A third of Republicans are sick and tired of patronizing temporizers.

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

...I doubt Trump will lose much of his 35-45% support in the next rounds of elections. It does no good for his critics to point out that he never reaches 50% margins in either elections or polls, when he can still win primaries well enough without gaining half the electorate. His genius so far has been to turn his third of the electorate into proof he’s a winner because his opponents never united to marshal a majority against him. In other words, Trump counted on the egos of his opponents to outweigh their concerns for their establishment party. His 35% is unimpeachable, and the anti-Trump 65% is at this late date still hopelessly fragmented. The more candidates talk about “uniting” around an anti-Trump candidate, the more they sound like medieval proverbial mice who dream of someone else putting a warning bell on the marauding cat.

Nor does it matter much that Trump flip-flops or outright lies as often as he calls others liars. His appeal is predicated on a general premise: He is a creature of pure emotion when a third of Republicans are sick and tired of patronizing temporizers. Just as civil wars can prove more savage than conflicts against foreign enemies, so too we have reached a point where the Trump base hates the Republican establishment (with whose agendas it agrees 75% of the time) far more than it despises Hillary Clinton (with whose policies it would support 5% of the time). All the latent class biases of the Republican gentry are now on the table, and they prove more compatible with Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump. Republican nihilism is the result.

...The children of Republican elites do not sit in classes where a quarter of the students do not speak English. When that specter of diversity looms, parents yank their kids and put them in the prep schools of Silicon Valley that are rapidly reaching New England numbers (or maybe better southern academies that followed integration). Their children are not on buses where an altercation between squabbling eight year olds leads to a tattooed parent arriving at your home to challenge you to a fight over “disrespecting” his family name. The establishment Republicans have rarely jogged around their neighborhoods only to be attacked by pit bulls, whose owners have little desire to speak English, much less to cage, vaccinate, or license their dogs. They have never been hit by illegal-alien drivers in Palo Alto. In other words, they do not wish to live anywhere near those who, as a result of an act of love, are desperately poor, here under illegal auspices, and assume California works and should work on the premises of Oaxaca.

...In Palo Alto where I work, there is no epidemic of bronze plaque and copper wire thievery, as there is near my home, where everything metal—Romex conduit, the dedicatory plaque at a Masonic temple, or bronze fittings on irrigation pipe—is in danger of being carted off, Vandal-like. I don’t think Mitt Romney has had a dead pit bull, in ripe rigor mortis with a rope tied around its neck, dumped on his lawn, or a beautiful Queensland Heeler, torn to shreds from dog fighting, thrown into his vineyard. Does the Gang of Eight ever get accosted in the evening by a group of tattooed thugs, claiming at your door they “are lost,” as they case your rural home? Or were they dreamers and future UC brain surgeons incognito?

Ask a citizen voter a simple question: If you invent a false Social Security number, and create an alias for the DMV, and lie on federal documents, will you be subject to indictment? If you arrive at an airport without a passport, will they wave you through as an act of love? I suggest you try it sometime—your version of crossing the southern border illegally.

Who does and does not have to follow the law — only U.S. citizens?

...Because Trump anger is not about consistency on the issues, but raw emotion, refuting Trump by rationally exposing the myriad of his hypocrisies and vulgarities has not so far won over too many of his supporters. That might have been easily possible a year ago, had a candidate tried to infuse some passion into a workable agenda and shown some affinity with those who are otherwise written off as Ice Road Truckers or Ax Men embarrassments. Or had a candidate far earlier, as Rubio apparently is now, been willing to blow up his campaign by descending to Trump’s crude level and in kamikaze fashion trading repugnant Trumpian smears, blow for blow. Or had a Kasich, Carson, or Bush far earlier bowed out.

But at least for a while longer, millions of Republicans and lots of Reagan Democrats would gladly prefer to be wrong with Trump than right with anyone else.

Read more here.