ANALYSIS/OPINION:

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, 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 Mr. 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 Hillary Clinton, but alas, he’s not running.

How many leftists in the media or in the Democratic Party have renounced now that Hillary Clinton and her top campaign operatives have exposed themselves in emails as an 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 partial birth abortion and he’s not. 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 Sodamayers 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?

Some say that Mr. Trump is deranged, even unhinged? You want to hear deranged? Listen to the leftists leading the charge against Mr. Trump. The USA Today ran a rant last week by a professor at Princeton wrote tongue-in-cheek about the Orwellian future if Mr. Trump wins: “Some continued to resist Trump’s efforts to Make America Great Again. To prevent them from undermining his policies, many African Americans, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Hispanics, and nonconformists were sent to labor camps for re-education and potential deportation.”

This is funny? All that was missing was a reference to gas chambers. The USA Today is supposed to be a semirespectable paper and it’s a sign of the anti-Trump obsession in the media that they print such vile words? There is a lunatic who is unhinged here, but it isn’t Donald Trump. Any by the way, we already have re-education camps in America, and they are called the public schools.

What is most troubling to me than the rapid-fire assaults on Mr. Trump — many of which, alas, he brought upon himself — is the denigration of his voters. We’re learning that it isn’t just Hillary Clinton who thinks they are a “deplorable” bunch of racists, xenophobes, and homophobes. (Hillary lied when she said in the last debate “I was talking about you, not your voters.” Listen to the tape. And listen to the laughter and applause from her millionaire contributors.) As Mr. 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 a group of “dumbed down” voters, “white supremacists,” and even “contemptibles.” Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter and now a columnist for The Washington Post argues victoriously that Mr. 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 the very establishment that he and so many others 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 light bulbs, toilets, washing machines in our homes.

Oh wait. That already has happened under George Bush and Barack Obama, which is strange because they are so “politically skilled.” If it is an “insider” not an outsider, there is no better candidate in all of America than Hillary Clinton, America’ queen “public servant.” She has nearly $1 billion of special interest money to trash the outsider who wants to toss over the apple cart in Washington. Do the anti-Trump misogynists even get the irony of them calling Donald Trump a misogynist?

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 like 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. They are the front-line victims of government in Washington run amok. One Trump voter said it well to me at a recent rally in Colorado Springs: “All we want from government is less of it.”

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

• Stephen Moore is an economics consultant with Freedom Works and an economic adviser to the Trump campaign.

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