If the last 6 months of my political life had a movie title, it might be “Dr. Trumplove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Trump” (with all due apologies to Slim Pickens, his heirs and successors). Or maybe “CVC: Cretin vs. Criminal” in the mode of the “AVP: Alien vs. Predator” franchise of movies.

I don’t really “love” the Trump but win or lose, it is hard not to marvel at the service he has done for America. Of him, in July of 2015, I wrote: “Trump is the GOP’s version of one of those red assed baboons. I don’t like Trump except as the disposable tip of a spear – he was/is a valuable tool in drawing fire from the progressive camps. The media covers him as if he was the Kim Kardashian of politics.” With the candidates, the GOP had to select from, I never expected that he would be the actual nominee…but throughout it all, he maintained the red-assed baboon role but somehow, he has successfully deflected that attention back onto the Hillary camp and their chicanery.

Trump is a progressive leaning populist. He’s a crony capitalist with only the most superficial acquaintance with the Constitution or the principles it holds. He stumbles and bumbles his way along against an entrenched Democrat candidate who knows the Constitution very well – well enough to skirt every provision and stricture contained within. Her knowledge of government has been accumulated as she and her husband probed the limits of the laws, looking for blurred edges as they sought (and continue to seek) to enrich themselves at the expense of the American public.

The Clinton campaign treats Trump in the manner that a Queen’s court ridicules the court jester only to find out later that the jester has two Ph.D.s and is only playing a role – he is smarter than the lot of them.

When I say that Trump has provided America a service, I mean that he has exposed ties so close between the Democrat Party, the mainstream media and the deep state that these three entities are entirely indistinguishable from a single body. He has made it possible for the average citizen to see how the sausage making of government works and what an isolated, inside game it is. He has brought out evidence of how truly arbitrary and capricious the ruling class is and that there are truly two sets of laws in America – one set for the privileged progressives and one for everyone else.

I have heard it proposed that if we had just had a Rubio or a Cruz running against HRC, either would be up 5 to 15 points right now – but I’m not so sure. I must wonder if it weren’t for a Trump candidacy would we have seen all the Wikileaks dumps – or the Clinton camp would have been goaded into the mistakes it has made. I wonder if the Clinton Crime Family Foundation and Global Graft Initiative would have been discussed if Trump had not pulled Bill into the campaign as an issue. Would the other candidates been crass enough to raise the issue of Hillary’s failing health? I’m not so sure.

General George S. Patton is reported to have said to his men that they must forget all the high-minded rules of war that were written in the parlors of the moralizing politicians. He said that the enemy doesn’t care about our rules and he will fight according to his own rules (or absence of them). He said that the only way to win was to fight according to the enemy’s rules – or even dirtier.

In our own minds, we know this to be true. On the battlefield, holding true to any rule that renders you defenseless or restricts your ability to mount an offensive will get you killed. Patton was right. War is about victory on the battlefield.

Just as I doubt that an ISIS jihadi will praise you for your adherence to high moral standards after he cuts your head off, a winning Democrat is never going to laud you for sticking to your principles. Democrats have a word for people like that – losers. An iron rule of politics is this: if you can’t win, you can’t govern.

Trump may not win but if he doesn’t, it is possible that in his run, he has vested irreparable damage to the Democrat party, the progressive movement and the mass media by exposing the collusion, coordination and corruption that has long been understood by conservatives to exist. Trump is a cretin to be sure – but then with the same degree of certainty, one knows that Hillary Clinton is a criminal. He was not my choice for the GOP nominee. I’m not necessarily against him but I do not think he represents my philosophies any more than Romney, McCain, Bush or Dole did before him – but I am left to wonder if he was the right guy at the right time. To borrow General Patton’s rationale, he might have been the only candidate who understood that to defeat someone who flings feces, you must be willing fling feces as well.

I don’t like what this says about American culture because it would imply that we are not a principled nation any longer but this is what we have come to.

There may be a bright side. Often, after an unmitigated disaster, a renaissance begins. Hopefully, history will record Campaign 2016 as such a cleansing disaster. I guess we should remember this as well: politics is war but who America is in wartime is not who we are in peace. No worse enemy, no better friend.