Maybe conservatives should begin to be worried that liberals are far more accurate predictors of their own behavior than they themselves are.
Activists and leaders in the social conservative movement, after spending most of the past year opposing and condemning Donald J. Trump, are now moving to embrace his candidacy and are joining the growing number of mainstream Republicans who appear ready to coalesce around the party’s presumptive nominee.
What's that? The #NeverTrump movement is flailing about, shrinking and rudderless, while the "social conservatives" who base their entire identity on deep-seated beliefs that Donald Trump has either openly mocked or, at best, shown absolutely no interest in, are falling in line behind him? You don't say.
“Didn’t know we’d be here,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group. Ms. Dannenfelser began the year in Iowa with a group of other politically active conservative women like Ms. Nance who tried to stop Mr. Trump because, as they said at the time, he “disgusted” them.
But if it's a choice between voting for the clearly unqualified, unprepared, belligerent, and "disgusting" manchild and, you know, not doing that, forget it. Get out the Trump signs and the airsickness bags, my children, we're going a-canvassing!
But this—this part here sums up everything you might ever want to know. Put your drink down and savor this one.
For others in the movement, acceptance is rooted less in practicality than in forgiveness. Many religious and evangelical voters are taking what amounts to a leap of faith: willingly looking past Mr. Trump’s three marriages, his irreverence in referring to the Holy Communion as having “my little cracker” and even his apparent inability to ask God for forgiveness, which he said he had never done. [...]
“They love a convert because it’s what their faith is all about,” said Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition and a friend of Mr. Trump.
“Contrary to the stereotype that is often assigned to them by the larger culture,” Mr. Reed added, “evangelicals are far more forgiving and extend far more mercy to political figures and others than is understood.”
That would be the Ralph Reed, the "faith"-based Republican lobbyist-slash-conman who got caught fleecing "faith"-based conservatives outright in the Jack Abrahmoff days but who has been able to climb right back up on the Jesus horse and play the same pied-piper role to the exact same "faith"-based rubes as if nothing had ever happened. And the word he's looking for is not "forgiving." The word is "insincere." Social conservatives are "insincere" in their social pronouncements. Another even better choice might be "gullible"—truly, there's not a leader of any social conservative group anywhere that doesn't thank their lucky stars for that particular word, every single day of their limo-riding, book-selling existence. But forgiveness implies that Donald Trump has sought such a thing from them, and he has not. He has not so much as even made a nod in that direction.
The overarching theme in the piece is that Donald Trump may literally be the worst person in the Republican Party to represent "true" conservatives, but he's not the Democrat and so that's good enough. You might wonder, based on this, if there is any human on the planet so rancid that doctrinaire Republican base-thumpers would choose not to attach themselves to him. Once you've duct taped yourself to the Donald Trump candidacy, you don’t need to even bother asking that anymore.
To be sure, they could try to derail the clown of a candidate at the convention. But they won't. They could refuse to work for him, instead either attaching themselves to a more legitimate, if third-party, voice—or sitting out the election entirely. They won't. They will instead embrace him, because no matter how vile a person he is (and we have not heard the last of the revelations on just how vile he is, of that you can be sure) there is a presidency to be won. And if the only way to win it is to support the lunatic, then so be it. The lunatic it is.