Some things I didn’t say to my friend:

• Trump has successfully created an image of himself as a self-made man. But this is blatantly untrue. He was born into a family made wealthy by buying political favors (cheaply), and capitalizing on government largesse for their development projects. Trump presents himself as the man who can’t be bought, but he sure has a long history of buying others (for his family’s financial gain). That’s corruption, in my opinion. In the 1970s, he even tried to bribe an investigative journalist with an offer of finding him a better place to live.
• The pattern of favors exchanges continues to the present. Does anyone really think it was in any way a coincidence that within hours of receiving Sarah Palin’s endorsement, he named her as his running mate?
• This man has a “teflon coating” so powerful it makes Reagan’s look vulnerable. He’s not only attacked whole classes of people, he attacked John McCain for being captured, and by proxy insulted every veteran and all those who respect their service—and then he turns around and repeats the biggest mistake of McCain’s career: running with Palin (I think he might have won in 2008 if he had a running mate people trusted). How is it that the mainstream media hasn’t torn him to ribbons? Howard Dean was forced out of the race for a yell of enthusiasm at a gathering of his supporters (and watching it again, I still don’t see anything inappropriate). In 1972, Edmund Muskie was forced to drop out after shedding a few tears in the wake of an attack on his wife—what’s wrong with showing emotion, pray tell? (We seem to have moved past that, finally. We’ve seen establishment political figures from John Boehner to Barack Obama crying in public recently, and appropriately, it’s no big deal). Yet here we have a demagogue who attacks entire ethnic groups, who makes blatantly false statements, who has even been attacked during the Republican response to the State of the Union, and he’s still out there attracting support. What is up with that?
• Unfortunately, Trump is merely the most blatant face of a party mired in better-disguised racism, sexism, etc. To name one among many examples, is “moderate” Jeb Bush’s assertion that he would only let in refugees from Syria who can prove that they’re Christian really less despicable?