David Cole, at Taki Mag, thinks the unthinkable.

Last week was not a very good week for Donald Trump’s poll numbers. In fact, I had several Trump diehards—not bloggers or pundits, just private nobodies who are friends of mine—tell me that these days they find themselves thinking the once unthinkable: Trump might lose. Trump’s multiple recent statements speculating about the possibility of a loss have not helped soothe some of his followers’ growing anxiety. With so many Trump supporters framing the election as the “last hope for Western civilization,” it’s not exactly encouraging to hear your man say, “It’s okay. I have a yacht and a mansion; I’ll be fine.”

Now, I know that some of you are thinking, “The polls are wrong, the polls are biased, the polls lie.” You keep thinking that. Because by all means don’t listen to those of us with a little more experience in these matters. I mean, for a lot of pro-Trumpers, especially those who come from the alt-right fringe, this is their first time feeling like an active participant in a national presidential election. As a longtime GOP party hack, I can tell you that the “lying polls” line is not something you want to fall for. In 2008, many GOPs had convinced themselves that the polls were not to be believed because Americans were being untruthful with pollsters, as no white person wanted to admit he wasn’t gonna vote for the black guy. “But wait till they get in the voting booth,” we smugly assured ourselves. “Then they’ll vote our way.” And we all know how that turned out.

The “lying polls” rationalization made an encore in 2012. I wrote about it in my book, as I recalled the events of an October 2012 Condi Rice banquet:

I was taken aside by Derek Broes. Broes had been a senior VP at Paramount, and senior director at Microsoft. By 2012, he ran his own consulting firm, and he was a contributor to Forbes. “It’s a lock, David,” he told me. “It’s going to be a Romney landslide.” He painstakingly explained the polling numbers and the context and meaning. “We can’t lose.”

We lost.

So take some advice that I know you’re not going to take: Don’t buy the “lying polls” claim. Polls are imperfect, but generally they’re accurate.

Erick Erickson, like myself, refuses to take the blame for the impending debacle.

There really are not going to be very many silver linings for conservatives coming out of this election season. Hillary Clinton is going to be President. That is a given. The Supreme Court is going to move left. That is a given. The regulatory state is going to expand. That is a given. Congressional Republicans, in an effort to appear reasonable, will cut bad deals. That is a given.

All of these things are the logical outcome of Donald Trump’s disastrous campaign. His supporters are now fixated on the idea that those of us who warned them of the consequences of their actions are to blame for those consequences. It is akin to being blamed for a death when you warned the person the gun was loaded so they shouldn’t point it at their head and pull the trigger.

Michael Walsh yesterday published an outrageously intellectually fraudulent essay that claims that I’m supposed to vote for Donald Trump and am guilty of moral cowardice, forsooth! if I decline to support him.

Walsh starts off, with jaw-dropping insolence:

For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that Donald Trump is what the small but obsessive, increasingly deracinated, band of “never Trumpers” says he is. He’s not a “movement conservative” – true. He’s often crass and vulgar – true. His quasi-grammatical flights of oratorical fancy often get him into trouble –also true. “Words matter” they remind him, while calling him a “witless ape,” a “white nationalist,” and — most childishly — a “turd-tornado,” who’s “dark,” “condescending,” and a “lunatic,” to list some of the more printable epithets in the conservative press. …

Okay. Therefore… what?

“For the sake of argument”!? We have to “stipulate”!? You are “deracinated” if you recognize that Donald Trump is not conservative, unprincipled, unethical, badly educated, a bully, a pathological unhinged narcissist, and a habitual liar? And “therefore… what?”

Therefore, we do not support someone who really does not believe in any principles, let alone the basic, fundamental ideas that the Conservative Movement came together to defend. Therefore, we do not support someone unqualified for the presidency additionally on the basis of a flawed character and inadequate education and intelligence.

Like President Adams, we should desire that only honest and wise men ever rule the United States.

Mr. Walsh then tries to prove that I have to support Trump because Hillary is leftist, corrupt, and also unacceptable. Unfortunately, this argument does not work for a variety of reasons.

It happens to be the case this year that not one, but two non-conservative, unprincipled, corrupt candidates have the nominations of both parties. If you are facing the prospect of Bubonic Plague, that actually does not make Ebola suddenly acceptable.

Donald Trump might make some policy concessions to conservative Republicans, but… the unlikely event of Trump winning the election would fatally confirm the separation of today’s Republican Party from the party we are familiar with and would mark the starting point of a new kind of populist, nativist, protectionist, and isolationist Republican Party, a party resembling much more the Know Nothing Party of the early 1850s than the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan.

Hillary’s election would condemn the country to another four years of corrupt democrat misrule, but Hillary is a known commodity. She is a conventional democrat politician. She will be progressive in her policies, but her policies will fall within recognizable limits. Hillary Clinton may campaign as a populist, but she will never repudiate international trade agreements, destroy NATO, or cancel the US alliance with Israel. On the other hand, nobody knows what Trump might do. In campaigning, Trump has spouted all sorts of radical Buchananite BS. You never know: Donald Trump might decide to endear himself to the yobbos by shredding all our trade agreements and re-instituting the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Donald Trump might possibly out-do Barack Obama in deepening the recession by provoking the first grand international “beggar-your-neighbor” trade war in many decades.

Trump’s daughter Ivanka vacations with, and was fixed up with her husband, by Vladimir Putin’s mistress. Putin has been leaking material damaging to Hillary. How can anyone be sure that Donald Trump won’t trade Ukraine for a casino monopoly in the Russian Federation?

What Trump might or might not do is, of course, imponderable. We have no way of predicting his policy decisions accurately. But we have had plenty of evidence of his character, his behavior, and his knowledge and intelligence. Donald Trump is totally unqualified for the presidency and even the prospect of Hillary Clinton’s election does not make him qualified.

Faced with two unacceptable candidates, I’d say the responsible thing to do is to vote for neither. Hillary’s flaws do not make Trump desirable or qualified and vice versa.

Michael Walsh is obviously living in Trumpkin-kuckkucksheim. He thinks that because Trump got a plurality of low information, commonly cross-over-democrat, votes, leading to capturing delegates in badly-arranged winner-take-all primaries, conservatives like myself are somehow obligated to support him. If I don’t vote for Trump, he says, I will have “stabbed him in the back.” Baloney! I’ve been attacking Trump quite consistently directly from the front. I do not owe Walsh, the Alt-Right, or all the Trumpkins in the trailer park a damned thing. When I was first of age to vote in a presidential election, the Republican Party was running Richard Nixon. I would not vote for Richard Nixon, and I’m certainly not going to vote for Donald Trump.

Trump Promises to Build Giant Net to Stop Zika from Spreading, Will Make Mosquitoes Pay for It.

They can’t, but I think I can.

Donald Trump is the Post-Modern Candidate, who isn’t really running to win office at all.

It should have been obvious months ago, but the commentariat is only beginning to take notice the second week of August.

Erik Erikson, 10 August: If Trump wanted to lose to Clinton, what would he be doing differently?

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Damon Linker, The Week, 11 August, Something Is Going On With Donald Trump:

The media just can’t shut up about Donald Trump. In no small part, this is because his behavior appears to be inexplicable.

Where the most gaffe-prone big-league politician might go off the rails once every week or so, Trump does it several times every week, and sometimes several times every day. And where the most gaffe-prone big-league politicians quickly take back their verbal flubs, clarify, and apologize, hoping to move on before inflicting maximal political damage on themselves, Trump invariably doubles down, needlessly dragging out the controversies for endless days.

This seemingly self-destructive behavior has spawned, in turn, a cottage industry of armchair psychologizing of the man, who’s been repeatedly diagnosed as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder or maybe just “insanity.”

Something is going on with Donald Trump. But we don’t need a precise clinical diagnosis. It’s possible to examine Trump’s behavior over the past few weeks and reach a tentative understanding of his bizarrely self-subversive and flagrantly unpresidential statements and actions, including his tendency to flirt with inciting political violence.

Trump wants to lose the election.

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The Hill, 11 August, Dem Accuses Trump of Sabotaging His Own Campaign:

Donald Trump is trying to sink his own campaign, Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.) contended Thursday.

“It appears as if he knows he will not be the next president of the United States, so he’s trying to sabotage this thing because he’s not used to losing,” Carson said during a press briefing in the Capitol.

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Face it, Trumpkins, you’ve been had.

Donald Trump isn’t a conservative. Donald Trump is not a down-home American like you. Donald Trump is a conniving, cynical New Yorker. He’s 70 years old, fabulously wealthy, already famous and already living a completely sybaritic life-style. For him, moving from one of his luxury residences to the White House and having to be president would be like moving down-market in housing and getting a full-time job. It would be a real bummer.

He is not into personal sacrifice. Donald Trump cares about political ideas the way I care about Olympic soccer matches. Donald Trump has no real personal political ideas or preferred policy agenda at all. He’s just a businessman, a total pragmatist.

Donald Trump is not your buddy and he is no kind of patriot. Trump likes money, tail, and Trump, period.

So we’re watching him campaign. He carelessly contradicts himself. He routinely takes one position and then the opposite one. He constantly offends rival candidates and significant potential voting blocs. He does exactly as he pleases, casually taking time away from campaigning, often spending no money, doing no advertising and no fund-raising. He behaves like a crazy person, defying convention, political correctness, and rather frequently ordinary good manners and civility as well. He says something embarrassing or outrageous several times a week.

One is obliged to conclude that either Donald Trump is crazy and the most incompetent candidate for office in human history, or he is motivated by something other than winning.

Since we know that Trump is a close friend of the Clintons, on the whole, I like best the theory that contends that Trump has really just been running, all along, in order to kill Republican chances in what ought to have been a landslide Republican year and to make possible the impossible: Hillary’s election.

He’s having lots of fun. He’s soaking up the limelight and laughing at all the dopes supporting him, while mischievously dropping another turd in the electoral punchbowl every now and then and watching the commentariat have fits over what they think is a gaffe.

Donald Trump is having huge personal laughs at the expense of all you oiks out there who are supporting him on the basis of total BS and he is enjoying himself even more playing the role of unruly Groucho to the Mainstream Media’s Margaret Dumont.

Trump is, in essence, the practical man of business who is casually kicking into a heap of rubbish the whole superstructure of American presidential politics, reducing all the theories, ideals, and PC taboos into useless impotent debris by sheer chutzpah.

All of this, I believe more and more as time goes by, is not a genuine political campaign at all, the Trump campaign is guerilla theater, an exercise in deliberate mockery and transgression, that has not only succeeding in bamboozling the American electorate and satirizing our political system on a fantastic scale. Trump has turned reality on its head, defeating all the real Republican candidates and usurping the GOP nomination for the presidency with pure comedy theater. Reality TV has defeated reality.

Trump has, in essence, demonstrated that energy, shameless aggression, and flamboyant pandering will, in America, triumph over ideas, serious policy, and decorum every time. H.L. Mencken is laughing cynically in Hell.

Yet, he obviously has not been doing all this just to prove that he can outdo the late Andy Warhol in art. There has got to have always been a substantive purpose there, and that purpose could only be one thing: electing Hillary. After the inauguration, just watch the multi-billion-dollar contracts for Infrastructure and new Federal housing start rolling Trump Enterprizes’ way.

Hillary is so scandal-beset that it is actually miraculous that she isn’t under indictment right now, and she is so unappealing as a candidate that I think it is only a matter of time before the Donald really will have to eat a hamster on live television to keep poor Hillary’s candidacy limping in the direction of the finish line. But you can count on him. If it takes eating a hamster to elect Hillary, that hamster is toast.

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Earlier Trump Faux-Candidacy commentary:

25 February — What If?

31 May — What Happens When the Dog Catches the Car?

04 August — Is Trump Deliberately Throwing the Election?