Let's all take stock of this being a thing: Donald Trump routinely threatens to use government power (DOJ, IRS, etc.) to attack his personal enemies once he becomes President.

In other words, Trump openly promises to do what Republican propagandists and fever swamp nutballs have pretended or imagine Democratic presidents do.

I've been wondering about this for a few days. As Donald Trump and the GOP establishment go through this delicate dance toward a marriage of convenience, there are two or three big policy initiatives that are usually referenced as the ones that are just unacceptable to mainstream Republicans, too crazy to be considered, unconstitutional or just too politically damaging. The most frequently mentioned are Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the country and the Trump TajMaWall he says Mexico will agree to pay for.

This strikes me as odd because despite how odious these ideas are, there's very little mention of what is undoubtedly the craziest, most dangerous, most expensive and brutal of his policies: his plan to deport roughly 3% of the current US population in 18 months.

Start taking the establishment money and you'll start taking the establishment policy positions soon enough.

It's a little hard to get a sense of just what to make or just how seriously to take the policy initiatives Trump is getting behind as he moves from the emotive issues that are really driving his campaign to positions on the countless nuts and bolts issues the federal government must confront. At the center of the story is a guy named Sam Clovis, a Tea Party activist from Iowa who has been a campaign co-chair for some time and now is labeled his "chief policy advisor."

All signs point to the House GOP falling quickly into line with Donald Trump. Indeed, it's not clear to me that #NeverTrump even really exists anymore outside of a thin membrane of conservative writers and intellectuals who may be acting admirably but have little real electoral pull. But remember, the House is heavily gerrymandered. It may be plausible that a total blowout at the top of the ticket could lose Republicans the House. But it's not likely. For a number of reasons, House Republicans have a lot of ways to bundle up to withstand a Trump electoral storm, if indeed it turns out to be a storm.

The Senate is an altogether different matter.

So today is the big day: Donald Trump meets Paul Ryan and Republican Senators who are afraid to endorse him. From a historical viewpoint it occurred to me that Ryan's encounter with Trump is all vaguely reminiscent of when the caretaker head of state who the Shah left behind had to hang with the Ayatollah Khomeini when he returned in February 1979. A great moment in history. In any case, the first meeting seems to have gone reasonably well. Trump and Ryan just released a joint statement which essentially says that their differences are outweighed by their common views and the need to defeat the evil Hillary Clinton.

The latest right wing freak out about Facebook is reverberating in some interesting places: in a sports radio conversation about UFC and eSports. As Colin Cowherd puts it, maybe conservatives should have created Facebook or Silicon Valley or any of the other dynamic new parts of the economy which have such a dominant sway over the culture.

Of course, it doesn't really seem like Facebook was 'suppressing' conservative views at all. So there's that too.