Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian, columnist, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, wants conservatives to give Trump a chance to improve his act. What happens if by August, he’s “reinvented himself into a more sober Trump and announced that if elected he’d like to appoint Ted Cruz to the Supreme Court, John Bolton as secretary of state, Larry Arnn as secretary of education, and General Jack Keane as secretary of defense?” Hanson asks in National Review.

Conservatives may be forced to decide not between two bad choices—Trump and Clinton—but between “a bad Trump and a far, far worse Clinton,” he writes. “If it is the latter, then it’s an easy choice in November.”

Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, was criticized by National Review’s Jonah Goldberg for supportive words about Trump on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show in April. In response, Arnn cited in the college’s newspaper the “chief things” he’d said about Trump. He liked Trump’s comments about “the regulatory state” and praised “his confidence, self-direction (he seems to say what he says because he thinks it, rather than having been advised to say it), his sense of humor, and fearlessness.” About Trump’s character, Arnn has a few doubts.

Meanwhile, the Western eggheads have a biting website devoted to advising, analyzing, and touting Trump and zinging his conservative adversaries. It’s called the Journal of American Greatness. Its authors are anonymous. But Kesler says they’re in the “Claremont and Hillsdale orbit” and represent “a subset of Western Straussians”—that is, disciples of the late political philosopher Leo Strauss.