Things are finally turning around for Donald Trump! After a year and a half of offending the intellect of anyone with a grip on reality, and with plenty of time until the presidential election, the Republican nominee has finally secured his first major newspaper nomination. On Sunday, the Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote an editorial called “Donald Trump For President,” proving only that Las Vegas is a fetid chancre of sin and misery. The editorial is more an indictment of the paper than the present state of the US, though, and it’s not very difficult to demonstrate.

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Let’s start with the article’s opening line.

These are turbulent times.

OK, hold it. No they’re not. To whatever degree the “times” are “turbulent,” it’s because of Donald Trump.

In real life, America’s post-recession recovery has been vibrant and thorough. Inequality has narrowed, the labor market is tightening, and even middle class wages are up. In fact, one of the lone drags on the economy, or at least financial markets, is fear over a Trump presidency.

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So if today’s world is anything, it’s peaceful. Once we dispatch the white-nativist threatening to capsize the ship, we’ll be doing even better. Unless, of course, you’d like to continue endorsing him.

More and more Americans express frustration and disillusionment today with the political institutions that govern the nation.

Again, your guy is expressing disillusionment. Your guy and the party he represents.

It’s one thing to complain about the government, but another to deem it a fundamentally illegitimate enterprise. That’s the tactic Republicans have been using to wage a war of attrition on our civic underpinnings for two decades or more — all while advancing an agenda of elitism and corporatism anyway. If “more Americans” are feeling left out, take it up with the party that disputes the very concept of the general welfare.

The discontent isn’t confined by ideology or political philosophy.

I mean, it kind of is. Some Democrats want a higher minimum wage, but none of us are alleging elections aren’t possible. And we’ve had elections stolen from us.

As Donald Trump confounded the pundit class in ignoring convention and protocol on his way to securing the Republican presidential nomination, a long-time socialist generated throngs of enthusiastic supporters on the left and almost derailed the Democratic coronation of Hillary Clinton.

Yeah, except he didn’t, because this election has always had one plausible outcome: President Hillary. And, news flash, this wasn’t because the liberal media was committed to her “coronation.” It was because in our sad-ass politics, no one in the political landscape was able to hold a candle to her case for becoming president.

The Democrats had no one; literally the only interesting alternative was an ancient gadfly who said precisely nothing different than he had the rest of his ineffectual career. Sanders was a seat-filler — a default alternative — who only became interesting in the absence of any competition to Hillary. (At least he had the grace to eventually concede to reality. More than I can say for some.) On the right — holy fuck. I could say the Republicans ran the same plug-and-play gallery of misanthropic white combovers they float every cycle, but it’s punchier to say this: they lost to Donald. Fucking. Trump. And now you’re endorsing him! Are you hoping to get on TV, Las Vegas Review-Journal?

“Change is in the air,” activist Marianne Williamson wrote, “as old patterns fall away and new energies are emerging.”

Is Mike Tyson on the editorial board? Mike? Is that you?

History tells us that agents for reform often generate fear and alarm among those intent on preserving their cushy sinecures.

You may have heard that history’s had its share of villains? A lot of them have characteristics in common: the desire to avenge the corrupted fatherland, a monopoly on the truth, racial divisiveness, a lust for power. It’s a solecism to apply the word “reform” to regressions like that. Address it correctly: nativism. Racism.

The whole point of invoking history is that we get the benefit of hindsight, and if you’re unsure of how history judges guys like Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mussolini, don’t cite history at all.

But let us not be distracted by the social media sideshows and carnival clatter. Substantive issues are in play this November.

Our allies on the world stage watch nervously as America retreats from its position of strong leadership leaving strife and conflict rushing to fill the void. The past eight years have pushed us $20 trillion into debt, obligations that will burden our children and grandchildren.

Our allies “watch nervously” to see if the United States’ cardboard filling is going to goddamn revolt this November. And Trump’s tax plan would “boost debt more than Hillary Clinton,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal, a George Soros/Illuminati joint.

Yet Hillary Clinton promises to lead us down the same path. She’ll cuddle up to the ways and perks of Washington like she would to a cozy old blanket.

We’re anti cozy old blankets now? And you don’t cuddle up to a blanket, you desert-dwellers. You wrap yourselves in blankets. She’s not a fucking cat.

Mr. Trump instead brings a corporate sensibility and a steadfast determination to an ossified Beltway culture.

I will type this in an attempt to conjure my brain from its emergency hiding place: the only thing more risible than the idea that Trump is sensible and steadfast is the notion that he has something to do with corporate success. Trump is a failed businessman many times over, and a con artist to boot. His wealth is nowhere near what he says it is, and in fact is barely more than it would have been if he had put his $40 million inheritance in an index fund.

The only reason we’re talking about him is because Trump did to wealth what Larry the Cable Guy did to Southern culture: he figured out how to play it up and put it on TV. Except Larry the Cable Guy doesn’t say Git er dun! off camera. Donald Trump, meanwhile, never becomes a real person. At all times, he is a boogey-man.

He advocates for lower taxes and a simplified tax code, in contrast to his opponent’s plan to extract another $1 trillion from the private economy in order to enlarge the bureaucracy.

Courtesy of The Hill, here’s a quote from economist Stan Veuger of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute: “He doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, and his policy platform is so incoherent that he has to make claims like that,” referring to Trump’s “ridiculous expectation” for growth.

Mr. Trump understands and appreciates the conditions that lead to prosperity and job creation and would be a friend to small business and entrepreneurship.

Yeah, and 90% of sexual assault is perpetrated by someone the victim is friends with.

(The other 10% is perpetrated by Donald Trump.)

The next president may be charged with filling multiple [SCOTUS] vacancies, shaping the court’s direction for a generation. Mr. Trump prefers nominees who recognize the Constitution’s checks on federal authority as a bulwark against tyranny.

There are some hold-your-nose conservatives who agree with this Supreme Court logic. But what evidence do we have that he would nominate competent judges for the bench? First, his campaign has been a blundering clusterfuck. The only mainstays have been his overwhelmed publicist, Hope Hicks, and in true strongman style, his family. Literally everyone else has gotten fired. Second, the only nominee he’s mentioned for the Supreme Court is Peter Thiel, a crypto-anarchist who wants to create Galt’s Gulch in the ocean. American as apple pie.

Make no mistake, a Hillary Clinton administration would indulge the worst instincts of the authoritarian left and continue to swell the bloated regulatory state while running the nation deeper into the red in pursuit of “free” college and health care.

Isn’t it funny that we now have a number of vivid recreations of Trump’s seduction technique? It's amusing how bad he is at it. Every one of these women portrays the same guy: entitled, yes, but also a buffoon with that particular mix of desperation and obliviousness every woman knows to avoid and every man knows to ridicule. Is he just not good at anything?

Mr. Trump represents neither the danger his critics claim nor the magic elixir many of his supporters crave. But he promises to be a source of disruption and discomfort to the privileged.

Yeah, it’ll be real disruptive when currency is worth what you can burn it for.

Enough of this. The fact is, the Las Vegas Journal-Review is free to predict how sane and safe a Trump presidency would be, and we'll never have definitive proof otherwise. It's the ultimate unfalsifiable prediction.

We can, however, surmise that Trump would continue to rule as a solipsistic tyrant, with no regard for the rule of law and not a magnanimous instinct in his makeup. There’s a reason this editorial is such an outlier: Trump is a loser, and his administration would be "a disaster." The American people may not be smart, but collectively at least, we're not stupid enough to support Donald Trump. Few are.