There’s usually a pastor around whenever vigilantes gather for an execution. For moral justification this week, the pious Dr. Ben Carson linked Clinton to Lucifer — the devil himself. So, little wonder that it produced barely a shrug when another delegate, and Trump’s adviser on veterans, Al Baldasaro, said Clinton should be “shot for treason.” The Salem witch trials had more respect for due process.

Inside the convention, the hatred was also directed at one who dared members to vote their conscience, Ted Cruz. True, he may be the most disliked politician in the United States. But somehow, it was expected that Cruz would bow to a man who had defamed his father and insulted his wife. Heidi Cruz had to be escorted out of her party’s convention by a friend who feared for her safety.

On Thursday, an openly gay entrepreneur, Peter Thiel, was cheered. But outside the convention, boos and obscenities greeted the lead singer for Third Eye Blind, who had earlier urged delegates in the audience at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to be more accepting of gays and “not live your life in fear.”

Individually, many of these Trump delegates are nice people. In personal chats, you might get them to understand why Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for “The Art of the Deal,” broke a long silence to say that he is terrified of Trump because he’s a “sociopath.” Listening to the acceptance speech, he tweeted, “This is the Donald Trump I came to know, not a word about hope, not a word about possibility, all doom, all the time.”

But in a group, the emotions of the Trumpites pool to hatred and mob single-mindedness — all Mexicans are rapists, all Muslims are terrorists, all crime is rising, Hillary Clinton is the devil and should be shot.

On one level, this convention was Fox News on steroids — the half-truths, the grievances, the demonizing, and certainly the elderly audience, as overnight ratings for the first nights showed. But what a strange irony it was that the mastermind of all that broadcast polarization — and, arguably, of the party that gave us Trump — was forced out on the night that should have been Roger Ailes’s apogee.

Ailes will be an asterisk. When the convention closed, fear had won the hall. And we should fear — for the republic, for a democracy facing its gravest peril since the Civil War.