Are unauthorized immigrants “pouring across the southern border”? Since Donald Trump said it, there’s automatically a strong chance that it’s a lie, and sure enough, it is.

According to Pew Research, the population of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico peaked in 2007 at 6.9 million and has been dropping ever since. Currently it stands at 5.6 million. As the chart on the right shows, net migration from Mexico has been negative every year since 2008. But maybe the ones that are here are disproportionately murderers and rapists, as Trump also says. Nope. The number of unauthorized immigrants in US prisons is relatively small, and the bulk of the available research suggests that they’re incarcerated at lower rates than US citizens. It’s just another lie.

This is nuts. Yesterday Pollster had Hillary Clinton ahead in South Carolina by about 20 points. Today they added one new poll, and they have her ahead by 50 points—which is about what she won by.

Did Bernie really lose 30 points of support in the past two weeks? That’s what the polls seem to show. But why? And how did the press not pick up on this? Most of the coverage I’ve seen has suggested that, sure, Hillary is going to win, but she’s really being pressed in the black community and Bernie could do better than expected. But according to the exit polls, she ended up winning 84 percent of the black vote. And perhaps even more worryingly for Bernie, she even crushed him among voters who agree that our economic system favors the wealthy. That’s his wheelhouse, and he won only 30 percent of their vote.

We’ll know more after Tuesday, but this doesn’t look good for Sanders. If Hillary racks up a big win on Super Tuesday, she’ll be so far ahead in the delegate count she’ll be almost mathematically unbeatable. At that point, it will be pretty hard for him to justify staying in the race.

The Washington Post reports on Marco Rubio’s rollicking, Trump-bashing rally today:

While Rubio attacked Trump, national cable networks played his speech live — a favor granted constantly to Trump, rarely to anyone else. When Rubio switched tacks to deliver his positive stump speech, the networks cut away.

And there you have it. This year’s debauched and disgraceful campaign coverage in a nutshell.

The New York Times has a big story this morning about the trials and tribulations of the Republican Party establishment in their efforts to stop Donald Trump. I would like to draw your attention to two things. First this:

Late last fall, the strategists Alex Castellanos and Gail Gitcho, both presidential campaign veterans, reached out to dozens of the party’s leading donors, including the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, with a plan to create a “super PAC” that would take down Mr. Trump….A Trump nomination would not only cause Republicans to lose the presidency, they wrote, “but we also lose the Senate, competitive gubernatorial elections and moderate House Republicans.” No major donors committed to the project, and it was abandoned. No other sustained Stop Trump effort sprang up in its place.

….[Mitt] Romney had been eager to tilt the race, and even called Mr. Christie after he ended his campaign to vent about Mr. Trump and say he must be stopped. On the night of the primary, Mr. Romney was close to endorsing Mr. Rubio himself, people familiar with his deliberations said.

Yet Mr. Romney pulled back, instead telling advisers that he would take on Mr. Trump directly. After a Tuesday night dinner with former campaign aides, during which he expressed a sense of horror at the Republican race, Mr. Romney made a blunt demand Wednesday on Fox News: Mr. Trump must release his tax returns to prove he was not concealing a “bombshell” political vulnerability.

So why didn’t Romney just fund this Super-PAC himself? $10 million would be pocket change for him, and these PACs all know how to keep contributions anonymous if Romney had wanted that. It’s ridiculous that the Republican Party’s many zillionaires have all been unwilling to drop a few megabucks on this effort, and doubly ridiculous that Romney is willing to go public with his “horror” but wasn’t willing to shell out to do something about it. Maybe that’s why he lost the 2012 race.

And there’s also this:

At least two campaigns have drafted plans to overtake Mr. Trump in a brokered convention, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has laid out a plan that would have lawmakers break with Mr. Trump explicitly in a general election.

….While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination….Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.

He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

Mitch McConnell is the ultimate transactional politician. He never bothers with fancy justifications for what he wants to do; he just tells reporters that his goal is stop x or push y because it’s what he wants, and that’s that. It’s almost refreshing in a way.

So if he’s seriously suggesting that Republicans in significant numbers might break with Trump and hand the election to Hillary Clinton, he’s probably serious. He doesn’t play 11-dimensional chess. I’ve been frankly dubious about all the promises I’ve heard from conservatives about abandoning Trump even if he wins the nomination, and I still am. I think most of them will eventually invent some reason to “reluctantly” pull the lever for him thanks to their existential horror of a Hillary Clinton presidency. But who knows? If McConnell is up for it, maybe it’s a more serious possibility than I think.

A few of my fellow liberals have been suggesting lately that they’d prefer Donald Trump as president to, say, Marco Rubio. Mostly this is for two reasons. First, they figure Trump will be easier to beat. Second, if he does win, Trump’s volatile personality and tenuous relationship to ideology suggest that he might be surprisingly flexible in office. Rubio, by contrast, is a stone ideologue who would appoint hundreds of fellow ideologues to office. He’d make a real effort to do every horrible thing he says he’s going to do.

This is an enticing argument, but it’s also dangerous. For months, we’ve been warning that Trump would be a uniquely dangerous president. He’s a serial liar. He’s a demagogue. He’s a racist and a xenophobe. He appeals to our worst natures. He’d blithely enact ruinous policies simply because his vanity makes him immune to advice and policy analysis. He’d appoint folks who make Michael Brown look like Jeff Bezos. He would deliberately alienate foreign countries for no good reason. He’d waste money on pet projects like border walls and huge military buildups that would likely have no appreciable effect. And while that volatile personality of his probably wouldn’t cause him to nuke Denmark, you never know, do you?

No liberal wants to see a conservative in the Oval Office. Not Rubio, not any of the others. But there’s a difference between accepting an ordinary member of the opposition party and accepting a fatuous clown like Donald Trump. The former will enact lots of policies we hate, but that’s democracy for you. We’ve been through it before and we’ll go through it again. The latter is a mockery of everything democracy stands for.

Even if you assume that Marco Rubio might be more technically destructive of liberal policies than Trump—an unlikely but admittedly possible outcome—Trump would be more destructive of the very core of liberalism. If we’re willing to accept bigotry and belligerence and just plain inanity—along with the small but genuine chance of something truly catastrophic taking place on his watch—just for the sake of maybe getting a slightly better outcome on a few liberal policies, we really ought to just hang it up.

At this point, it’s not clear if Trump can be stopped anytime before November 8th, but liberals should nevertheless be doing everything they can to help his opponents relegate him to the ashcan of history. After all, it’s no sure thing that he’ll lose in November either. There are lots of ways he could win. An economic downturn could do it. Trump’s demagoguery might do it. Some kind of unexpected scandal could do it. He might turn out to be a better general election campaigner than we think. Or Hillary Clinton could just run a bad campaign.

This is not 11-dimensional chess. All those arguments we’ve been making against him are absolutely correct. We need to be against Trump—not ironically and not with our fingers crossed, but in reality. The conservative establishment hates him because he’d be bad for conservatism. We ought to hate him because he’d be bad for the country and bad for liberalism.

Do you remember this famous video of the South Korean parliament from a few years ago?

How infantile! This is supposed to be a mature democracy. What the hell is going on?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Marco Rubio on Friday morning, making his case against Donald Trump:

Can you feel the burn? And here is Trump a few hours later making his case against Rubio:

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it? The presidential campaign of one of our great political parties has now degenerated into two guys in suits insulting each other for sweating a lot during a debate.

By the way, Trump’s schtick came during an event where he announced the endorsement of New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Trump now has the following endorsements:

• Sarah Palin, crackpot former Republican VP candidate.
• Teresa Giudice, star of Real Housewives of New Jersey.
• Geert Wilders, Dutch Islamaphobe and leader of the Party for Freedom.
• Joe Arpaio, famous Arizona sheriff fond of chain gangs, dressing inmates in pink underwear, feeding them moldy food, and too many other lunatic acts to count.
• Paul LePage, wingnut governor of Maine who memorably said that Maine’s biggest problem was “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty….they come up here, they sell their heroin.”
• David Duke, noted white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
• Alex Jones, insane talk radio conspiracy monger.
• Jerry Falwell Jr., evangelical leader of Liberty University, whose endorsement came despite Trump’s well-known string of affairs, remarriages, skinflint charitable giving, and apparent lack of any serious Christian faith.
• Ann Coulter, political commentator noted for her Islamaphobia, hatred of illegal immigrants, and general descent into highly-calculated derangement.
• Dennis Rodman, famous basketball player and friend to Kim Jung-un
• Juanita Brodderick and Paula Jones, who both made sketchy but famous accusations of sexual harassment against Bill Clinton.
• Willie Robertson, homophobic star of Duck Dynasty.
• Carl Paladino, racist emailer and secret-daughter-hiding former Republican candidate for New York governor.
• Chris Christie, ambitious, tough-guy governor of New Jersey embroiled in a controversy over punishing a political opponent by deliberately shutting down two lanes on the George Washington bridge and tying up traffic for miles.

This man is currently leading the national Republican polls by more than 20 points over his nearest competitor.

Here is Hilbert resting magnificently on his red blanket on my desk. Upstairs, he has a gray-and-white polka dot blanket on Marian’s desk. I really need to clean this thing over the weekend. At this point, I think there might be more cat fur than actual blanket on my desk.

Apparently Donald Trump has promised to appoint Chris Christie attorney general. Or secretary of state. Or, I dunno, maybe Christie will be in charge of a special task force to lock up Marco Rubio and his entire family in Guantanamo Bay and take their oil. Bada bing. It’s a mystery.

Not much is happening in the Democratic race in South Carolina. Bernie Sanders seems to have given up, and there’s been only one new poll in the last week. Still, just for the record, here are the final Pollster aggregates one day before the primary. Hillary Clinton continues to lead by more than 20 points.

If the future of my country weren’t at stake, I’d say that things are getting genuinely entertaining in the Republican primary race. Here is Marco Rubio this morning dishing on Donald Trump:

Let me tell you something, last night in the debate, during one of the breaks — two of the breaks — he went backstage, he was having a meltdown. First he had this little makeup thing applying, like, makeup around his mustache because he had one of those sweat mustaches. Then, then he asked for a full-length mirror. I don’t know why, because the podium goes up to here. But he wanted a full-length mirror. Maybe to make sure his pants weren’t wet — I don’t know.”

Fabulous! I can’t wait for Ted Cruz to join in too.

But if these guys really want to hit Trump where it hurts, there are two things they need to do. First, they have to get under Trump’s skin. Trump favors torturing the families of terrorists, so maybe going after his family will work. Or pointing out repeatedly how badly he got played in his various deals. Or mocking his vanity. Anything that makes him look ridiculous and provokes an atomic reaction. Second, they need to say things that might actually sway Trump’s supporters. This shouldn’t be hard, since both Rubio and Cruz were born and bred in the tea party movement and supposedly know what makes its supporters tick. There’s no point in saying that Trump lies. They don’t care. There’s no point in saying he’s a racist. They don’t care. There’s no point in saying he’s not ideologically pure. They don’t care. There’s no point in saying that he’s an embarrassment. They don’t care.

So what do they care about? That he’s tough. That he’s not PC. That he takes on the politicians and the media. So that’s where to hit him. Show that he’s all hat and no cattle. Show that he’s afraid to really tell the truth. Badger him on his tax returns. Tell stories about how he kowtows to reporters. And above all: whatever you say, say things outrageous enough to force the media to pay attention to you.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s no need to be obsessively truthful in all this. Take Rubio’s little story above. I imagine it’s true. But if it’s exaggerated a wee bit—well, tell it anyway. And lots more like it. That’s what Trump does. If you can make Trump spend all his time denying that he’s a weenie by picking apart tiny details in your stories, you’re on the road to the White House.

POSTSCRIPT: This is just an aside, but am I the only one who finds it a little creepy that apparently Rubio can change his personality on a dime? I mean, he seems to have decided a couple of days ago to become a young Donald Trump, and he’s already doing a bang-up job. I think that even most professional actors would have trouble learning a new part that quickly.