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Republicans predicted a national "horror movie" should United States President Donald Trump lose in November, flinging out dark warnings on the opening day of their scaled down national convention.
Trump's campaign had promised to offer an inclusive and uplifting prime-time message, hoping to broaden his appeal beyond his hard-core base by featuring the next generation of party stars including two Republicans of colour, Congressman Tim Scott and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Yet efforts to strike an optimistic tone were frequently overshadowed by dire talk that Democrat Joe Biden would destroy America, allowing communities to be overrun by violence.
Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida likened the prospect of Biden's election to a horror movie.
"They'll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door," Gaetz declared.


Later in the night, Haley and Scott did offer a softer tone as they highlighted their experience growing up as people of colour.
"I was a brown girl in a black and white world," Haley said, noting that she faced discrimination but rejecting the idea that "America is a racist country."
She also gave a nod to the Black Lives Matter movement, saying "of course we know that every single black life is valuable."
And Scott, the Republican Party's only black senator, levelled the kind of personal attack against Biden that Trump and his white allies could not.
"Joe Biden said if a back man didn't vote for him, he wasn't truly black. Joe Biden said black people are a monolithic community," Scott charged.
He acknowledged that African Americans have sometimes been victimised by police brutality, but later said: "The truth is, our nation's arc always bends back toward fairness. We are not fully where we want to be ... but thank God we are not where we used to be."
The GOP convention marks a crucial moment for Trump, a first-term Republican president tasked with reshaping a campaign he is losing by all accounts, at least for now.
A deep sense of pessimism has settled over the electorate 10 weeks before election day.
Just 23 per cent of Americans think the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new poll from AP-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research.
Trump, who was not scheduled to deliver his keynote convention address until later in the week, made multiple public appearances throughout the first day of the four-day convention. And while the evening programming was carefully scripted, Trump was not.
"The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election," Trump told hundreds of Republican delegates gathered in North Carolina, raising anew his unsupported concerns about Americans' expected reliance on mail voting during the pandemic. Experts say mail voting has proven remarkably secure.
Trump and a parade of fellow Republicans distorted Trump rival Joe Biden's agenda, falsely accusing the Democrat of proposing to defund police, ban oil fracking, take over health care, open borders and raise taxes on most Americans.
They tried to assign positions of the Democratic left to a middle-of-the-road candidate who explicitly rejected many of the party's most liberal positions through the primaries.
Trump set the tone with unsupported claims about voting fraud and falsehoods about his own record in office.
The Republican convention comes as more than 177,000 Americans have been killed by the pandemic and millions more have been infected. Coronavirus-related job losses also reach into the millions
Trump and his supporters touted his response to the pandemic while standing alongside front-line workers in the White House, although he glossed over the mounting death toll, the most in the world, and his Administration's struggle to control the disease.
Organisers also repeatedly sought to cast Trump as an empathetic figure, borrowing a page from the Democrats' convention playbook a week ago that effectively highlighted Biden's...