I suppose it is possible that Donald Trump — the man who supports single-payer health care (Obamacare on steroids), who didn’t know about the nuclear triad until a few weeks ago, who once proposed a 14.25% wealth tax on “the rich,” and until 15 minutes ago was an enthusiastic proponent of abortion on demand, even that form of infanticide euphemistically described as “partial birth abortion” by its partisans — I suppose it is possible that Donald Trump will get the country to rally around him and hand him the Republican nomination.

As of Sunday, February 21, 2016, I doubt it. There was a moment, just a few weeks back, when I thought the choice would be between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. I have now privately reverted — well, I suppose it’s not all that private — to my earlier hypothesis that the GOP race will come down to Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.

I say this notwithstanding Donald Trump’s lead in the polls. For one thing, the polls do not really make allowance for Trump’s astronomical, off-the-charts negatives, which have yet to be adequately factored into the psephologist’s handicaps.

I hope he’s right.

One way I express that hope: I’ve yet to create a “Donald Trump” tag for these blog posts. Hopefully I won’t need one in a few months. Time will tell.

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Donald Trump won his second straight primary tonight and I am baffled but no longer surprised. I don’t normally go for apocalyptic thinking when it comes to politics, but I do believe that God will give you over to your desires and permit you to take the consequences, and as a country we’ve grown ever more voracious in our desire for ungodly things. So . . . maybe we’re being given over.

On the bright side, if Trump wins I will be, for the first time in my adult life, a man without a party. Well, good. I’ve always strongly identified with the conservative side of the house, but I started realizing over the past six years or so that there is no “fix” for what ails us in our political process. Good leaders can

, of course, make things somewhat better but I think our system becomes more unwieldy each cycle and I’m not sure that any of the required incentives for good government exist anymore. So this election cycle is just confirming what I’ve been slowly learning and hopefully will get me focused more on the One who really is going to fix everything.

Nominating a man like Donald Trump (if that happens) and electing him to the Presidency (an event I once would have thought completely impossible but now I think there’s an even shot) will be the dumbest thing we as a country have done for quite some time. We keep falling for the megalomaniacs and narcissists who tell us what they think we want to hear. Trump’s supporters are convinced that he is going to take care of our Biggest Problem™: illegal immigration.

Who says that’s our biggest problem? Here’s a list of what I believe are some of our biggest problems, just to name a few, each of which dwarfs the illegal immigration problem:

1. The absolute destruction of the African American family unit, largely due to idiotic government policies and perverse incentives. Seriously, the societal problems that spring from the dissolution of the family (regardless of your color, but the African American community has been the hardest hit) are akin to taking a bazooka round to the abdomen compared to the pinprick of illegal immigration. According to the CDC (referenced in this article among many others), the out-of-wedlock birthrate among African American women is 72%, with not as high but still very high rates among other groups.
    
2. The breakdown in our system of separation of powers. Seriously, the President these days can do almost anything he or she chooses, or at least can attempt to do anything he or she chooses and force the opposition to mount an expensive and time consuming legal challenge to stop it. Between executive orders, presidential memoranda, and the all but unstoppable and almost completely unaccountable regulatory regime of the executive branch, the President wields more power than ever. By the way, Trump supporters, your man doesn’t even act like he’s ever read the Constitution and I have zero confidence that he will roll back the current trends toward Executive hegemony. He’ll do the opposite, I believe. But, hey, you wanted a strong man who “gets things done” so enjoy the ride.
    
3. We don’t know how to reason or think anymore, or how to have a congenial and good-faith debate with those who differ from us. Tolerance, that vaunted character trait everyone has always at least pretended to value, is almost nowhere to be found in our public discourse. We’ve become one big, ongoing, never-ending food fight.
    
4. As a country we owe 19 trillion dollars to creditors.
    

None of these issues are going to be seriously addressed by the next President if current trends hold.

Sorry for the doom and gloom. Hopefully I’m wrong.

True
https://twitter.com/jaredcwilson/status/697230110433243138?s=09

I don’t believe I have been given any credit by the voters for self-funding my campaign, the only one. I will keep doing, but not worth it!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2016

We do not want this man to have his finger on the nuclear button

From Neo-Neocon’s excellent blog: Donald Trump loves the regular folks—unless their homes happen to stand in Trump’s way

As a large-scale real estate developer, Trump has sometimes sued in his efforts to use government to condemn houses belonging to people of modest means whose homes—which Trump considers insufficiently attractive—have stood near his big developments and have chosen to exercise their liberty by refusing to sell to him. That’s one of the reasons Trump agrees 100% with the SCOTUS decision in Kelo (decided in 2005): he sees it making it easier for him to use government to compel the sale of a person’s house even against that person’s will.

It’s Trump’s prerogative to approve of Kelo, and it’s certainly understandable that someone in his line of work might have that point of view. He has every right to build his projects, and to try to buy the land of those with adjacent property. But if more people knew about the tactics he has used in trying to get government to force people out of their homes against their will, and his own condescending and often insulting comments about those same people and their modest homes, he might not be seen in such a positive light. With Trump, the legal often seems to segue into the personal.

There are several examples. One occurred in the 1990s, when Trump was trying to buy the home of a 70-ish Atlantic City widow named Vera Coking. He wanted her property not for building his casino, but in order to use the land as a waiting area for limos. She had lived in the same place for three decades, and said no to Trump’s offer to buy. After that, Trump tried to get the city to condemn her property and buy it for a reduced sum, and the court battle took five years.

. . .

Ms. Coking had said earlier that “This is my home. This is my castle.” Trump had disagreed; he had built a different kind of castle with a different kind of aesthetic, and he made it clear that her home didn’t fit into his picture:

Everybody coming into Atlantic City sees that [Coking] property,” Trump continued…”They’re staring at this terrible house instead of staring at beautiful fountains and beautiful other things that would be good.”

Here’s a picture of the Ms. Coking’s “terrible” house, in front of Trump’s casino:

As Neo says, “I’m not sure everyone would agree as to which of the two buildings is more aesthetically pleasing.”

From Instapundit

Money quote:

Endorsing Trump gets Palin back into the spotlight, increases Trump’s bona fides with lots of conservatives and blue collar voters, and as Glenn noted yesterday, is a way for her to stick it to the GOPe, who never had her back in the fall of 2008 and afterwards. And it’s possibly a ticket to a cabinet position as well. This doesn’t exactly require complex rocket surgery to parse out.

Bottom line, we get the government we deserve.