Silly me. I thought Donald Trump’s entry would turn the Republican Party establishment upside down simply because he was unlike anything they would have ever dared allow into the mix of candidates for the presidential nomination. He’s brash. He’s bold. He’s not willing to play games with the mainstream media. And, more than anything (listen up, John McCain and Mitt Romney) he’s a winner who plays by his own rules, defying any attempt by the Republican Party / Democratic Party / media establishment “cartel” (to use Ted Cruz’s words) to keep the status quo.

I’ve always felt deep down that if it came to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, the GOP establishment and their insiders in the conservative media would talk a good game publicly but deep inside (and in the voting booth) choose Madame Hillary. Why? Because she’s the quintessential Washington / Beltway insider. Not as progressive as Bernie Sanders has forced her to be, totally part and parcel with the establishment. Simply put, more than anything else, she’d be predictable and far more likely to keep the status quo and system of spoils that Washington operates around more than Donald Trump ever would – indeed, even more than Barack Obama has.

Me? I despise everything about the GOP establishment, and like many Trump supporters who come from the conservative side of the Republican Party, want to see it burn to the ground, taking the likes of squishes like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, the GOP senators and representatives who ran as conservatives but turned into squishes as soon as they arrived in Washington (our Arizona senators McCain and Flake are poster children), and the big-money donors who ensure nothing ever changes with them. I know Trump’s candidacy isn’t going to do that single-handed, but it can sure make these bastards squirm in their seats, that’s for sure.

I knew Trump’s ascendancy would turn the candidates against each other as the original seventeen slowly but gradually were reduced to the current four – that’s politics, after all – but I never in my life imagined that the conservative media would turn against each other the way it has. I mean, you’d think that simply because I support Donald Trump I and those like me are to Republican Party and GOP politics the equivalent of kryptonite to Superman. I used to enjoy websites and blogs like Red State, Hot Air, National Review Online, and Power Line (to name just a few), cable outlets like FOX News, and radio shows hosted by Salem Communications (Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, and Dennis Prager) but finally grew weary of the daily onslaught and increasingly personal and vicious attacks on both Trump and his supporters. Heck, you’d think we were the problem, not Washington, the GOP establishment, and indeed the entire nominating process that created the fertile environment from which Trump’s candidacy emerged.

Me, I’ve always believed that you can disagree with someone politically but it doesn’t have to get personal. My problem with the media outlets above is that not only has their coverage been incredibly one-sided (in FOX’s case, Megyn Kelly has become virtually unwatchable in its anti-Trump vitriol), but once-favorite bloggers have allowed their sites to not just become quite nasty in tone, but stifle any form of dissent to the extent where long-time visitors and commenters have been banned (never a good thing unless they regularly violate the rules of conduct) and links to other blogs that have dared to cover Trump’s campaign with any kind of favorability or at least even-handedness have been removed.

As both a Republican and a conservative, I thought we were better than this. I mean, Mitt Romney was a squish and a phony, but I supported his candidacy and voted for him. Same thing with McCain. Perhaps Trump isn’t a conservative, and perhaps he’s playing a different game than your usual probable (at least at this point) Republican nominee, but fer gawdsakes, the guy isn’t afraid to take the game to the likely Democratic nominee (at least at this point), and you cannot deny he’s bringing the kinds of voters into the booth – and perhaps the Party – that no other Republican candidate could ever dream of doing. Does anyone really think that with Ted Cruz – a so-called “true conservative” (whatever that means) at the top of the ticket he could bring states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and possibly New York and New Jersey into play for 2016? I don’t think so.

But I believe Donald Trump can. Of course, the media outlets mentioned above will rail endlessly that Trump couldn’t beat Hillary in a general election, but that kind of conventional wisdom has been proven wrong by Trump over and over again since his entry into the race last summer. Of course, as I mentioned above, you can expect an endless parade of so-called “conservatives” who’ll come out in support of Hillary, but all that does is reinforce my original conviction that these folks have never been conservative, they’re just so tied with the UniParty establishment in Washington that the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency scares the bejeezus out of them.

As it should. Which is why I’m sticking with The Donald through thick and thin. After all, can you imagine another candidate with the chutzpah to put out an ad like this?