Conservatives watched last night as what was left of the Grand Old Party died. Ted Cruz bowed out of the race after a crushing loss in Indiana. John Kasich is expected to do the same later today. Donald Trump is now the presumptive Republican nominee for president, and the party has officially been split apart. The party of Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. is nominating a man who allies himself with white supremacists. The party of Reagan is nominating someone who openly admires dictators like Vladimir Putin, someone who wants to sue people for disagreeing with him and advocates violence against people who protest him. Donald Trump, a man who is nothing more than a loud-mouthed obnoxious bully using the anger of Americans for his own ends and who answers policy questions by bragging about his penis size, could possibly be our next president. It’s not exactly difficult to see why countless conservatives are now leaving the party, burning their voter registration cards and vowing not to vote in the general election. Trump’s supporters don’t allow people to have opinions that their Dear Leader might not like, though, and so they’ve gone on the attack. There are the typical insults, but they’re just following in Trump’s footsteps. Far more common than the Trumpbots are the people imploring everyone to forget their principles and vote for Trump anyway. Sure, he’s a complete and total sellout of everything the Republican Party is supposed to stand for — vote for him anyway! After all, if people don’t sell out their values, then we might get President Hillary, which would be the worst thing ever… right? Wrong.

David French at the National Review explains:

There’s no real difference in character between the two. They lie as easily as they breathe: habitually, transparently, shamelessly. Hillary lies like a lawyer, always parsing her words to provide a legal escape route. Trump lies like a thug, contradicting himself with each successive breath and daring anyone to call him on it. They both seek to destroy their political opponents, and they’d probably both wield the levers of power to do so and to reward their friends. In other words, they’re both fundamentally corrupt.

… Trump’s foreign policy, insofar as he has a coherent foreign policy, is by contrast an entire casserole of crazy. At various points in the campaign, he’s promised that he’d order the military to commit war crimes by torturing terrorists and killing their families; he’s called our core alliances in question; he’s pledged to remain neutral in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; and he’s switched anti-ISIS strategies so many times that no one has the slightest clue what he’d do. This is a man who has on multiple occasions endorsed a “bomb them all and take their oil” strategy for fixing the war-torn Middle East. He’d alienate every Muslim ally America has, including the Kurds, and he’s still completely mystified by the most basic defense concepts. The entire world would be less secure with his finger on the button.

On trade, Clinton will almost certainly be superior to Trump. Trump pledges to “win” through punitive tariffs that would increase the price of consumer goods and trigger trade wars, but he gives little indication that he understands the economics of trade, the reality of the American economy, or even the truth about American manufacturing. (It is not, in fact, disappearing.) Clinton, by contrast, would probably maintain the trade-policy status quo, and while that status quo creates winners and losers — as any status quo would — free trade has long been an overall positive for American families. The Clinton and Trump tax plans are both miserable. Clinton offers the standard Democratic package of tax increases for the rich and vastly increased spending, while Trump’s tax cuts would blast a hole in the budget, adding as much debt as Obama did — without the burden of a historic recession. Clinton’s plan would probably slow economic growth, but would be closer to revenue-neutral. Trump’s plan would spur more growth but would also increase the national debt by up to $10 trillion. Pick your poison.

… How much better would Trump be? It’s impossible to know if his recent pro-life conversion is genuine, but it can’t be a good sign that he still refuses to denounce Planned Parenthood, consistently using Democratic talking points to praise the nation’s largest abortion provider. On immigration — aside from that big, beautiful wall, which is a pipe dream at best — he’s all over the place. And his corporate record indicates that he’s exactly the kind of “jobs Americans won’t do” legal-immigration and touchback-amnesty advocate who would be all too willing to open the door so wide that no one would have to scale the wall.

As for judges, the indications are similarly ominous. He praises his far-left sister and promises to nominate men and women whom everyone will like. But not everyone likes true conservatives. In reality, he’ll probably nominate friends and cronies — people who’ve said nice things about him. The best-case scenario is that he’ll delegate lower-court judicial nominations to home-state senators, simply adopting their recommendations. He’d probably be better than Hillary, but not by much.

… But virtually everything we do know about Trump is negative. He lies. He traffics in far-left conspiracy theories. He incites violence. He surrounds himself with thugs, cronies, and fools. He’s ignorant of the most basic realities of national security, foreign policy, and global economics. He has a decades-long record of corruption and a decades-long record of liberalism. In arguing that he’s better than Clinton, his supporters now ask us to trust his current “conservative” incarnation and disregard that record. We don’t really know how he’ll handle immigration, trade, ISIS, abortion, or judges. But trust him. He’ll do better. Yes, Trump has praised single-payer health care during this election, but trust him. He’ll do better than Obamacare. Yes, Trump has advocated touchback amnesty and increased legal immigration, but trust him. He’ll protect American workers. Yes, Trump has supported abortion-on-demand and gun control, but trust him. He’s changed. Yes, Trump has written large checks to leftist politicians, but trust him. He’ll fight them as president. Yes, his campaign team lives in the gutter, but trust him. He’ll appoint good people.

Why is it, exactly, that we should believe Donald Trump would be any better than Hillary Clinton? At the absolute best, he’s a cipher. We have no idea what he would do as president. With Clinton, we know what we’re getting. She would be better than Obama, although that’s not saying much. She would nominate leftist judges; we know that. She would support Planned Parenthood and further abortion; we know that. We know Hillary, and we know how to fight her.

But what do we know about Trump? He claims to be a conservative. He says he opposes illegal immigration. He says he’s pro-life. The thing is, literally everything in his past says otherwise. He wasn’t just pro-abortion in the past; he supported partial-birth abortion. He says he’s pro-life now, but he constantly stumbles and to this day, still defends Planned Parenthood. On top of that, he says that he wants the GOP to open up their platform on abortion to be less strict and wants to continue taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. That’s just one example, too, of one issue. It’s like that across the board. So why is it that we should hold our noses and vote for someone when we have no idea what they stand for?

What we know about Donald Trump is nothing good. We know he’s a con artist who swindles people out of everything that he can if it means making himself an extra buck. We know he’s been a pro-abortion extremist in the past. We know that he’s used illegal immigrants for labor over Americans in his hotels. We know that his personal character is, to say the least, lacking — his constant adultery, his multiple marriages, his open misogyny and sexism towards women. We know that he admires dictators like Vladimir Putin. We know that his personal finances are disastrous, and that he would have more money if he’d left his inheritance alone instead of trying to build his own empire.

The positives are basically that he’s not Hillary, and that he claims to be a Republican. That’s it. There is no coherent policy platform. There is no superior intelligence. Trump is unpredictable at very best, and he’s dangerous, no matter which way you look at it. But hey, he’s mad, just like you, and he’ll yell, just like you. There’s bluster and anger and outrage. Is that enough? Is that worth selling out everything you believe in?

For some people, the answer may be yes. But for others, the answer is no — and it doesn’t make them responsible for the now-inevitable Hillary presidency. Trump isn’t owed anyone’s vote just because he’s the presumptive nominee. He has to earn it, and for countless Americans, he failed, just like he’s going to fail in the general election. If not voting for Trump means that Hillary Clinton will be president, then bring it on. At least we can say that we kept our principles, that we had nothing to do with this catastrophe. Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, will have to live with that knowledge for a long, long time.

“If we must have an enemy at the head of Government, let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.”

~ Alexander Hamilton