I have said for a very long time to my family and others that the experience of parents having and raising children isn’t really about the children.  God will handle the children as He sees fit.  It’s about the parents, and there are two experiences that test your mettle more than any other: marriage and children.  It’s one of God’s way of sanctifying His own, but it has the opposite affect on others.

One reason I care about the election cycle isn’t because I think we can make a difference.  Oh, we can in some ways, we can’t in others.  We can make a difference in the medical care situation in the country, but we can’t in the global financial system.  This discussion is saved for another time.  But one thing the individual vote does at one and the same time is affect the soul and show the content of the soul of the voter.  It’s a deeply moral act that has eternal consequences for the one who is given stewardship of the vote.

Now let me turn for a moment to a recent commentary by Jonah Goldberg.  Sometimes I disagree vehemently with him, but other times he hits on all cylinders.  This day the engine was running to perfection on the dynamometer.

This week there have been some cracks in the façade. Trump’s attacks on Heidi Cruz unsettled even Ann Coulter. And his abortion remarks are still sending tremors through the granite foundations of Trump can-do-no-wrong-ism. Joe Scarborough and Breitbart’s John Nolte are talking about what a bad week he’s having and gravely warning Trump to get his act together. As Jim Geraghty has been writing, the problem with such second thoughts is the assumption that something is amiss with Trump or his campaign. This is Trump. This is his campaign. The Trump we see before us is the same Trump. It’s a bit like when Barack Obama said that the Jeremiah Wright he saw denouncing America wasn’t the man he knew. That was nonsense. Obama knew exactly who Wright was, having attended his church for 20 years. It was only when Wright’s act moved to a larger national stage that all of a sudden he became inconvenient to Obama.

The analogy isn’t perfect, of course. But the basic point is the same. The Donald Trump of the last week is the exact same Donald Trump many of us saw a year ago or five years ago. He’s always been full of sh*t. He’s always been a total ignoramus when it comes to public policy, lacking the simple sense of patriotic duty to do his homework on the issues. He’s always been a nasty and boorish cad. He’s always pretended to be a conservative while working on liberal assumptions of what conservatives want to hear.

His “punish the women” comments were of a piece with his refusal to condemn the Klan on CNN. It’s not that he wants to punish women who have abortions — I’d bet he’s paid more abortion bills than he will ever sign — it’s that he thinks that’s what pro-lifers want to hear. It’s not that he’s a Klansman or that the pillowcases at Mara Lago come with eyeholes cut out in advance. It’s that Trump thinks lots of his fans like the Klan and he wants to pander to them. I have heard first-hand stories from people who’ve worked with Trump about how he disparages women’s appearance routinely. That’s who he is. If you’re attacking him because he retweeted a bad picture of Heidi, that’s not you being principled, it’s you getting cold feet. Indeed, I am sure that the same opportunism that has caused so many supposedly principled conservatives to hitch their wagons to Trump is now causing some of them to question their choices, not because Trump has changed but because the climate might be changing around them. By all means, if Trump continues to unravel (a huge if), please abandon Trump. But don’t think for a moment that the rest of us will automatically take your word for it when you say this or that statement changed your mind about the man. He hasn’t changed, your calculations have.

[ … ]

Like all demagogues, he’s using his lies as a loyalty test for his followers. He’s exploiting his popularity and abusing the devotion of his fans to force them into going along with his fictions, until they are in so deep psychologically, they have no choice but to carry on. It’s an ancient psychological tactic of authoritarians, Mafia dons, and the like: Force your followers into sharing the blame for your misdeeds so that they can’t break ranks.

Jonah is right.  He thinks we want to see women who have gotten abortions in the town center in stocks and chains.  He’s pandering to the social right, but he missed on this, and he missed badly.  His other positions – support for the second amendment, advocacy for closed borders – can only be assumed to be pandering as well.

Not to worry, though.  Just about as soon as he said it, he triangulated his position again, to something like abortion laws are already set and we have to leave it that way.  Trumps views on abortion aren’t the topic here.  Trump is the topic.  He is a mirror in which everyone sees what he or she wants to see, its just that the mirror has to be adjusted based on the onlooker and Trump isn’t really as good a triangulator as he is made out to be.

And that brings me to the conservative voters who have already cast their votes for Trump in the primaries heretofore.  Do you remember when socialized medicine was the most important thing about the Obama administration, the holy grail of the progressives?  It still is.

And yet, you have jettisoned that most important piece of your world view to support a man who sees things far differently than you, who supports socialized medicine, and who has said that the only thing he would change about the current system is to allow it to cross state lines.

Trump has woven you into his deception, his lies, his evil.  And when socialized medicine is codified and solidified for you, your children, and your children’s children to the tenth generation of your progeny, when you see that your seed will hate you and this generation for what has been done to the country, it will be far too late.

Open wide, and suck it down.  This is what you voted for, whether in the end it’s Hillary or Trump, or some replacement for Hillary.  Own it.  It’s yours.  The Mafia don asked you to pull the trigger and do the deed.  It’s no longer about him.  Now it’s about you.