The Hill:

Trump: Republicans ‘have no choice’ but to vote for me.

Donald Trump said Thursday that Republicans wary of his campaign have little choice but to vote for him anyway.

“If you really like Donald Trump, that’s great, but if you don’t, you have to vote for me anyway. You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges,” Trump said at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

“Have no choice, sorry, sorry, sorry. You have no choice,” Trump continued, calling the late Justice Antonin Scalia a “great guy” and acknowledging tied decisions at the Supreme Court after his death.

In the first place, I do not believe that Donald Trump has any real conservative convictions, and I don’t believe his promises are worth any more than his payment agreements with local New Jersey contractors. Once he’s in office, he can do anything he pleases, and what Trump will do is whatever he thinks is good for Trump.

Supreme Court seats are also not the be all and end all of everything. We had a majority of Republican appointees and Chief Justice Roberts changed his vote once and saved Obamacare twice.

The fact is Donald Trump is not only unqualified to be president, insofar as he has any positions, his positions (Nativism, Protectionism, Isolationism) constitute reprehensible and long-refuted debris from the rubbish-pile of American political history. Know-Nothing-ism Redivivus has nothing to do with Conservatism or the traditional positions of the Republican Party.

Trump is a repulsive personality. He is vulgar and a bully, and he gives constant evidence of being afflicted with a very serious personality disorder. Faced with criticism or opposition, he behaves like an ill-mannered 8-year-old rather than a serious adult. My own opinion is that there is something really wrong with the judgement of anyone who would promote the contemporary equivalent of Caligula to the chief magistracy of the Republic.

I’m afraid that Hillary Clinton is not an acceptable alternative. Hillary is a crook and a cynical democrat demagogue allied with the radical left. She, too, has some kind of disordered personality, and a record of bad judgement.

The fact is we are simply screwed this year. There is no major party choice to vote for. It’s happened before. The first presidential election I was eligible to vote, the personally-repulsive, China-recognizing, EPA-creating, non-conservative Richard Nixon was running against George McGovern who was representing the Anti-Vietnam War socialist radical left. I voted tongue-in-cheek for John Schmidtz, a Bircher congressman who talked about the Illumati Conspiracy.

We are going to have a bad four years however this comes out. I’ll grant you that there is a certain charm to the idea of electing Trump. Putting Trump in the White House would be a lot like stuffing a disgruntled water snake into a thoroughly-disliked high school Biology teacher’s desk drawer. But this is our country we’re talking about, not high school. Human lives, the fate of the free world, and the Constitution are at stake. We’re probably better off really if (ugh!) Hillary wins. That way, we take our lumps for another four years, and elect a qualified genuine conservative in 2020 after Hillary makes a major mess and the chickens really come home to roost. But I will not be voting for her either.

Five Feet of Fury‘s Kathy Shaidle, at Takimag, attempts to explain, and justify, the twisted motivations of someone willing to support Donald Trump.

I don’t like Donald Trump on the First Amendment, don’t trust him on the Second, and positively loathe him on eminent domain. I covered that here at Taki’s in October 2012, when I was also still pissed at Trump for firing Adam Carolla on The Apprentice.

Trump says creepy crap about his daughter.

He’s vowed to bring manufacturing back to America just as corrupt, collectivist labor unions were finally in hospice; I grew up in a steel town, in the ’70s—I dread spending what’s left of my life hearing “Take This Job and Shove It” on an endless loop once millions of Americans suddenly remember why they hated that type of work in the first place. (With the added “bonus” of having to pay more for—or go without—all the stuff they used to buy so cheaply at Costco and Walmart, presuming they stay in business.)

I’m afraid he’ll turn the Map Room into the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.

But if Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, I will literally fall to my knees and weep with relief.

I’m not proud of that. I hate feeling propelled, rather like a cat in heat, by a toxic cocktail of shallow novelty-seeking and primitive tribalism. As a conscientious, civic-minded reason to cheer a presidential wannabe, “He annoys all the right people” ranks somewhere between “It’s just time for a change” and “This’ll teach the bastards a lesson.” I know.

But 15 years after September 11—and however long it’s been since O.J., and since “global warming” became a “thing”—I just can’t cope. And drinking’s not an option.

I thought we were going to nuke Afghanistan, not build schools for inbred pedophiles with no written language—or worse, let them and their ilk into the country. I agree with Derb that “the most amazing, astounding, astonishing statistic of the 21st century is that the annual rate of Muslim immigration into the U.S.A. increased after 9/11.”

Meanwhile, millions of low-IQ Mexicans stream across your southern border, bringing their well-documented attitudes about rape, animal cruelty, drunk driving, and litter. (Can you people really not mow your own lawns or build your own decks? A serious question for another time…)

Now, switching from grapes to cotton: I figured that after Americans got electing their first black president out of their systems, they’d return to their senses—not hand the fool a second term.

The political correctness my anarchist pals and I wrote off in the late ’80s as an irritating passing fad on a par with Cabbage Patch Dolls has become, along with certain varieties of mental illness, enshrined in public policy and entrenched in quotidian intercourse.

It’s 1968 with (even) crappier music. I want it over.

Read the whole thing.

Apparently, the desire to pull down the pillars of the Temple and let the roof fall on those annoying holier-than-thou liberals is sufficient motivation to cause some people to depart from reality and to become ready to vote for the presidency of an unqualified clown whose only real area of agreement with genuine conservatives is a yen to give an upraised finger to political correctness. If you are sane, it’s not enough.

Reuters:

North Korea has backed presumptive U.S. Republican nominee Donald Trump, with a propaganda website praising him as “a prescient presidential candidate” who can liberate Americans living under daily fear of nuclear attack by the North.

A column carried on Tuesday by DPRK Today, one of the reclusive and dynastic state’s mouthpieces, described Trump as a “wise politician” and the right choice for U.S. voters in the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election.

It described his most likely Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, as “thick-headed Hillary” over her proposal to apply the Iran model of wide sanctions to resolve the nuclear weapons issue on the Korean peninsula.

Read the whole thing.

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But, hey! Kim Jong-Un was undoubtedly just reciprocating. After all, back in January, Donald Trump had kind words for North Korea’s insane and murderous dictator. In fact, he praised him specifically for his ruthlessness and brutality.

Telegraph:

Donald Trump has praised the leadership style of North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un, for the “amazing” way he murders political rivals.

During a Republican political rally in Iowa at the weekend, he repeated his assertion that Muslims should not be allowed to enter the US before turning his attention to the North Korean despot, who has carried out frequent purges of officials.

“You’ve got to give him credit. How many young guys – he was like 26 or 25 when his father died – take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden… he goes in, he takes over, he’s the boss,” said Mr Trump, known for his own less than subtle style of leadership in the American version of The Apprentice.

“It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one. This guy doesn’t play games.

Defense One:

Evidence suggests that a Russian intelligence group was the source of the most recent Wikileaks intel dump, which was aimed to influence the U.S. election.

Close your eyes and imagine that a hacking group backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin broke into the email system of a major U.S. political party. The group stole thousands of sensitive messages and then published them through an obliging third party in a way that was strategically timed to influence the United States presidential election. Now open your eyes, because that’s what just happened.

On Friday, Wikileaks published 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. They reveal, among other things, thuggish infighting, a push by a top DNC official to use Bernie Sanders’ religious convictions against him in the South, and attempts to strong-arm media outlets. In other words, they reveal the Washington campaign monster for what it is.

But leave aside the purported content of the Wikileaks data dump (to which numerous other outlets have devoted considerable attention) and consider the source. Considerable evidence shows that the Wikileaks dump was an orchestrated act by the Russian government, working through proxies, to undermine Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign.

“This has all the hallmarks of tradecraft. The only rationale to release such data from the Russian bulletproof host was to empower one candidate against another. The Cold War is alive and well,” Tom Kellermann, the CEO of Strategic Cyber Ventures told Defense One.

Here’s the timeline: On June 14, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, under contract with the DNC, announced in a blog post that two separate Russian intelligence groups had gained access to the DNC network. One group, FANCY BEAR or APT 28, gained access in April. The other, COZY BEAR, (also called Cozy Duke and APT 29) first breached the network in the summer of 2015.

Cybersecurity company FireEye first discovered APT 29 in 2014 and was quick to point out a clear Kremlin connection. “We suspect the Russian government sponsors the group because of the organizations it targets and the data it steals. Additionally, APT 29 appeared to cease operations on Russian holidays, and their work hours seem to align with the UTC +3 time zone, which contains cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg,” they wrote in their report on the group. Other U.S. officials have said that the group looks like it has sponsorship from the Russian government due in large part to the level of sophistication behind the group’s attacks.

Read the whole thing.

Trump’s nomination acceptance speech was relatively presidential, but the very next day, Trump became the usual Trump again, responding at great length to Ted Cruz’s non-endorsement, proving all over again just how petty, thin-skinned, and vindictive he is to the world-at-large.

Trying to get Trump under control is a major problem for his handlers.

Right before the big acceptance speech, there was fear in professional GOP circles about what might happen:

When Donald Trump takes the stage in primetime tonight to deliver his acceptance speech, he’ll have an opportunity to reach undecided voters. “Trump, for most of them, is not even on their menu right now,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican political consultant. But Murphy isn’t hopeful that Trump can seize the moment, despite his speechwriters’ best efforts:

It’s like being Charlie Manson’s foxtrot instructor. You go out there, you teach him a few moves, and you think, ‘Hey, look at that, he can learn the foxtrot.’ And the next thing you know, he’s trying to put a pen in your eye, because he’s Charlie Manson.

Murphy spoke on an Atlantic panel at the Republican convention in Cleveland, moderated by Ron Brownstein and Major Garrett of CBS News. The panelists agreed, in broad terms, on the challenge now facing Trump.

Ben Shapiro has some choice words about what the Republican Party has done.

The irony of Donald Trump’s nomination for president of the United States is that the same establishment that he supposedly opposes has been praying for a candidate of his ilk for decades: a social leftist, a secular materialist, a big government activist. In other words, the establishment has drooled about nominating a Democrat for years.

They finally did it.

Trump’s new Republican Party has nothing to do with the Constitution or conservatism – he mentioned the Constitution one time this week, conservatism zero times, freedom one time, liberty zero times, the unborn zero times, God zero times, and himself some 83 times. As he said, America is broken and “I alone can fix it.”

Trump promises to fix your problems; Hillary promises to fix your problems. Freedom means fixing your own damn problems. It’s their job to get government out of your way.

Or at least that used to be the conservative line.

No longer, in Trumpservative America.

Read the whole thing.