Danielle Allen is a political theorist at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Post.

Call me crazy, but I think that, in his remarkable op-ed last week in the Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump offered to hand over to other candidates half of the delegates that he won in Florida and Arizona.

“Delegates,” he wrote, “are supposed to reflect the decisions of voters, but the system is being rigged by party operatives with ‘double-agent’ delegates who reject the decision of voters.” In other words, Trump is arguing, delegates should show up at the Republican convention in Cleveland ready to vote in the same patterns in which the voters in the delegates’ home states voted. If we take his argument seriously, there should be no winner-take-all states whose delegates all vote for Trump.

Trump won all 99 delegates in Florida with 46 percent of the vote. His own principle would knock his delegate haul down to 45 in the Sunshine State. In Arizona, he took the state’s 58 delegates on the basis of winning 47 percent of the vote. There, he would have to relinquish 31 delegates.

Wait. What’s that? That’s not what Trump meant at all? He was just complaining about the process by which the Colorado GOP decided in August to dispense with its caucus straw poll and focus on its traditional elections for delegates at local conventions?

Colorado Republicans didn't have a regular primary or caucus this year; instead, they held a state convention. Here's how it worked. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

Oh, right. I was misled into thinking that there was an articulation of principle in that op-ed, as opposed to a crafty assemblage of sophisms meant to throw sand in people’s eyes.

Let me take another look to see why I was led astray.

Trump’s op-ed begins with historian’s precision, launching with a date and place. “On Saturday, April 9, Colorado had an ‘election’ without voters.” The people of Colorado, we are told, were not able to cast their ballots in this election.

Then we get a new paragraph with a new fact, this one not introduced with a date. “A planned vote had been canceled.” The necessary impression made on any reader without full information is that the date identifier that opened the previous paragraph applies to this new fact, too. “What!” the reader thinks. “The Colorado GOP canceled its primary vote a week or two ago and decided to keep the delegate selection process in-house?”

Thus the author of the piece — and Trump clearly has a decent writer in his stable for the first time — sparks the outrage he or she hopes to stir up, by acting as if the story is being told in accordance with a precise chronology when that is not the case.

The second paragraph requires a second date: August 2015. The Colorado GOP made its decision not to hold its caucus straw poll last summer, far too early to be reasonably considered an effort to block Trump. The failure to include this particular date in the op-ed is a clever rhetorical trick.

The same impression of a vote canceled only recently is repeated when, again, without providing the August date and context, Trump’s op-ed asserts, “No one forced anyone to cancel the vote in Colorado. Political insiders made a choice to cancel it.” Ummm . . . not quite. There was never a statewide primary vote scheduled in the first place. There was a caucus, which was held, and a decision — made in August — not to use a presidential preference poll at that caucus.

Traditionally, the straw poll at the Colorado caucus hasn’t bound Colorado’s GOP delegates to particular candidates. A Republican National Committee rule change now requires that even straw polls at caucuses bind delegates, and the Colorado GOP wasn’t ready to scrap its long-standing traditions. It decided to scrap the straw poll instead and to focus on the traditional heart of its process, which is its delegate elections. All registered Republicans were eligible to vote in that process. None was sidelined.

Yet Trump’s op-ed escalates to “Casablanca”-esque high dudgeon: “Responsible leaders should be shocked by the idea that party officials can simply cancel elections in America if they don’t like what the voters may decide.” Well, again, Colorado Republicans held their traditional elections, and one might criticize them for their long-standing commitment to a process other than a broad primary, but they did let voters decide. They can’t reasonably be compared to parents who say, “Kids, I’ve decided not to buy you ice cream because I don’t like the flavors you may pick.”

The prose implies that the Colorado GOP brought back the smoke-filled backroom, and that’s just false. Only the op-ed’s unacknowledged, opening conflation of August and April events makes it possible for the author to sustain this false impression.

A few more paragraphs then lead us from high dudgeon to the principle that we’re supposed to take as being at the heart of Trump’s complaint about Colorado: “Delegates are supposed to reflect the decisions of voters.” And this is interesting. This principle has some force, but not in the direction that Trump desires. The only delegates at the Cleveland convention who will act in a first vote in ways that don’t reflect the decisions of voters are delegates from winner-take-all states — delegates currently bound to Trump in Florida and Arizona, for instance.

Mr. Trump, are you willing to put your money where your mouth is and hand over your extra winner-take-all delegates to the opponents whose voters said they wanted them, not you? No? Oh, right, because then you’d have to think of principle as something other than a gilded decoration pasted onto a trumped-up accusation.