RNC 2016: Donald Trump is declared the Republican Party presidential nominee after smooth roll call on convention floor

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One by one, representatives of the 50 state delegations at the Republican Convention grasped a microphone, offered a little commercial about the special virtues of their homes - oil in Alaska, potatoes in Idaho - and then announced who they wanted to take up battle for the White House.

The whole country - the whole world - knew it already, but as the name Donald J. Trump tripped successively from their lips in the traditional convention roll call and echoed around the arena, there were surely not a few inside it - and outside - whose heads were still spinning in wonder.

Not that everything seemed exactly transparent. There was some bafflement when Washington DC announced it had 10 votes for Marco Rubio of Florida and and 9 for John Kasich, the Governor of Ohio. But the convention secretary then said all 19 votes would be going to to Mr Trump anyway.

Chip Nottingham, a Washington DC delegate, was not impressed. “The chair, in a power play, just deemed that all 19 would go to Trump 'cause they don't want any dissent even though they clearly have a majority of votes that they need.”

"Congratulations Dad, we love you!" And so it was, at 7.11 in the evening, that Donald Trump Jr stood with his delegation, New York, and announced that the 89 votes it was giving to his father had formally put him over the toop. It was done. Over. Those fired: Cruz, Jeb, Marco, Kasich, Carson, Huckabee, the list is long. The lights played on the crowd and the band struck up 'New York, New York'.

Thus the luxury of dreaming that the braggadocious billionaire with honey-spun hair, a punchline for far longer than a politician, didn’t really mean it when he asked to take charge of the party of Abraham Lincoln could no longer be sustained. He had done it.

Next stop…the office of POTUS, President of the United States. That remains to be seen, of course, and when the Democrats end their convention in Philadelphia next week presumably with Hillary Clinton carrying their standard, the battle for that high office will really begin.

Mr Trump will formally accept his party’s nomination on Thursday evening. It will be his coronation and the climax of a convention that so far has been marked by some tension and also controversy, notably allegations that the speech of his wife, Melania Trump, on Monday was partly lifted from a Michelle Obama speech at the Democrats confab eight years ago.

And when there hasn’t been controversy there has been a clear dearth of the usual happy hoopla and energy seen at past conventions of either party. From the perch of The Independent it was hard not to notice that the arena on Tuesday night was perhaps barely 60 per cent full.

Before the roll call had started, the task of formally nominating Mr Trump had fallen to one of the few members of the US Senate to have consistently and enthusiastically championed him, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, not a figure known on Capitol Hill for his rhetorical scholarship.

“Our political system is not working. We operate like the trench warfare battles of WWI,” Senator Sessions attempted. “Crime is rising and the president, he blames the police.” Adding that the Washington and corporate establishment always demands that no one rocks the boat, he said Mr Trump hadn’t been intimidated. “He would not be silenced. He spoke the truth.”

“Off to a good start,” Paul Ryan, the House speaker, offered when Mr Sessions had done, acknowledging tacitly that he and the rest of the party had not been certain going into the evening if the handing of the nomination to Mr Trump would go smoothly or expose the fractures that still lurk below.

There was a brief but startling ruckus on the convention floor on Monday when the remaining anti-Trump dissidents made one last try to force a floor vote on changing the rules in a way potentially to draft an alternative nominee only to be thwarted. There was about five minutes of confusion and chaos before it was clear that the rebellion had been put down.

Throughout the roll call process in the Quicken Loans Arena chants of ‘Trump, Trump, Trump’ and ‘We want Trump’, would occasionally break out in different parts of the hall. “Maintaining order during the roll call is extremely important,” Mr Ryan admonished the delegates just in case of last-minute tumult.