To me, the most astonishing fact about this primary season isn’t that Trump has managed to get a stranglehold on the nomination. It isn’t even that he has done so by convincing so many people who are sick and tired of Obama’s imperial ways that it would be great to replace him with someone else who promises to ignore the limitations of the Constitution by legislating with his pen and his phone, as it were.

A campaigner may be able to get away with promising to do things on his own, pretending that Congress and the Supreme Court don’t even exist, but only a dictator can actually get away with it.

Still, the most fantastic thing of all is that a candidate with an (R) after his name can be competitive in 2016 America. How is it even imaginable when the Democrats have bought and paid for the votes of blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, Muslims, college students, single women and union members? The Left has even managed to convince a good number of financially secure senior citizens that they’re being suckers if they don’t sign up for SNAP (food stamps).

When you realize that even farmers believe they’re entitled to receive ethanol subsidies until the end of time, I’m a tad surprised to find I’m not the last Republican standing.

Although I have tried to discourage my wonderful readers from sending me email consisting of anything but their own comments, pro or con, regarding something I’ve written, one of them broke the rules and shared a picture of a Bernie Sanders yard sign that had been torn in half. The caption read: “I took half of your poster because you had one and I didn’t. I’m sure you understand.”

That is about as clear and as succinct an argument against socialism as I’ve come across.

Although I don’t encourage violence or lawlessness, I think it would be poetic justice if every dumb cluck with a Sanders yard sign or bumper-sticker had half his car and half his house or apartment confiscated for the sake of those poor unfortunates who lack homes and automobiles.

I take no joy, but I do take a bow for having blown the whistle on the Wounded Warrior Project a couple of years ago. And believe me, that wasn’t an easy thing to do when an outfit has the words “Wounded” and “Warrior” in its name.

But it just made no sense to me that a charity could afford to spend so much money advertising night after night on Fox News.

Recently, WWP CEO Steve Nardizzi and COO Al Giordano were fired for their lavish spending. To give you an idea, the annual staff meeting at a 5-star hotel in 2014 ate up $970,000 in charitable donations.

In what passed for a mission statement, but what I read as a criminal confession, Nardizzi had summed up his approach: “We need to embrace the notion that has long guided the ‘for-profit’ world — think big and spend big in order to succeed big.”

My rule of thumb is to donate what I can to the Salvation Army. When it comes to veterans’ groups and other charities, I suggest you go online and check out their financial reports, and if their directors are making more than you are, scratch them off your Christmas list.

What’s more, never send a nickel to the Humane Society of the United States, no matter how many address labels they send you. Instead, I suggest that pet lovers donate to the various animal rescue groups in your community. The folks at the Humane Society of the U.S. make Nardizzi and Giordano look like pikers. Your donation is far likelier to wind up in a numbered account in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands than it is to save the life of a single dog or cat.

It was predictable, but no less distressing, that the media and the other candidates, including those in the Republican Party, held Donald Trump responsible for the hooliganism that recently took place at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Trump’s use of tough talk is certainly adolescent in the extreme, but it had no more to do with the mob behavior of Black Lives Matter, MoveAlong.org and the Bernie Sanders fan club, than it did with the similar mob that greeted Ben Shapiro when he tried to deliver an address about free speech at Cal State a week earlier.

For all the chatter about Trump’s telling his supporters to punch out the lights of troublemakers, the most incendiary rhetoric of our times has come from black leftists calling for burning cops like bacon. But I haven’t heard anyone in the media taking Sanders or Clinton to task for pandering to the creeps in the Black Lives Matter movement, and I’m betting I never will.

Ever since the 1960s, when young fascists were given a pass at Columbia, Cal Berkeley and the 1968 Democrat convention — also in Chicago — to act up without consequences, we have seen similar riots taking place on a regular basis.

We’ve seen them in Ferguson, Baltimore and New York, anytime a black criminal is killed by a cop in the line of duty, and on nearly every college campus when a conservative arrives to give an address. College campuses, where free speech was once held sacred, are now pig pens where left-wing professors and students display their mutual contempt for the First Amendment by mimicking their Nazi forebears and silencing those with whom they disagree.

The irony is that if you asked them why they’re behaving like barbarians, they’d justify it by insisting it’s because the speaker is someone who is intolerant of blacks, illegal aliens, Muslims, homosexuals and socialists. But what they really mean isn’t “intolerant of,” but, rather, not “reverential towards.”

What took place in Chicago wasn’t the final rousing scene of “Les Miserables,” it was just another act in the long-running psychodrama known as “Fascism, American Style.”

The other day, while watching Chris Wallace’s Sunday show, I heard Mr. Wallace say the single goofiest thing I’ve heard since Hillary Clinton last opened her yap.

Wallace was grilling Donald Trump about his statement that the followers of Islam hate us. In framing his question, Wallace pointed out that whereas there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, he could only account for 100,000 jihadists.

If he hadn’t repeated the number, I would have assumed I had misheard. I can’t even imagine where he came up with his jihadist nose count.

I imagine there might be an 800-number that liberals call to order their statistics. It would explain where they got the 10% of the population who are allegedly homosexuals, when the actual number is probably between one and two percent, or that there are only 11 million illegal aliens in the U.S., a number that, miraculously, hasn’t wavered since they began tossing it around in the 1990s.

Getting back to Wallace, generally when it comes to guessing the number of real or potential terrorists in the Muslim world, the percentage you hear most often is 10%, which would translate to 150 million jihadists. But I consider even that a lowball figure.

Perhaps if they’re only counting the Muslims who would have the guts to blow themselves to smithereens for the glory of Allah, 150 million might cover it. But when you add up those who feel Islamic pride well up when they hear about 3,000 people murdered in Manhattan, 130 slaughtered in Paris, 13 gunned down in San Bernardino, or when countless thousands are butchered, burned or beheaded, throughout the world, the actual number, I would suggest, is probably around 1,499,999,994.

And I’m not so sure about those other six.