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Is not a question of whether I find Trump to be a personally agreeable fellow, that is irrelevant because it is a President we are electing. I want a "brilliant" president and I can see that Trump is in fact brilliant but clearly he is not brilliant in the sense that he does not possess the kind of character we should want in a president. He is brilliant at showbiz, he is brilliant at the art of the deal, he is brilliant at public-relations but he is not the man to lead a nation. He is not the man whose finger should be but inches from the red button.

Because this is a conservative forum, I can say that he is not the man to lead a conservative movement. He is not a conservative he is intellectually and philosophically incoherent and has been all over the lot on every side of every issue for decades. His history belies the kind of stability we want in either a conservative or a president-which of course is one in the same. It is the richest of ironies that Trump rises to the top with the support of the conservative movement by pointing out the absence of true conservatism among the Republican elite and by adopting an anti-immigration stance when he himself has no historic claim on any of these issues.

I do not believe that Trump has a better chance of getting elected than Cruz. There are just too many people viscerally opposed to Trump. While I concede that Cruz has earned his share of negatives (earned is clearly the appropriate word, Cruz has drawn his negatives by his actions not by gratuitous flippery). I think he is possessed of the intellect (clearly superior to Trump's), a sense of history (clearly distorted in Trump), the forensic ability (he never puts a foot down wrong, unlike Trump), and the integrity (do we need to catalog Trump's divorces and corporate bankruptcies?) to overcome those negatives. In other words, Trump has probably hit his ceiling but Cruz can go all the way.

But even assuming you are right and I am wrong, Cruz cannot get elected and Trump can, what we will have in the White House is not a conservative but a man whose body is but a life-support system for his ego. You will not have a conservative, you will have a man lurching from issue to issue on an ad hoc basis, committing gaffe after gaffe, disgracing the party and caricaturing the nation before the world.

I see no conservative victory in that picture.

I don't know whether you are correct or not, but flaglady47 is correct that he wrote a book published back in 2011 that explained his positions. I doubt that even you would have a problem with most of them. Instead of assuming you know the answer, why not get a copy of Time to Get Tough and read it for yourself. Perhaps you'll find it's not so much blather and even more conservative than you imagined. Certainly more conservative than all of the others running except maybe Cruz.

Conservative positions, coupled with Trump's ability to get cross over voters and the hispanic vote the GOPee is so desperate to have, along with his name recognition, make him a very powerful candidate. If he is doing this with conservative ideas, he is creating the Reagan big tent built of all people who share the same ideal of America. Which is a very different big tent from the every idea is accepted except conservative ideas, that the RINOs and GOPee want their big tent to be.

What Trump is doing is almost impossible for a phony like Romney and the rest of the GOPee RINOs to accomplish. You actually have to hold these conservative ideas as part of your core beliefs in order to be able to defend them. The Rick Perry's and Mitt Romney's of the world learned you can't just have head knowledge of what you pretend to believe, or you will forget when it counts and will never be able to defend the beliefs.

I know that ideas in books are easy. It could have been ghost written. But read the book. See if he continues to hold those beliefs. Watch Trump in debates and see whether he defends those principles or not.

This election we have a whole slate of liars. Most of them are lying because they have been bought and believe they have to lie to keep the money flowing in while fooling the public. (See Walker's closed door meeting with the Chamber of Commies.) That is certainly not Trump's situation. He could be lying for some other reason. But if he really is a lib pretending to be conservative, it will come out.