I concluded this week’s Campaign Stops column, written amid near-total Republican disarray, by wondering if reform-minded and populist-friendly conservatives should stop rooting against Donald Trump and hoping for a successful co-optation of the legitimate portions of his message, and instead just accept that the Trump phenomenon is going to carry all before it in this cycle — welcoming it as one part creative destruction, one part judgment issued from on high.

Now let me explain why I still think the answer is no, why I can’t just win the victory over myself and learn to love Big Donald. Here I’ll draw on an argument between two liberals, ruminating on how the possibility of a Trump nomination should be regarded on the left. On the one hand, Jonathan Chait has made the case that his fellow liberals should cheer Trump on, not only because he’s unlikely to win a general election but also because it wouldn’t be so bad if he did, since he’d be a much more ideologically-unsettled figure than a President Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, and thus more likely to cut deals with Democrats and generally govern from some kind of center. As a hopeful example, he invokes as a Trumpian forerunner Arnold Schwarzenegger, another misogynist celebrity demagogue who ended up as “a highly effective governor” because all he cared about was his popularity, which made him much more willing to work across party lines.