Ironically, the cheapest moralizing has been reserved for those trying to make the best of a bad situation. Thus Trump running mate Mike Pence finds himself accused of moral turpitude for working to keep the Republican Party from coming apart and giving voters some hope for a conservative agenda if Mr. Trump were to win.

Ditto for House Speaker Paul Ryan, excoriated by the Trumpers for his efforts to preserve the GOP’s House majority and by Never Trumpers for refusing to un-endorse the Republican nominee. Mr. Ryan understands that losing the Congress would give President Hillary Clinton two years to push through the progressive wish list, not to mention putting a liberal majority on the Supreme Court, preserving ObamaCare and maintaining the travesty that is the nuclear deal with Iran. Having watched what the 2010 GOP House takeover did to the Obama agenda, she would no doubt take full advantage of the time she has to act.

In the end, the strongest argument for a Trump vote has always been this: The alternative is a president who lies, whose public life has been a series of scandals from cattle futures to the destruction of documents under subpoena, who would be a third term for disastrous Obama policies at home and abroad, and who has never taken a position that wasn’t done from naked political expediency—from supporting the Iraq war in 2002 or opposing it later to invoking Abraham Lincoln to justify saying one thing in public and another in private.