I'm not angry at Trump. I'm angry at the electorate, at the stupid, self-centered, uninformed, xenophobic, even racist, ignorant, personality-driven voters willing to turn this country over to a man who, as McCullough points out, lacks any of the four key qualities President Dwight D. Eisenhower said a leader must possess: character, ability, responsibility and experience.

A nationally-televised presidential debate stage is, indeed, neither the time nor the place, one would think. This year, however, all the rules have been thrown out and we've got Donald Trump and Marco Rubio comparing relative penis sizes in their effort to become the so-called leader of the free world.

Now that the primaries are getting a lot closer, some are doing mental pretzel-bends to rationalize their gut feeling about Trump's inevitable loss (since their gut feeling can't possibly be wrong, of course.)

Throughout his column, Douthat speaks of how libertarian values restrain fascism--they do. To equate them with conservative ideology, however, is a bit of stretch. Conservatives are not libertarians. Conservatism is not the ally of liberty. It is first and foremost the ally of the status quo and the past. Every attempt to expand human liberty was opposed by conservatives of the day.