THANKS, DONALD!:

I got involved in politics in 2014, when I started college. In that world, I still would have been the guy who thought that the GOP was the party of the smart and honorable, and that everything that the Democrats did and said had a malicious angle.

Donald Trump changed that.

He ran against every principle that I, and virtually every other Republican, held dear. His character was flawed. His foreign policy was Obama 2.0 but open about intending to commit human rights violations and war crimes. He was against free trade. He ran against cutting entitlements. The list goes on--and never stops!

And, naturally, virtually every single of those Republican officeholders came out against him, making the same arguments I just made. You see? My party was great! Here were my party's leaders, the smart and the honorable, standing against the frontrunner of the field.

Then, Trump became the nominee. One by one, those honorable party leaders fell, and so did much of the conservative intelligentsia. As Jonah Goldberg likes to say, it was like the invasion of the body snatchers.

Beneath the tragic circumstances, there was a great awakening for the young college kid that I was: Politicians are human and prone to human temptations and failings, and party affiliation doesn't change that. Some are good, and some are not so good.

The Trump moment has taught me that politicians can be honorable no matter how wrong I think they are. And they can be complete hacks with zero principles, even if they like judicial originalism and entitlements cuts.

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