ALL ABOARD!

We expected the convention to be a train wreck. Instead, Trump put the Republican Party on a new track — with a one-way ticket to the White House

CLEVELAND — Strange and terrible things can happen at these supposedly “too-scripted” “glorified infomercials” we call political conventions. Backstage in 2012 at the Republican convention in Tampa, none of the party apparatchiks had any idea what Clint Eastwood would say when he politely requested a 15-minute slot that had been reserved for others. Great, said Republican handlers. Then Eastwood requested a chair. Er, okaaaaay, said the RNC suits.

Then Eastwood began talking to the chair. On stage. In front of tens of millions of voters. Backstage, according to journalists who were there, a leading RNC official leaned over and vomited into a garbage can.

But conventions can spur spontaneous magic, too. Sarah Palin was a completely unknown quantity when her speech instantly defibrillated the clogged arteries of John McCain’s tired campaign on Sept. 3, 2008. Four years ago in Charlotte, Joe Biden veered off the teleprompter and started riffing. Far from coming across as an ill-timed dose of Crazy Uncle Joe, though, it worked beautifully and helped make for a winning convention.

Here in Cleveland, at the Huntington Convention Center where thousands of political journos were holed up a half-mile from “the Q” — the Quicken Loans Arena where the speakers thundered and the delegates herded — the hacks took turns Monday morning gazing down at the urban farm located right on the property. Just outside what figured to be the most fractious party convention in at least 40 years, 700,000 bees were swarming. Immediately the Hall of Hacks shifted into a state of Advanced Metaphor Alert. Bees can come together to make sweet, irresistible honey. Or they can just go bonkers stinging everyone in sight.

What would the Republicans create? Painful, long-lasting welts or a delicious treat so smooth you can spread it on toast?

According to an NBC News poll, Donald Trump was only 1 point behind Hillary Clinton as the convention kicked off. But as things got rolling Monday, the Fifth Avenue insurgent was facing a conservative counter-insurgency: having failed to drive through a Rules Committee change that would have allowed Trump’s delegates to vote for someone other than Trump, last-ditchers joined a rebellion led by Utah Sen. Mike Lee to force a rollcall vote, instead of a voice vote, that would have at least forced ev- eryone present to go on the record with their position on Trump.

“Chaos!” said NBC News. “Chaos!” said NPR. “Open discord and rebellion!” said CNN. But the whole thing was over in a few minutes. This wasn’t a prison riot, it was grumbling. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, like an exceedingly polite and buttoned-down bulldozer, blithely eliminated the opposition and pushed on. A day later, all that was left of the #NeverTrump vanquished was . . . a cocktail party. Influential anti-Trump conservative journos — nationally known columnists, leading magazine editors — listened as officers of the group Better for America promised improbably that they could whip up a complete national political campaign in “a matter of days” and that prominent financial backers sitting on the bench were eager to charge on the field for . . . a third- or fourthor fifth-party candidate. We nodded and sipped our rosé and nibbled our shrimp cocktail but the Dump Trump movement was dead without knowing it. It was like the ghost ball in “The Shining.”

Back at the Qthere was no doubt about whose party this was. Monday night fea- tured one blistering speech after another, most of them attacking Hillary Clinton as a dishonest, untrustworthy, corrupt and failed leader. Just a day after a cop hater gunned down three police officers in Baton Rouge, just four days after an ISIS-loving fanatic ran down some 300 people with

‘Ta truck in Nice, just 11 days after another radical killed five cops in Dallas, just 36 days after another Islamist freak murdered 49 people at an Orlando disco, fear of real, actual, blood-in-the-streets chaos was on the minds of every American except Democratic Party fanboys lost in their own fog of denial. They keep nervously reassuring one another that the Summer of Terror isn’t. HE vast majority of Americans today do not feel safe,” said ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in a barnburner of a speech. “They fear for their children. They fear for themselves. They fear for our police officers, who are being targeted.” He praised the police in the hall and outside it, crying, with genuine plaintive gratitude, “When they come to save your life, they don’t ask if you are black or white. They just come to save you!” He referred to the stark and utterly undeniable poisoning of race relations under President Obama and asked, “What happened — what happened to ‘There’s no black America, there’s no white America, there is just America?’ What happened to it? Where did it go?”

Liberals — both the admitted kind and the pretend neutrals who work at “unbiased” major media outlets — had been quietly dismissive of the evening so far, as one speaker after another failed to find his footing, spoke too long or allowed their rhetoric to get ahead of the facts. Plus: What was Scott Baio doing here? But now Giuliani was raining haymakers on Obama-Clintonism. The mewling, apologetic, America-last mindset about how we must try to “empathize with” (as Mrs. Clinton once put it) underprivileged peoples who just happen to be mass murderers was being confronted forthrightly. The HRC-BHO outlook was getting skewered, filleted and barbecued.

Liberals were getting nervous. First they got on social media and called Giuliani crazy. Then they went quiet, realizing it was counterproductive to draw attention to what he’d said. Their best bet was to hope that some other jingling cat toy would roll along the carpet for America to bat around. So in walked Melania Trump. When Melania’s pretty but content-free speech was revealed to have recycled about three sentences’ worth of vapid sentiment from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech in Denver, it trig

gered a hys- teria avalanche, a rockslide of mockery with a tinge of concern-trolling about What This Meant about the professionalism of the Trump campaign.

The train wreck the media had prescripted was well under way. But Donald J. Trump has been outsmarting the media since Day 1. He lowered expectations so brilliantly that it would seem like a miracle if the Trump Train even stayed on the tracks. It did much more than that. It began to pick up steam. It began flattening everything in its path. By the end of the convention, it was looking hard to stop.

Halfway through the week, the media had already decided this would go in the books as the Plagiarism and Scott Baio Convention. The turn came when Trump and his campaign supremo Paul Manafort, who had been dickering behind the scenes with Ted Cruz about the Texas senator’s much-awaited Wednesday night speech, managed to turn Ted’s dislike to its advantage.

Manafort couldn’t convince Cruz to give an endorsement, but he knew exactly what Cruz was going to say. We all did. The entire transcript was sent out to the media before Cruz started speaking. There would be only one mention of Trump, and it would be as frosty as the maniacal air conditioning that chilled the Q. “I want to congratulate Donald Trump on winning the nomination last night” was as far as Cruz would go. So Manafort and Co. decided, before the speech even started, that it would end with heckling. (Time magazine and other sources reported as much, citing anonymous sources. Manafort evidently tipped off Bloomberg reporter Mark Halperin, who tweeted before the speech, “@PaulManafort owns the floor. Will be key at several moments tonight. Watch what @tedcruz says & the reaction.”)

Cruz approached the end and, as Cruz’s campaign manager Jeff Roe said on a Philadelphia radio show, the “active whip operation got active.” The New York delegates were whipped up by Team Trump to interrupt Cruz with shouts of “We want Trump,” finally booing him off the stage. Cruz, in portraying himself as the man of principle, looked like a louse on a skunk.

It was a genius move by Manafort that pulled off three astonishing tricks. For the media, which thinks of itself as a relentless detective agency discovering for the people’s benefit the “unscripted moments” that reveal everything, it gave them a perfectly crafted scene they overhyped because they didn’t know it was staged.

For the public, it gave them a new and irresistible reason to watch Trump’s speech the following night. And for Trump, it made him, for once, the innocent wronged victim instead of the bully — in the parlance of the pro-wrestling shows that Trump used to participate in, the “heel” had become the “face.” That certified smartypants Cruz essentially blew himself up on live TV was for Manafort and Trump merely an amusing side benefit.

Now the Trump Train was hitting about 90 mph. After an endearing set-up speech by Ivanka Trump, who softened her dad’s rough edges by recalling all the times she’d seen him invite luckless souls into his office to hook them up with jobs or contacts, the Qwas practically vibrating in anticipation. His speech was powerful stuff that looked straight into the eyes of the 69 percent of Americans who think the country is on the wrong track and said, “I understand.” Trump is a salesman and he knows what product he’s selling. He also knows who hasn’t been buying: a lot of college-educated GOP voters turned off by his hyperbole. So he skillfully played to them without sounding like he was abandoning Trumpismo. Combined with his running mate Mike Pence’s soothing remarks the previous night, the message was reassuring for an important bloc of voters: Trump signalled it was safe for Republicans to come home and open their checkbooks.

OK, he isn’t running for sheriff. And a president doesn’t have the power to command the world to calm itself and take a timeout. But the presidency — like salesmanship — is all about gauging the emotional state of the country and matching it. In 2012, Americans said their No. 1 issue was the economy, and they said they trusted Mitt Romney to handle it better. But President Obama trounced Romney on the much fuzzier question of “Does he care about people like me?”

This year, the “I feel your pain” candidate isn’t a Clinton. Trump painted a picture of a moment plagued by cop killings, terrorist attacks, mayhem and injustice. It happens to be the exact same picture painted grudgingly by the journalists who despise him. “I am the law and order candidate,” he declared, and who doubts that? Plus voters remain more inclined to trust a successful businessman over a career lawyer/politico when it comes to economic stewardship.

The media groused about how Trump was supposedly too loud, or too nasty, or went on too long — but the public didn’t care. The public, like Trump, is tired of political correctness and saw him as the lone gunslinger who was willing to take aim at the bad guys. The speech wasn’t just a success, it was a smash hit — 75 percent favorability, according to a CNN snap poll, with 56 percent saying they were now more likely to vote Trump as against only 10 percent less likely.

Loony fire-and-brimstone stuff ? Hardly. Trump said nothing that was outrageous, racist or sexist. Is that a low bar? Yep, but the media set it at ankle height, then was shocked when Trump hopped over it. Gone was the suggestion that Mexico be made to pay for the wall on the border, which he mentioned only briefly. Gone was the promise that all Muslim immigration would be halted.

Instead of threatening a trade war with China, he spoke of turning “our bad trade agreements into great trade agreements.” When the crowd reacted to a mention of Hillary Clinton by chanting, “Lock her up!” he waved them off. Trump no longer has to play the rabble-rouser. Now he’s serious, and he looks it. The protest candidate has gone mainstream. The barking dog caught the car he was chasing, climbed in, and started driving. The media expected open-mic night at a ninth-rate comedy club; he gave them a plausible potential president.

His speech looked straight into the eyes of the 69 percent of Americans who think the country is on the wrong track and said, “I understand.”