It’s Donald Trump’s Convention. But the Inspiration? Nixon.

Related Link Howard Fineman on the Nixon analogy

 Let Trump be Trump, his aides have always insisted. And let his convention serve as an unapologetic tribute to his singular, erratic, untamed persona.

“I want,” the candidate has often said, “to be myself.”

But on the opening night of the Republican National Convention here on Monday, Donald J. Trump was conspicuously trying to conjure somebody else: Richard M. Nixon.

In an evening of severe speeches evoking the tone and themes of Nixon’s successful 1968 campaign, Mr. Trump’s allies and aides proudly portrayed him as the heir to the disgraced former president’s law-and-order message, his mastery of political self-reinvention and his rebukes of overreaching liberal government.

It was a remarkable embrace — open and unhesitating — of Nixon’s polarizing campaign tactics, and of his overt appeals to Americans frightened by a chaotic stew of war, mass protests and racial unrest.