John Hawkins will never vote for Donald Trump.

Donald J. Trump is like a grown up version of King Joffrey from “Game of Thrones.” He is like a mean-spirited parody of a Republican on “Saturday Night Live” come to life. Donald J. Trump is a walking, talking Internet meme who seems to be spouting off shallow slogans half the time and lying the other half. He’s also a creepy, thin skinned authoritarian who has made it clear he cares nothing about free speech for anyone but himself and has publicly encouraged political violence at his rallies. Moreover, aside from some tough talk about immigration, trade and unworkable, over-the-top attacks on Muslims, his entire campaign has been centered on mean tweets, third grade insults and campaign promises that sometimes change from day-to-day or even from hour-to-hour. It’s difficult to know what Trump would really do if he were in power. His real views could range anywhere from liberal to conservative to South American dictator on just about any issue. So, if you’re a conservative who believes in God, country and the Constitution, how do you fall in line behind someone like that?

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Hat tip to Robert Laird.

“Hell, make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ’em think you’re God-Almighty. Or make ’em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ’em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ’em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ’em, and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give ’em something to stir ’em up and make ’em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ’em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.”

You know what Ted Cruz’s wife is going to look like in 20 years?

Who knows? She hasn’t been born yet.

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Mona Charen explains that the problem with the Trump candidacy is Donald Trump’s character. His character is bad, and his behavior is off-the-charts not normal.

Donald Trump is not emotionally healthy. No normal man sits up late at night tweeting dozens of insults about Megyn Kelly, or skips a key debate because he’s nursing a grudge against her for asking perfectly ordinary questions, or continues to obsess about her weeks and months after the fact.

A normal, well-adjusted man does not go to great lengths to prove to a random journalist that he has normal sized fingers. Some may think it was Rubio who introduced the “small hands” business, but it actually dates back to an encounter Trump had 25 years ago with journalist Graydon Carter. Carter had referred to Trump as a “stubby fingered vulgarian” in Spy magazine. Trump could not let it go. Carter told Vanity Fair in 2015:

To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him — generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers . . . The most recent offering arrived earlier this year, before his decision to go after the Republican presidential nomination. Like the other packages, this one included a circled hand and the words, also written in gold Sharpie: “See, not so short!”

Notice he didn’t contest the “vulgarian” part of the insult. And remember that at a presidential debate, for God’s sake, Trump brought it up himself and assured the world that “there is no problem, believe me.” I don’t believe him, and I’m not talking about his genitals.

There is an enormous problem. Trump seems to suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, an insecurity so consuming and crippling that he has devoted his life to self-aggrandizement. This is far beyond the puffery that most salesmen indulge to some degree. It strays well into the bizarre. Asked whom he consults on foreign policy Trump said “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.” What grown man says things like that and continues to be taken seriously? How can he be leading the race for the Republican nomination?

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Heather Wilhelm has the same problem I do: understanding how people can tolerate Donald Trump’s shameless mendacity and still support him.

[In a recent New York Times Trump profile], “a kind of unofficial historian at Mar-a-Lago,” recalls how Trump, among other various fibs and exaggerations, “liked to tell guests that the nursery rhyme-themed tiles” in the children’s suite “were made by a young Walt Disney.” Senecal, a seemingly normal person, would often correctly protest that this was not true. Trump, in return, would simply laugh and offer a simple reply: “Who cares?”

Who cares, indeed? A significant swath of voters apparently doesn’t. As the 2016 presidential race has unfolded, we’ve seen lies flying around like stray car parts at a low-budget demolition derby — with Donald Trump as the fast-and-loose king of blatant untruths, and people so inured to it all that they don’t even bother to flinch or duck.

In just the past few weeks, Trump has told so many lies it’s hard to know which ones to cite. He famously lied about serving Trump steaks at a press conference on national television — they were “Bush Brothers” steaks, hilariously, from a butcher in West Palm Beach. On March 7 and 11, Trump claimed he was “not taking money” for his “self-funded” campaign, which might come as a surprise to the individuals from across the country who have donated a reported $7.5 million to his campaign. …

Trump supporters tend to get irritated when confronted with things like the blatantly fake Trump steaks served up in front of a national audience: “Who cares?” — unsurprisingly — is a common reply. This is somewhat puzzling, given that many Trump fans claim to like him because he “tells it like it is.” It’s also puzzling because if you know anything about life, you likely know this: When someone consistently lies about little, inconsequential things, they tend to lie about big, consequential things too. [Emphasis added]

And so it is that we have Donald Trump telling his Iowa supporters, “I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees” if someone decides to “knock the crap” out of a protester. More recently, on Meet the Press, Trump told Chuck Todd he had “instructed my people to look into” paying legal fees for a man who, apparently taking Trump’s advice, sucker-punched a protester at a rally in North Carolina, then told the press he’d be happy to kill someone for Donald Trump. But wait! What’s that? Why, it’s Donald Trump on Good Morning America, claiming he “never said” he was going to pay legal fees, even though the video of Donald Trump saying just that is captured all over the Internet and easily accessible with a few effortless clicks.

Then there’s the Donald Trump who, after months and months of claiming that Mexico would pay for his wall, recently told Sean Hannity, “Politically, that’s not feasible.” Oh, and there’s the Donald Trump who linked to a hoax video that claimed one of his protesters had ties to ISIS: “All I know,” he said when asked about the inaccuracy, “is what’s on the Internet.” Unfortunately, the various dancing cats and escaped Area 51 aliens and Nigerian princes who reside on the Internet were unavailable to comment for this story.

Politicians have lied for centuries, of course; it’s practically part of the job description. In this, Trump is certainly not alone. … [But, t]raditionally, politicians have at least tried to hide their dishonesty, due to the assumption that voters would care.

They tell me that they want a Revolution, but my reply is: If you want to end the Republic and turn power over to an Emperor, at least take the trouble to make sure he’s an Octavian, and not a Caligula.

Aristotle, Politics, 1280b-1281a:

It is clear then that a state (πόλις) is not a mere society, having a common place (κοινωνία τόπου), established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange. These are conditions without which a state cannot exist; but all of them together do not constitute a state, which is a community of families and aggregations of families in well-being, for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life. Such a community can only be established among those who live in the same place and intermarry. Hence arise in cities family connections, brotherhoods, common sacrifices, amusements which draw men together. But these are created by friendship (φιλίας), for the will to live together is friendship. The end of the state is the good life, and these are the means towards it. And the state is the union of families and villages in a perfect and self-sufficing life, by which we mean a happy and honorable life.

Our conclusion, then, is that political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship. Hence they who contribute most to such a society have a greater share in it than those who have the same or a greater freedom or nobility of birth but are inferior to them in political virtue; or than those who exceed them in wealth but are surpassed by them in virtue.”

Thomas E. Dewey

S.A. Miller, at the Washington Times, explains that close has very commonly historically proven to be not good enough in nominating convention delegate votes. Donald Trump would by no means be the first candidate to arrive at a GOP convention with more votes than his rival candidates, but short of the necessary majority. It has frequently happened that the front runner then proved unable to attract the necessary extra votes and another man became the nominee. Just ask Thomas E. Dewey.

If Donald Trump finds himself in a contested convention this summer, a looming question for the Republican presidential front-runner will be whether he is a Lincoln or a Dewey.

Mr. Trump obviously would prefer to follow in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln, who emerged the nominee from a brokered Republican convention in 1860 and went on to win the White House and become one of America’s most revered presidents.

Unfortunately for Mr. Trump, the experience of Thomas E. Dewey at contested Republican conventions is more common and far less inspirational. The front-runner heading into a contested Republican convention has never won the White House and most of the time does not even secure the party’s nomination. …

“The notion that you go in with a plurality, therefore you deserve the nomination is just flat wrong,” said Merrill Matthews, resident scholar at the Dallas-based think tank Institute for Policy Innovation.

“It would not surprise me if we go to a contested convention and Trump ends up losing in that contested convention,” he said. “But I think it is too early to say. We have to see if the voters begin to gravitate toward him, as they typically do in presidential elections, and even if he doesn’t get 1,237, if the momentum is clearly behind him, I think it would be hard to deny him the nomination.”

Still, Mr. Matthews stressed that Mr. Trump will have to close the deal on the convention floor.

“He’s got to make the case to the delegates there,” he said. “He needs to persuade the other delegates that they should change their vote to him.”

Dewey ended up like most candidates who enter the Republican convention with the most delegates but short a majority — a position Mr. Trump could easily find himself in July in Cleveland — either passed over for the nomination or the loser in the general election.

Dewey experienced both outcomes. He was denied the nomination in 1940 and received it in 1948 only to lose that November to Democrat Harry S. Truman, despite the famously erroneous banner headline on the front page of The Chicago Daily Tribune.

In 1940 and eight years later, Dewey had a plurality of delegates when the convention opened.

In the history of the Republican Party, there have been 10 conventions where no candidate arrived with a majority of the delegates needed to clinch the nomination on the first ballot.

At seven of those brokered conventions, the candidate who arrived with the most delegates did not win the nomination. Half the time, the nomination went to the candidate who had the fewest delegates.

Lincoln was one of the candidates with the fewest delegates at the start of the convention. Another was Rep. James A. Garfield of Ohio, who entered the Chicago convention with no delegates but got the nomination after 36 ballots, the longest convention vote in Republican history.

In all three cases, when the candidates with the most delegates at the start of a contested convention emerged as the nominee, that candidate lost in the general election. Dewey shares that dubious distinction with Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes and U.S. Sen. James G. Blaine of Maine.

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Gustave Doré, A Traveller from New Zealand Contemplating the Ruins of London.

“[W]hen some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s” — Thomas Babbington Macauley.

Selwyn Duke explains that the presumably-disastrous next presidential election doesn’t really matter all that much. America (and the rest of the West) is doomed anyway.

Many people lament that “Obama has destroyed America these last eight years” or, alluding to same, will say “I don’t recognize my country anymore.” This is much like viewing a woman who marries a greasy-haired, dope-smoking, heavily tattooed and pierced, unemployable reprobate and saying that her matrimonial decision destroyed her, when the real problem was that she was the kind of person who could make such a choice in the first place. Do you really think Obama isn’t a symptom at least as much as a cause? Do you think the 2008 A.D. America that elected him would have been recognizable to 1950 Americans?

And even if the next president is an anomalous good result, he won’t even be a pause that refreshes, but will at best slow down the runaway train racing toward the precipice. This is because our main problems aren’t illegal migration, trade deals or health care, as significant as those things are. Our problems are more fundamental.

Do you really want to save America? Okay, then completely transform the media, academia and entertainment so they’re not brainwashing citizens 24/7 with anti-American, anti-Christian, multiculturalist, socialist, feminist and a multitude of other lies. End legal immigration, which, via the importation of massive numbers of Third Worlders, is changing our country into a socialistic non-Western culture. Even more significantly, convince the 70-plus percent of Americans who are moral relativists to believe in Truth; these are people who, as the Barna Group research company put it, believe that what we call “truth is always relative to the person and their situation” and whose most common basis for moral decision-making is “doing whatever feels right….”

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