Donald Trump walked onto the gilded stage at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Super Tuesday with the air and confidence of a magician.

“I am a unifier," he said.

Ta-dah!

Moments earlier, Trump's famulus, Chris Christie, made a similar claim: "He's bringing the country together."

The irony is deep. Christie's campaign slogan was "telling it like it is." He lost largely because Donald Trump has overwhelmingly won the support of voters who want a candidate to "tell it like it is." And both men took to the stage on the biggest night of the primary season and tried to trick voters into believing something that isn't true.

In this case, it's not just that what they're saying isn't true. It's aggressively, spectacularly false. Arguably, the single biggest story of the 2016 presidential contest has been how Trump's candidacy has divided the Republican party. Exit polls from several states that held contests earlier that day added to the constellation of datapoints: In Tennessee, 42 percent of respondents said they'd be dissatisfied if Trump were the nominee; in Georgia, it was 45 percent; in Arkansas, 50 percent; and in Virginia, 53 percent.

Trump won all these states. But roughly half of the GOP primary voters in each oppose him. This is what political division looks like. Trump's claim to be a unifier is not just specious, it's absurd.

This casual dishonesty is a feature of his campaign. And it's one of many reasons so many Republicans and conservatives oppose Trump and will never support his candidacy.

I'm one of them.

I'd never support Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, of course, so if Trump is the Republican nominee, I'll vote down-ballot and support someone else.

Living in Maryland, one of the bluest states in the country, there's no real consequence to this decision. But beyond Trump's easy and eager mendacity, there are reasons, philosophical and personal, that he would never get my vote. I came to Washington in 1993 to work in the conservative movement. I'd interned at the Heritage Foundation and was lucky enough to land a job there after I graduated from college. With a one-year interruption for graduate school in journalism, I've been working in the conservative movement and reporting on its debates, ideas, and policies for nearly a quarter-century.

My wife and I chose to live outside the Beltway, in rural Maryland, in part so we could raise our kids somewhat as we were brought up in the Midwest. On the vanishingly rare occasions that we attend a cocktail party in Washington, it's almost always an event hosted by one conservative group or another.

I've never been much of a Republican party guy. I had a one-week volunteer job at the national convention in San Diego in 1996, working as a go-fer for Haley Barbour. Three months later, frustrated by Bob Dole's timid centrism, I voted for Harry Browne, the Libertarian party candidate.

I consider myself a conservative with a strong libertarian streak. I'm for gay marriage, I'm deeply skeptical of paternalistic regulation, and I believe the tax code needs a radical overhaul—a national sales tax would be my preference. But I care most about the two issues that directly threaten the continued viability of the American experiment: national security and the debt. My views on individual politicians are shaped mainly by their positions on protecting the country and reforming entitlements. Accordingly, the most promising policy development over the past decade was Paul's Ryan victory over the GOP establishment and its determined opposition to entitlement reform and the most worrisome was Barack Obama's abandonment of the war against the global jihadist movement.

A Trump presidency would be disastrous on both scores. Trump opposes entitlement reform, and it's unclear whether he even understands the central role entitlements play in our mounting debt. Trump claims Republicans lost the presidential election in 2012 because of Ryan's reforms. "He represented cutting entitlements," Trump said last month, pointing to the selection of Ryan by Mitt Romney as "the end of the campaign." Trump has said repeatedly that he won't touch entitlements. "The only one that's not going to cut is me."

On national security, Trump says he'll be strong and frequently pronounces himself "militaristic." But he doesn't seem to have even a newspaper reader's familiarity with the pressing issues of the day. He was nonplussed by a reference to the "nuclear triad"; he confused Iran's Quds Force and the Kurds; he didn't know the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah. The ignorance would be less worrisome if his instincts weren't terrifying. He's praised authoritarians for their strength, whether Vladimir Putin for killing journalists and political opponents or the Chinese government for the massacre it perpetrated in Tiananmen Square.

To the extent he articulates policies, he seems to be an odd mix of third-world despot and naïve pacifist. He favors torture as opposed to the enhanced interrogation techniques of the previous administration—for punitive reasons—and he has called for targeting the families of America's enemies and confiscating the oil in Iraq. But he has waffled on whether the United States should be fighting ISIS at all and has said he wouldn't rip up the Iran nuclear deal.

The main reason I won't support Trump is simpler and more personal: I couldn't explain such a vote to my children.

Last summer, I was in Ames, Iowa, to cover an event hosted at Iowa State University by evangelical leaders. Although Trump had begun to climb in the polls, I was there to cover pretty much everyone else. But as he was being interviewed on stage, he made some comments about John McCain that left me—and many of those in attendance—slack-jawed. McCain is "not a war hero," Trump bellowed. "He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."

I ran to the basement of the building for Trump's post-interview press conference. I've had policy differences with McCain, but I knew well the story of his time in Vietnam. He was shot down flying combat missions on October 26, 1967. He was taken captive with a broken right leg and fractures in both arms. He was beaten and tortured repeatedly, in part because his father commanded the U.S. forces in the Pacific.

I asked Trump why he would blame McCain for his capture. He changed the subject. "I am saying John McCain has not done a good job."

When I repeated the question, Trump said, "I am not blaming John McCain for his capture. If he gets captured, he gets captured."

"Why would you say you like people who don't get captured?"

Trump responded: "The people that don't get captured I'm not supposed to like? I like the people who don't get captured and I respect the people who do get captured."

We had several testy exchanges and then I asked Trump whether he'd read any accounts of McCain's time in captivity or was otherwise familiar with his experiences as a prisoner of war. Trump's answer left me speechless.

"It's irrelevant."

It wasn't just that Trump was willing to mock the heroism of a prisoner of war, it's that he was willing to do so without any understanding of what had happened.

There would be other moments equally revealing of his character. Trump would suggest that Megyn Kelly asked tough questions at a debate because she was menstruating. He would ridicule the face of a female rival, Carly Fiorina, and then lie about it when he was caught. The man who has had harsh words for hundreds of people over the course of his campaign over even the most trivial perceived slights couldn't find the words to condemn David Duke or the Ku Klux Klan when asked three times to do so directly.

The worst of these moments may have come when Trump mocked the disability of a journalist who had criticized him. At a rally in Sarasota last November, Trump was discussing Serge Kovaleski, a reporter for the New York Times. "The poor guy, you've got to see this guy," Trump said, before flailing in a manner that resembled a palsy tremor. Kovaleski suffers from arthrogryposis, a congenital condition that affects the movement and positioning of his joints.

When Trump was criticized, he said he couldn't have been mocking the reporter because he was unaware of Kovaleski's condition. That wasn't true. Kovaleski had interviewed Trump a dozen times and said they had interacted on "a first-name basis for years." Trump then accused Kovaleski of "using his disability to grandstand."

This came up last Friday, as I drove my 8-year-old son to see the Washington Capitals play. I'll be gone on his birthday, covering presidential primaries, so this was an early present.

My son and his older sister have followed the campaign, as much as kids their age do, and they're aware that I've traded barbs with Trump. So we sometimes talk about the candidates and their attributes and faults, and we'd previously talked about Trump's penchant for insulting people. On our drive down, my son told me that some of the kids in his class like Trump because "he has the most points," and he asked me again why I don't like the Republican frontrunner.

I reminded him about the McCain and Fiorina stories and then we spent a moment talking about Kovaleski. I described his condition and showed him how physically limiting it would be. Then he asked a simple question:

"Why would anyone make fun of him?"

Why indeed?

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard .