Trump wants a referendum on Trump ahead of the midterms — let’s give him one. 

The strangest thing about last week’s Republican convention in Dallas wasn’t that Donald Trump managed to turn a midterm election into something resembling another presidential campaign. It was that so many people immediately began arguing about the spectacle. 

Was this normal? Was it appropriate? Was it another example of a political party organizing itself around one man? What did it say about the Republican Party? What did it say about Trump? 

At one point, Trump asked the audience to raise their right hands and pledge themselves to the “greatest president in the history of the United States” and to voting in November. Then, with his own hand raised, he declared: “I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do.” 

It was weird. It was cringy. It was wildly inappropriate. And a sitting president joking about cheating in an election after years of making unsupported claims that his opponents do exactly that deserves criticism. 

But it also illustrates something exhausting about American politics in the Trump era. Every provocation becomes the story. Every norm-breaking moment generates several days of outrage, defense and counter-outrage. Then another one arrives. 

In Dallas, Trump actually offered Americans a much more useful way to judge him. He told voters to “pretend that I’m on the ballot.” 

OK. Let’s do exactly that. 

Trump has spent most of his adult life asking to be judged as an executive. So let’s borrow an executive term and look, as impartially and dispassionately as possible, at his key performance indicators. 

Trump’s........

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