Mike Pence is simply shoring up the people the Republicans thought they already had. So he is a way for people who thought [Donald] Trump was not really conservative to say, well, okay, here's a conservative guy.

I think certainly everybody is aware of the potential for just the very inflamed political mood in America .

As so often, a political event involving Donald Trump looks like swinging wildly between melodrama and farce. The Republican National Convention in Cleveland has begun with accusations of plagiarism after Mr Trump's wife Melania gave a speech dotted with sentences that appeared to have been lifted from a speech that Michelle Obama gave in 2008.

Think the very fact that somebody like Mike Pence is seen as useful to the [Donald] Trump campaign would be analytically a sign of difficulty for him because, you know, the Republican Party over the last two decades has needed to include his support among women, among Latinos, among blacks, among young people, and among highly educated people.

The people who are showing up [on the Republican National Convention ], either they are ones who actually believe in Donald Trump, or they think there's enough they care about, sort of keeping the party afloat and avoiding a sweeping loss in the centre of the house, they're going to show up and give him some kind of base.

Donald Trump is going to be onstage introducing his wife, Melania, so I think this is the first time a presidential nominee has been onstage twice during one convention, and it probably is only the first of many firsts we will record for The Donald during these next few days.

The proportion of [Donald's Trump] own direct family members who are speaking [on the Republican National Convention] is high to an unprecedented degree and a proportion of sort of figures of policy substance is unprecedentedly low. But the word unprecedentedly can be applied to simply everything that's happening this year.