Jonah Goldberg explains why he is not moved by arguments urging him to fall into line and start supporting Donald Trump.

I can’t stand Kasich. But he meets my own minimal requirements for support. Trump, simply, doesn’t. He falls short of the mark like John Candy in the long jump. I’m not going to rehash all of my reasons for this conviction, but suffice it to say I think he’s unpatriotically unprepared and unqualified for the job. Politically, conservatism at its core is about the importance of ideas and the importance of character. With the exception of his longstanding support for protectionism and the unalloyed importance of “strength,” Trump cares not a whit for policy or philosophy. His attachment to principles is, for the most part, a nearest-weapon-to-hand approach. As a matter of character he’s crude, boorish, dishonest, proudly promiscuous, and has launched countless businesses based on the idea that it’s morally acceptable to take advantage of people. He dodged the actual Vietnam War but claimed that avoiding the clap in the 1970s was his own personal Vietnam.

Kozak and many others either disagree with me on these points or they simply don’t care. If it’s the former, we have some substantial disagreements about what I think are obvious facts. If it’s the latter, then I take our disagreement as a badge of honor. If Roger Simon wants to describe that as “moral narcissism,” so be it. But, there’s a practical point here too. I plan on being in this line of work for a while longer. In the future, I want to be able to continue to say character and ideas matter without someone shouting, “Oh yeah, then why did you support Donald Trump?” …

By waiving the standards we use to judge liberal politicians in order to defend an allegedly conservative one, we are waiving those standards for all time. I’m not talking about some allowances at the margins, politics should be flexible — strange bedfellows and all that. But there’s a difference between being flexible and willingly snapping your own spine to bend over for a politician who, almost certainly, has contempt for the standards you once held near and dear.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Michael Harrington performed some comparisons with previous primaries and calculated that there were 12,000,000 cross-over democrats voting in GOP primaries.

After a lot of work I have finished my math calculations. … Using 2000 and 2008 as baselines, the conclusion was staggering. Trump only got about 3.3 million Republican Votes. The rest are Democrats, approximately 12 million of them.

I also found via my studies by going back to 1992 that this behavior is not new, in fact even when there is a tight contest about 5% will “strategically vote” in the Republican Party primary/caucus. Even more disturbing is that it appears that there may be even a 5% not normally detectable, of Republicans who only vote Democrat. Aka plants that we always knew existed. …

[O]ur election was stolen. Trump would be in fourth, or worse, without Democrats, he would probably only have won New York and considering he would be doing so badly when that election happened it is unlikely even there. We have been tossed to the ground and electorally gang raped by Democrats.

The Trump Campaign is almost broke, but apparently The Donald has been siphoning off roughly 20% of campaign expenses to his own businesses.

But that’s nothing. (See Below) Donald Trump actually has himself on the campaign payroll as a salaried employee!

Just imagine what he could do with the Executive Branch budget.

Marketwatch:

Donald Trump’s campaign is almost broke, and is paying an unusual amount of money to Trump-owned businesses. That’s according to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s FEC filing, details of which were released Monday night.

The report provided a number of rather shocking facts, including that his campaign raised just $3.1 million in May compared to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s $27 million.

In comparison, Mitt Romney’s campaign raised $86.5 million in May during the 2012 presidential race. And on Monday night alone, Clinton raised about $1.6 million at a celebrity-studded fundraiser in New York City.

Another eyebrow-raising tidbit: Of the $6.7 million the Trump campaign spent in May, nearly 20% went to Trump-owned businesses or family members.

Furthermore, the filing suggests that Trump himself is drawing a salary from the campaign, which would be highly unusual.

The campaign also spent $208,000 on hats.

The phrase “Crooked as a snake with appendicitis” comes to mind.

Mark Cuban was invited to comment on the campaign performance of his former friend The Donald on the ABC program “Shark Tank.”

When Renee asked Cuban about his former friend, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, he held nothing back. He said, “You know what? It’s rare that you see someone get stupider before your eyes, but he’s really working at it…You have to give him credit. It’s a difficult thing to do, but he’s accomplished it.”

Jim Geraghty (via email) asks: Considering the Circumstances, Why Shouldn’t We See a Revolt at the Convention? (UPDATE: Now on-line here):

Why is anyone surprised that talk of a delegate revolt at the convention in Cleveland is picking up? Donald Trump isn’t doing the basic tasks a presidential candidate is supposed to do.

He isn’t hiring staff; he has about 30 paid staff around the country while Hillary Clinton has something in the neighborhood of 700.

He’s refusing to spend any money on ads:

The Clinton campaign and its allies are airing just over $23 million in television ads in eight potential battleground states: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and New Hampshire, according to data released by NBC News.

The Trump campaign? Zero.

Either Trump is illiquid, or he doesn’t have the money.

He’s either refusing to fundraise, or seriously slacking in this key component of a presidential campaign:

While Trump had promised Priebus that he would call two dozen top GOP donors, when RNC chief of staff Katie Walsh recently presented Trump with a list of more than 20 donors, he called only three before stopping, according to two sources familiar with the situation. It’s unclear whether he resumed the donor calls later.

He’s destroyed existing relationships between the Republican party and corporate America that previously had been beyond the realm of policy differences:

Apple has told Republican leaders it will not provide funding or other support for the party’s 2016 presidential convention, as it’s done in the past, citing Donald Trump’s controversial comments about women, immigrants and minorities.

Unlike Facebook, Google and Microsoft, which have all said they will provide some support to the GOP event in Cleveland next month, Apple decided against donating technology or cash to the effort, according to two sources familiar with the iPhone maker’s plans.

He’s getting less popular and he’s only creating more headaches for everyone else in the party. He’s trailing in Kansas, tied in Utah, and Arizona looks shaky.

Republican primary voters selected a candidate with very little appeal to the broader electorate. So which is worse? Alienating the 13.8 million voters who selected him in the primary? Or alienating a majority of the 120 million to 130 million who will vote in November? There’s no good option left; which one is less bad?

For those arguing the delegates have no business overruling primary voters . . . What are delegates for if not to avert a disaster like this? If they aren’t there to use their judgment and conscience, we might as well replace them with programmable robots.

Say this for a ticket out of any two other Republican lawmakers: that ticket will not destroy the party. It’s first act after a terror attack will not be to congratulate itself. It will not suddenly call the troops thieves. It will not call an Indiana-born judge “the Mexican.” An Anybody-Anybody ticket will stop creating problems for other Republicans and start solving them.

He’s right. Convention delegates are not robots, merely functioning to deliver the results of state caucuses and primaries. They are representatives, which role includes consulting their own consciences and using their own best judgement to choose a candidate who can be elected and who would represent effectively the principles of the Republican Party.

Donald Trump is not that candidate. He is too spoiled, narcissistic, and willful to run an effective and rational campaign. He is a divisive figure who cannot, in the final analysis, even attract the support of the entire Republican Party. He is not conservative. His positions consist either of unattractive and long-discredited negative impulses (Nativism and Protectionism) or mere opportunistic rhetorical poses which he is perfectly capable of reversing in an instant.

Trump is almost certain to lose to Hillary, and we cannot even be sure that his being elected would not be the worse result. Donald Trump as president is a frightening prospect. Trump is not really committed to any particular set of principles or theories of government. He is obviously not any kind of strict Constitutionalist. He is not at all a consistent adversary of Statism, Regulation, the Welfare State, Crony Capitalism, Gun Control, Abortion, Gay Rights, or the Progressive side in the Culture Wars. In fact, he is on the record, at one time or another, supporting each and every one of these issues.

The only sense in which Trump appears to be on the Political Right is as a sort of living, breathing embodiment of the crude, angry, and ill-mannered ignorance and vulgarity that the Left imagines in its own libelous imagination to be what being a conservative and a Republican is all about.

If Trump were to be elected, he’d would almost certainly prove incompetent in handling foreign policy and destructive in his economic policies. He would probably be at least as lawless a president as Barack Obama. And he’d leave office in disgrace, ruining the image and reputation of Conservatism and the GOP for a generation.

We still have time to prevent the catastrophe that the nomination to the presidency of Donald J. Trump would represent, and we should proceed to take all steps necessary to avoid that nomination occurring.

Politico reports on rumors that Trump would take some very large amount of money to simply walk away from the GOP nomination.

How much would it cost to get Donald Trump to give up his presidential run and walk away?

“I bet if someone offered him $150 million to drop out, he would,” one former Trump adviser told POLITICO, unprompted, during an interview Friday.

Asked about whether Trump would drop, another former Trump adviser, Jim Dornan said he believes the presumptive GOP nominee would cut a deal. “Yeah, probably,” Dornan, a veteran Republican operative who worked for Trump last spring on an abortive effort to set up a super PAC, replied via text message — adding there would be plenty of interest in buying him out. “The Kochs would be the first in line.”

Trump himself says it’s a ridiculous proposition and that he’s not a fan of the question.

Whole thing.