It was George Weigel who last week cited Evelyn Waugh as having created the literary character to whom one can reliably compare Donald Trump: Rex Mottram from Brideshead Revisited.  Quoting Waugh in Weigel's article:

You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it took me a year of marriage to see. He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed: something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was whole.

Has there yet been a better description of Donald Trump?  A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole?

While many very qualified candidates have dropped out of the race, we are left now with Trump; Ted Cruz, the one actually qualified candidate; and John my-father-was-a-mailman Kasich.  Kasich has won only one state but continues to claim not only that he can win the presidency, but that he is the only qualified person to run the country!  This would seem a textbook example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, "a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much greater than it really is."  Kasich is the Cliff Claven of politics, delusional about his own place at the table.  One state victory does not a president make.

That he actually believes he should be the Republican candidate is a stunning indictment of his grasp on reality.  For one thing, the man is more of a Democrat than a Republican.  While Marco Rubio never gained traction largely because of his affiliation with the Gang of Eight, Kasich is promising amnesty for illegals in his first hundred days.  He loves Common Core, the federal takeover of education that is further dumbing down American students.  He is not a true defender of the Second Amendment.  He likes Obama's SCOTUS nominee!  He vastly expanded Medicaid in Ohio while claiming to oppose Obamacare.  In short, he is an opportunist, a hypocrite, and a traitor to the conservative cause.  And he cannot win unless the party cheats the millions of voters who have watched the debates, donated money, and voted in the primaries in droves.  But the party has not been shy about its intent to do exactly that – to stop Trump and/or Cruz by any means necessary.

What does it say about the nation at this moment in time that qualified people like Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, and even George Pataki did not make the cut; that a "tiny man" like Trump is leading in the polls; and that Kasich the fantasist thinks he is still standing with a chance to win?  And the smartest candidate of all, Ted Cruz, is the one the D.C. establishment and the media continue to savage along with Trump.  What is wrong with this picture? 

Are we finished as a country?  If Hillary is handed the White House despite her long history of criminality and avarice, how do we prevail?  Obama has eviscerated the Constitution to the delight of leftists everywhere.  We will no longer be the constitutional republic of our Founders, but instead a Marxist grouping of "citizens of the world," based on moral and cultural relativism.  Caucasian-Americans will continue to be reviled for their "privilege."  Illegal immigrants will continue to be given preferential treatment, even if they are criminals.  The earned wealth of working people will continue to be redistributed to non-working people.  What will be left?  The hollow shell of the greatest experiment in civil society ever embarked upon.

Cliff Claven is known to have said: "If you were to go back in history and take every president, you'll find that the numerical value of each letter in their name was equally divisible into the year in which they were elected.  By my calculations, our next president has to be named Yellnick McWawa."  This may be as legitimate a method as any by which we nominate and elect our president these days.