Here is an excerpt from a recent piece by Ann Coulter for Breitbart:

“Voters quickly moved on from Cruz and tried Kasich. But he turned out to be the spitting image of a homeless man. He’s got the slouch, the facial tics, and a strange way of bouncing his head and looking around that makes you want to cross the street to avoid him. It looks like he cuts his own hair, and his suits are Ralph Nader cast-offs. He wolfs down food like a street person, has a hair-trigger temper, and rants about religion in a way that only he can understand.

“Kasich is constantly proclaiming that illegals are ‘made in the image of God,’ and denounces the idea of enforcing federal immigration laws, saying: ‘I don’t think it’s right; I don’t think it’s humane.’

“When asked about his decision to expand Medicaid under Obamacare—projected to cost federal taxpayers $50 billion in the first decade—he said: ‘Now, when you die and get to the, get to the, uh, to the meeting with St. Peter … he’s going to ask you what you did for the poor. Better have a good answer.’

“He lectured a crowd of fiscal conservatives on his Obamacare expansion, saying, ‘Now, I don’t know whether you ever read Matthew 25, but I commend it to you, the end of it, about do you feed the homeless and do you clothe the poor.” He also attributed the law to Chief Justice John Roberts and said, “It’s my money, OK?’

“Voters thought they were getting a less attractive version of Mitt Romney with Kasich, but it turns out they’re getting a more televangelist version of Ted Cruz.

“They’re also getting a less warm and personable version of Hillary Clinton. Last week, Kasich lashed out at a reporter who asked a perfectly appropriate question, going from boring campaign boilerplate to irritated browbeating in about one second flat. As much as I enjoy watching reporters being berated, this was deranged.”

“Deranged” seems, well, kind of a deranged description of Kasich’s exchange with a reporter who asked about the basis for his claim of electability, but Coulter is correct in pointing out that Kasich has had some difficulty in sustaining the “kinder, gentler” persona whenever he has been pressed on anything.

Coulter’s complete article is available at: http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/04/27/ann-coulter-slow-talker-homeless-guy-walk-bar/.

In one of his Morning Jolt newsletters for National Review, Jim Geraghty has surveyed a number of conservative commentators who were initially intrigued by Trump’s candidacy but have subsequently become disillusioned. This excerpt is from a piece written by Michael Brendan Dougherty for The Week; it reaches a nasty crescendo at the end:

“Becoming an establishment creature now would dispirit many of Trump’s core supporters. It would wreck any momentum his candidacy had at renovating the Republican Party’s stale ideology. Trump will have worse problems than even Mitt Romney did in trying to explain the convenient evolution of his views. Trump’s unreliability extends even to his own stunts. Months ago he skipped a Fox News debate to raise $6 million for veterans. They haven’t seen the money.

“Trump cannot succeed in a general election without an unforeseeable intervention from beyond our normal politics — think a sudden economic crash, a terrorist attack, or the likelihood of war. A little campaign makeover certainly won’t change what is now the most well-defined and lustily disliked campaign in modern memory. The Trump reboot will not make Trump viable. It just makes his new campaign manager viable. This is nothing more than another layer of orange-hued makeup on an orange-hued corpse of a campaign.”

I admit that I may be doing Dougherty a disservice by pairing him with Coulter because I am not as familiar with his work.

By the way, the end of Dougherty’s first paragraph undermines the assertions made by some Trump supporters—most recently, former Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight—that Trump will be an especially strong advocate for veterans.