He will not change his stripes

You're not likely to see many LITD citings of WaPo chief correspondent Dan Balz, but he is a seasoned observer of the political scene, and what he has to say about Squirrel-Hair's behavior since winning the Indiana primary bears noting:

Trump can’t seem to let go of any perceived slight or grievance. He can’t accept the idea of winning graciously. He still feels disrespected, by fellow Republicans and especially the media. He feels he hasn’t gotten all the credit he deserves. He thinks that even some of his losses during the nomination battle were worthy of more praise than he got at the time.

Some examples:

The run of stories about Trump has been unrelenting, raising questions about his business acumen, which hit especially close to home for someone who has been celebrated as the embodiment of success. One article described him as a celebrity businessman who posed secretly as his own PR agent. Another revealed that the candidate who refuses to release his tax returns paid no taxes years ago, according to a 1981 New Jersey gambling regulatory report.

Trump also was hit with tough questions, many from The Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold, about whether he had lived up to his claim of raising $6 million for veterans at an event in Iowa this past January. It turned out that one missing million-dollar donation was his own. Pressed on the fundraising pledge to veterans, he held a news conference to provide detail ls and then used most of the time to vilify the media. 

Newly released documents from a lawsuit alleging fraud by Trump University raised other troubling questions about the practices of officials at that institution. Trump insists he will win that suit. But he opened a new avenue of attacks by going after the Mexican heritage of U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is based in San Diego and is overseeing the case.

Under fire for doing so, he ramped up his attacks, first in an interview with the Wall Street Journal and then in another with CNN’s Jake Tapper. He accused Curiel, who was born in the United States, of bias against him because, he said, the judge’s heritage conflicts with Trump’s proposal to build a wall on the Mexican border. He rejected assertions that what he was doing was the very definition of racism. 

And he continues to give Republicans whose support he ought to consider crucial reasons to be skittish:

Trump has had success in bringing more and more Republican elected officials to his side, if not exactly uniting the party. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) finally said Thursday that he would vote for Trump in November. Then on Friday, Ryan had to disavow what Trump had said about Curiel. He said he would continue to take issue with Trump as necessary but added that he hopes that won’t be often. The evidence suggests otherwise.

Trump can’t resist airing his frustration with those still outside the tent. He needlessly attacked New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R), who admittedly has not said good things about him. Now he’s done a 180-degree turn, telling the Santa Fe New Mexican that he wants her support and has always respected her. 

What ought to concern us is that he squanders every opportunity to demonstrate character, a trait that Jeremy Rozansky, writing at NRO, asserts as perhaps the most crucial component of an American president's constellation of traits:

The Framers understood that there were broadly two ways in which a people are ruled: by laws and by will. As much as possible, they sought to have Americans ruled by laws, which were to be drafted, revised, passed, and implemented in a plodding process that prizes deliberation, compromise, modesty, and broad popular support. Most general matters can be addressed through the legislative process, but there are certain emergencies that require something other than lawmaking—they require executive discretion.

In Federalist 70, Hamilton argues that an energetic executive is “essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks . . . to the steady administration of the laws, to the protection of property . . . to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction and of anarchy.”

The legislative branch cannot respond appropriately to these emergencies. The need for a nation to engage in statecraft, war-making, and policing means that those powers must be left to a different kind of branch of government. Hamilton’s view is that such powers need to be unified in one man who can conduct diplomacy and act as commander-in-chief and as the chief law-enforcement officer with “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch.”

Electing a president is foremost not about the legislative agenda each candidate favors, a realm in which the president is profoundly constrained by Congress, but rather about the quality most essential to the arenas in which the president has the most discretion: temperament.

For Republican lobbyists and the conservative intelligentsia, Donald Trump’s utter lack of knowledge of the basics of public policy and his character defects that allow him to be easily manipulated present an opportunity. The agenda items they were hoping for from a new president are within reach. But the presidency is not ultimately a conduit of lawmaking, even with today’s enlarged presidency. Presidential discretion has creeped into areas that should rightly be deliberated by Congress, with President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, the health-insurance mandates, and even the simple fact that the president is now the first mover in any budget process. Yet, the expansion of presidential power is not an argument for replacing a progressive Caesar with a nationalist Caesar, it’s an argument for congressional reassertion and less judicial deference. 

Donald Trump's basic unfitness for this position must remain front and center in the ongoing battle between conservatives in various stages of capitulation to the "look-the-choice-in-November-is-going-to-be-a-binary-one-between-him-and-Clinton-so-you-must-align-yourself" mentality and those of us who refuse to fabricate any qualitative daylight between these two moral monsters.

Whichever ones, we must pray that he or she is so badly damaged, so thoroughly delegitimized from day one that there is no way he or she can be effective at anything.

Of course, that means we must have a legislative branch the composition of which is superior to anything we've had in at least decades, and I realize that that is a tall order.

But neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump must be allowed to wreak their respective brands of ruin on our flatlining nation.