos in our party, we need more women in the party, and I've raised it with him over the phone that I felt this is something that never should have happened and ought to be taken care of."

- "Hillary for prison" is the latest cause of establishment heartburn: Chris Christie, auditioning to be Trump's attorney general, tried to act like a prosecutor again as he laid out a case against Clinton. "Guilty or not guilty?" he asked the crowd. "Guilty," they yelled repeatedly. Four times the audience interrupted him to chant: "Lock her up."

It's historically unusual, putting it generously, to say that the leader of the opposition party should be jailed. Even in 1972, as the particulars of the Watergate scandal began to emerge, no leading Democrat said Richard Nixon should go to prison. The idea of locking up the other party's duly-selected nominee is in many ways antithetical to the principles of a free society. The FBI director, whose background is as a Republican, said earlier this month that no reasonable prosecutor would bring criminal charges against Clinton, even if she was extremely careless. Just months ago, calling for Clinton's imprisonment was seen as a fringe idea.

Trump and his surrogates are determined to push this concept into the mainstream. "She deserves to be in stripes," said the mother of a man who died in Benghazi. The Republican nominee for Senate in Colorado said Clinton should trade her "pantsuits" for "an orange jumpsuit."

Serious Republicans are bristling. "I wouldn't say that she belongs in jail," Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst said on CNN. And Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, who is skipping the convention, tweeted this Tuesday night:

"Hillary Clinton now belongs in prison? C'mon. We can make the case that she shouldn't be elected without jumping the shark."

- How swiftly has the rhetoric coarsened? While Christie seemed to welcome the crowd's chants of "lock her up" on Tuesday night, he pooh-poohed the idea on Monday:

- Two other moments when Tuesday night's speeches jumped the shark, via the Post's David Fahrenthold:

Ben Carson linked Hillary to Lucifer: "He noted that Clinton had written about Saul Alinsky, a community organizer for liberal causes. Carson said that Alinsky had used the biblical story of Lucifer as a model, the fallen angel cast out of heaven, with ambitions to rule the world. 'The original radical,' Carson said, citing Alinsky's book, 'Rules for Radicals.' Carson seemed to conclude that Clinton had some sympathy for the devil. If the country followed her path, he said, 'God will remove himself from us. We will not be blessed, and our nation will go down the tubes ... Are we willing to elect as president someone who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer?'"

Sharon Day, the No. 2 at the RNC, called Bill Clinton a sexual abuser: "As first lady you viciously attacked the character of women who were victims of sexual abuse ... at the hands of your husband," she said.

- The Post's Fact Checkers reviewed 10 of the most provocative claims of the evening and concluded - with characteristic understatement - that Clinton was attacked "sometimes unfairly or out of context."