I have been asked a dozen times by news reporters over the last week: Do you still support Donald Trump? The elites at The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN would love to be able to add me and dozens more to the list of Republicans who have publicly denounced the Trump-Pence ticket.

What I don’t get about the prominent Republican defectors who have declared they are now for Hillary Clinton is why they get this weird high off being praised by the leftists in the media. Is it really that important to them to be back on the invite list for the next press club dinner?

Yes, I am offended by many of Trump’s actions and words. Who isn’t? But who isn’t offended and frightened more by every word uttered and action taken by Hillary Clinton? I’d vote for my pet frog over Clinton, but alas, he’s not running.

How many leftists in the media or in the Democratic Party have renounced now that Clinton and her top campaign operatives have exposed themselves in emails as anti-Catholic and anti-evangelical bigots? The left keeps asking, “How can Christians still support Donald Trump for president?” Here’s one answer: She’s for abortion (and as a senator, she even voted against the banning of partial-birth abortions); he’s pro-life. She’s an anti-Catholic bigot, and he’s not. It will be the day that hell freezes over that the media writes a column asking: How can any Catholic, in good conscience, vote for Hillary Clinton?

Even if you believe that Clinton and Trump are louts, why vote for the lout who will raise taxes, put three more Sotomayors on the Supreme Court, cripple our energy industry, double down on Obamacare, support partial-birth abortion and worship at the green altar of climate change? Why not vote for the lout who will do the opposite?

What is more troubling to me than the rapid-fire verbal assaults on Trump — many of which, alas, he brought upon himself — is the denigration of his voters. We’re learning that it isn’t just Clinton who thinks they are a “deplorable” bunch of racists, xenophobes and homophobes. As Trump has faltered in recent days, the never-Trumpers on the right have almost triumphantly assailed the voters who have rallied so mightily and hopefully around him.

Trumpism is now ridiculed on left and right as the movement of “dumbed down” voters and “white supremacists.” Michael Gerson, a former George W. Bush speechwriter and now a columnist for The Washington Post, argues victoriously that Trump’s “fate is deserved.” He calls Trump voters those who “hold an absurdly simplistic anti-establishment attitude.” Yes, what a strong defense — by someone who is of that very establishment, which he and so many others who are marinated in the elite Washington culture defend.

We’d better dare not elect someone with “an outsider persona who lacks actual political skills” or else — what? We might get a president who is asleep at the switch before the biggest financial crisis in 75 years, or a president who runs up trillion-dollar deficits, or gives hundreds of billions of dollars away to the banks, throws millions of Americans out of their jobs, puts 40 million people on food stamps and regulates our lightbulbs, toilets and washing machines. Oh, wait. That already happened under George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

If these elites want an “insider” and not an outsider, there is no better candidate in all of America than Hillary Clinton, America’s queen “public servant.” She has spent nearly $1 billion of special-interest money to trash the outsider who wants to toss over the apple cart in Washington.

When I first met with Donald Trump many months ago, the first thing I told him was: “Donald, I don’t know if I love you, but I sure love your voters.” I don’t always agree with them on issues such as immigration and trade. But what I’ve come to discover is that it is the Trump movement, more so than Donald Trump himself, that is an existential threat to the establishment elites on the right and left. These Americans are the front-line victims of government run amok. At a recent rally in Colorado Springs, I spoke with a Trump voter who said it well: “All we want from government is less of it.”

Win or lose on Nov. 8, we are not going away.

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