The future isn’t yet written in stone, but we’re coming perilously close.

I’m not in a panic regarding Donald Trump.  “Horrified despair” would be a more accurate description.

Barring a miracle tomorrow, Mr. Trump is very likely to be in a commanding position to become the Republican nominee for the presidency by tomorrow night.

A more horrifying nominee I have never seen in my lifetime, from either party.

But I believe in miracles, and I haven’t yet (quite) given up hope.

Here are some additional materials regarding the coarse, ignorant, vainglorious, and unprincipled man who would be our Leader, who has already done immeasurable damage to the level of political discourse in America, and whose entire claim to fame — that he’s a hugely successful businessman and negotiator — may well be a fraud:

In which Donald Trump calls for egregious violations of the Geneva Conventions 

Regarding which, you must understand that I support the Geneva Conventions not out of sentimentality, nor weakness, nor political correctness, but because I regard their principles as morally sound and as, overall, protecting our own troops and providing incentives for others to abide by them.  Gross violations of them would also, quite understandably, further inflame the Islamic world against us — and, for that matter, most of the civilized world as a whole.  I don’t want my country to be linked with the kind of military behavior that we typically associate with the Nazis.

Mr. Trump sometimes speaks of expanding the Republican Party.  But if he opens the tent door to allow certain types in, if he becomes the GOP’s public face and voice, I myself will have no choice but to leave the party.  Here, for instance, is Mr. Trump having a difficult time rejecting the support of white supremacists and members of the Ku Klux Klan.  (I’ve already mentioned his love fest with Vladimir Putin and his apparent comfort with Benito Mussolini.)

Mr. Trump is an authoritarian nationalist, plainly, but he’s no conservative.  (His wife, too, has donated a lot of money to Hillary Clinton.)  Here he is, for example, endorsing the central concept of Obamacare.  And his attitude toward the First Amendment and the free expression of opinions is frighteningly cavalier.

We can take some comfort in the fact that Donald Trump will almost certainly not win the general election.  Already, he’s a Democratic “opposition researcher’s” dream.  But he can certainly do major damage to the Republican Party (and not only by wrecking its electoral prospects in 2016), and he can certainly set the cause of American conservatism back for many years.

“Nothing Will Redeem the Ruined Reputations of Trump’s Republican Collaborators”

Please take a stand today.  As publicly as you can.  Friends don’t let friends vote for Donald Trump.  The future of the Republican Party, of American conservatism, and, to a disquieting degree, of the United States depends on whether or not Mr. Trump can be stopped.

I’m not sure that he can.

But I’ve always admired heroic defenses of lost causes, like Thermopylae, and the slave revolt of Spartacus, and the Alamo, and, for that matter, Benghazi.  It’s a matter of principle and personal honor to stand against Trumpism.

My conscience will be clear, because I’ll be voting conservative.