ANALYSIS/OPINION:

That wheezing death rattle you hear right now are the last struggling gasps of the Never Trumpers finally slipping away and sinking into their muddy graves.

Donald Trump will shred the Constitution! He is not a conservative! He is not even a Republican!

These cries were the telltale symptoms of Donald Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Some eventually got cured. But others remain deeply infected to this day.

For some, it was the first time in their lives they had ever spoken up in defense of the Constitution. Silent were they when ex-President Barack Obama was busy shredding it into ribbons.

Others are longtime principled conservatives who truly believed that the billionaire real estate showman could not possibly understand the finer points of constitutionalism. But, really, they just didn’t like him or trust him because he was not one of them.

And that is precisely why so many Americans loved him.

They were so sick and tired of falling into line behind the rock-ribbed constitutionalists, principled conservatives and professional Republicans — and then losing. Again and again and again.

We gave them the White House. We gave them the House. We gave them the Senate. And yet they kept losing.

Under Republican control we got the largest expansion of an entitlement program in history and doubled the national debt. Under Democrats we got Obamacare and they doubled the debt again.

The Never Trumpers accused Donald Trump of not being conservative, not being a constitutionalist and not being a Republican. They were too stupid to realize that all three of those “attacks” were actually selling points for the man who would become president.

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died 13 days shy of a year ago, the stakes suddenly got very real. The Never Trumpers insisted Mr. Trump would appoint his sister or his butler or his pro-abortion, liberal dog to the High Court, desecrating the seat once occupied by one of the greatest legal forces in American history.

Instead, President Trump nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch, a man qualified beyond any doubt to fill that seat. And a man every bit as devoted to preserving and faithfully adhering to the Constitution.

It would be nice for the holier-than-thou Never Trumpers to finally acknowledge how wrong they were and concede that maybe, just maybe, you don’t have to be one of them to care about the country and stick up for the Constitution.

But that is unlikely. Donald Trump Derangement Syndrome is terminal, so we must settle for the sounds of their death rattles.

• Charles Hurt can be reached at [email protected]; follow him on Twitter via @charleshurt.

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