Can we please start with an all-around acknowledgement that this is an undesirable scenario?

Jonah Goldberg's G-File at NRO for this week is a must-read. It's lengthy and involved, but it is superb writing and he manages to make a few funny observations about our grim juncture.

I won't excerpt too much, because much of what he does with his piece is discuss a recent Charles Kesler's WaPo column on Squirrel-Hair , Victor Davis Hanson's NRO piece on the same subject, and what Stephen Moore has to say about it on the pages of The American Spectator (and how starkly Moore's current position is at odds with what he wrote about trade, protectionism and S-H in Investors Business Daily and NRO last year). Goldberg links to, and amply excerpts from, all of the above.

He starts out with a concept I'd not come across before: Burdian's Ass. Read it. It depicts where we are now.

But I will leave you with what I think is the essence of what he's saying:

Politically, conservatism at its core is about the importance of ideas and the importance of character. With the exception of his longstanding support for protectionism and the unalloyed importance of “strength,” Trump cares not a whit for policy or philosophy. His attachment to principles is, for the most part, a nearest-weapon-to-hand approach. As a matter of character he’s crude, boorish, dishonest, proudly promiscuous, and has launched countless businesses based on the idea that it’s morally acceptable to take advantage of people. He dodged the actual Vietnam War but claimed that avoiding the clap in the 1970s was his own personal Vietnam. 

And there is the policy level as well:

By waiving the standards we use to judge liberal politicians in order to defend an allegedly conservative one, we are waiving those standards for all time. I’m not talking about some allowances at the margins, politics should be flexible — strange bedfellows and all that. But there’s a difference between being flexible and willingly snapping your own spine to bend over for a politician who, almost certainly, has contempt for the standards you once held near and dear.

And then there is what we must do:

What I am saying is that just because we are facing a horrible choice, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t say it is horrible. That’s our job. As Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” 

I've actually been having a Facebook comment-thread conversation about the current stage of the S-H phenomenon with a blogger I've long respected, one whom I have quoted and linked to here many times. She has taken the "Our-choice-in-November-will-be-binary-so-we-will-have-to-prioritize-the-unpalatable-and-swallow-hard-and-vote-for-Trump" position. She's in honorable company. Dennis Prager and John Bolton (and Moore and Hanson) are in that camp as well. But lately she's been coming perilously close to saying there's nothing worthy of respect in the #NeverTrump position, going so far as to accompany her latest post about it with a photo of a whining baby. I'm not going to name her here or go into the details of the exchange, because I'm holding out the possibility that something - perhaps an utterance too far by S-H - will get her to change course.

There were actually several other pieces about this front-and-center matter I came across lately, but this G-File is the place to start.