My anti-Trump credentials stretch back to 1987, when Ross Douthat was eight years old.

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First the "conservative affirmative action" columnist Ross Douthat got in trouble joking about Donald Trump's assassination, which got Allen West all shook up. Then Douthat pinned the blame for Trump on Barack Obama ...

“What it hasn’t inspired is much in the way of self-examination, or a recognition of the way that Obama-era trends in liberal politics have helped feed the Trump phenomenon.”

... which Sean McElwee refutes vigorously in Salon:

Ross Douthat’s pathetic Trump evasion: The NYT columnist attempts to pin the blame on Obama — and fails spectacularly

 ... Trump is the ugly creation of the Republican party’s race-baiting political coup. As a man Douthat admires quite a bit once said, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” Obama’s only responsibility for creating Trump was being a Black man who had the audacity to become President of the United States.

Now Douthat has moved past all that, and advocates convention chicanery by the grandees.

The Party Still Decides, by Ross Douthat (New York Times)

What Trump has demonstrated is that in our present cultural environment, and in the Republican Party’s present state of bankruptcy, the first lines of defense against a demagogue no longer hold. Because he’s loud and rich and famous, because he’s run his campaign like a reality TV show, because he’s horribly compelling and, yes, sometimes even right, Trump has come this far without many endorsements or institutional support, without much in the way of a normal organization, clearing hurdle after hurdle where people expected him to fall.

But the party’s convention rules, in all their anachronistic, undemocratic and highly-negotiable intricacy, are also a line of defense, also a hurdle, also a place where a man unfit for office can be turned aside.

Donald Trump's book The Art of the Deal was published in 1987. That's amazing. It means I've been disgusted by Trump for nearly 30 years. What took the rest of you so long?

Even you, Ross?