Never Trump Moot?

Never Trump. By Jim Geraghty, Morning Jolt

http://www.nationalreview.com/newsletters

But at this moment, the argument about #NeverTrump feels pretty moot. With few if any Trump ads on the air, campaign offices few and far between, a campaign schedule that keeps sending the candidate to rallies in deep blue states, every indicator showing the GOP nominee getting obliterated among Latinos, African-Americans, young people and women, and the polls looking abysmal for both Trump and Congressional Republicans, reluctant conservatives are among the least of Trump’s problems. If all Trump-skeptical Republicans put aside all of their concerns and jumped on board, the outlook for his campaign wouldn’t be all that different.

It’s hard to get emotionally invested in the need for Trump to win when the candidate finds a new way to botch things every single day. If he’s not fighting with a slain soldier’s dad, he’s serving up a dozen tweets about how unfair the media is to him; if he’s not pre-emptively claiming the election will be rigged, he’s implying gun owners will assassinate Hillary Clinton; if he’s not calling President Obama the founder of ISIS and insisting it’s not a metaphor, he’s whining about the debate schedule. Trump’s longtime right-hand man Roger Stone just claimed, without any supporting evidence, that “Scott Walker and the Reince Priebus machine rigged as many as five elections including the defeat of a Walker recall election.” The entire Trump circus is a deep dive into paranoid conspiracy theories and seething resentment that does nothing to advance the cause of limited government or individual liberty. Trump gives his GOP skeptics nothing to latch onto as a sign of genuine hope.

I keep hearing from Trump fans that the future of the Republic is at stake. If that’s the case, why are there bigger expectations and demands of the reluctant conservatives than on the candidate himself?