I don’t know why more critics aren’t making this point about Trump. Ninety-nine percent of the knocks on him, including from Grahamnesty himself (as he admits), is that he’s xenophobic, he’s flirting with fascism — he’s a scary guy who might do scary things with power. That critique is understandable and it’s a smart way to hit people in their gut, but there’s another critique of Trump that works just as well and which ought to give his more casual fans pause. (The hardcore fans won’t be swayed by anything.) Since he obviously doesn’t spend much time mulling over policy details, what’s going to prevent President Trump from being captured ideologically by the bureaucrats he’ll need to help him manage the government? Like I said a few days ago, when push comes to shove there’s just no way to tell how Trump would govern. Cue Graham:

KILMEADE: Do you believe that he is coachable? Do you think that he knows more than he lets on? GRAHAM: I think half of this is an act. I think that Ted Cruz is a man who has lost. He is trying to be an isolationist when that’s hot. He’s trying to be a Lindsey Graham-type when that’s hot. I think Donald Trump, quite frankly, is coachable. I don’t like what he is saying, I’ve been hard on him, but I do believe that if you can convince him that we need more American troops in Iraq because the Generals are smart and say we do, and if you can convince him that a regional army in Syria is required to destroy the caliphate and we have to be part of it, I think he would go there. KILMEADE: That’s interesting that you think it is an act. After six months you think it’s an act? GRAHAM: I think some of it is just saying the strong man, you know, I’m going to kill everything and everybody therefore I’m strong, you know, I’m going to execute Bergdahl. Well, here’s what I am trying to say to Donald Trump, ‘You’re running to be President of the United States, the strongest voice in the world, you need to embrace our values to win this war, you need to be tough. You need to be able to articulate a plan to kill radical Islamists before they strike our homeland, but you need to understand partnerships are required. So the bottom line here is he’s undercutting the war effort, but I do believe, quite frankly, that he is more open minded than he appears to be. I maybe wrong.

Of course he’s more open-minded than he appears to be. He’s been on both sides of various hot-button issues over the past 15 years. He’s already taken various hardline positions during this campaign (mass deportation, barring Muslims temporarily from entering the U.S.) only to suddenly walk them back when he faces a little media heat (the “good” illegals can come back in, the ban on Muslims could be lifted quickly). When you press him on specifics of his proposals, he usually retreats into some variation of “I’ll have the best generals, the best people around me” — the guy’s all but telegraphing the fact that his advisors would have enormous influence. I think Trump fans love him because they see him as having an iron will, impervious to attacks that he’s politically incorrect, and therefore he’s the only man who can be trusted to keep his promises as president. Trump’s political history undercuts that, though. He’s been all over the map and you can’t expect to know where a man like that will eventually land, especially when he has a cadre of political professionals aiding him and all but uniformly pushing him in directions favored by the political class. Maybe he’s suddenly developed a steely commitment to national greatness that will see him carry out all of his plans no matter how much PC resistance he encounters. Or maybe he’s just an expert salesman who detected a hot market and came up with a product aimed at that market. Once the sale is made, their business with each other is concluded. Which read is more likely knowing what you know about Trump’s career? The best you could hope for with him, I think, is that he’d insist on doing whatever’s politically popular at a given moment. That approach has the virtue of vindicating majority will, but there are all sorts of things that might be good for America and Americans, e.g., entitlement reform, that might nonetheless be opposed by a majority for short-sighted reasons. What kind of leader do you want?

This is why Cruz is the better choice for populists, including populists who aren’t as dogmatically conservative as Cruz himself is. It’s not just that Cruz is a “saner” Trump, as some of his fans have taken to saying after Trump farts out some unworkable hardline proposal. It’s that Cruz is so heavily invested in his image as a principled ideologue that it’s hard to believe he’d bend easily as president, even under tremendous pressure. Not only is Cruz a committed conservative, in fact, he’s also pretty clearly a guy who thinks he’s smarter than any of his advisors (and maybe all of them put together). No bureaucracy is going to “roll” Ted Cruz the way they might roll Trump. I admit, that’s an ironic point to make when we’re, er, in the middle of a debate over how far Cruz has tilted on legalization for illegals over the years. But don’t miss the forest for the trees: Even a Cruz who’s open to some limited form of legalization is to the right of everyone else in the field on immigration. (Yes, including Trump per his dopey “let the good ones back in” hedging.) In fact, I think the reason Cruz has been so weaselly and lawyerly in avoiding clearly saying “I will not legalize illegals” is because he doesn’t want to make any promise he knows he might not keep. It’s bad for his image as a man who means what he says, so he’s not going to clearly say it. Trump, meanwhile, will say anything, then “refine” it later, and then will do lord knows what as president after he spends a few hours talking to people like Lindsey Graham and John McCain about, say, Syria. A Trump presidency would, I bet, be full of unpleasant surprises not just for the establishment but for his own supporters. As I say, it’s strange that more people aren’t hammering that point.