Donald Trump grabbed many of us with his immigration hole-shot.   His all-purpose chlorine bleach burn-outs wiping out political correctness  have been equally spectacular – not just for the strutting, but for calling out to the NHRA  grandstand-crowd, the erstwhile silent disenfranchised majority .

All Donald had to do was keep his front end under control.  Wheelies can be entertaining, but they usually lead to the wrong end of a bill of sale.

But no: Trump couldn't resist cracking open the nitrous bottle when he should have pinched the valve and locked it away in the trunk.  Soon enough, our quarter-mile rooster will need a tow back to the trailer apron.

First he dissed God.  Now he's dissed non-conformist Christians.  In the meantime, he dissed property rights, the handmaiden to religious liberty.  C'mon, Donald – what's wrong with you, man?

Donald Trump said he doesn't ask God for forgiveness when he screws up.  Why bother in Trump's line of work?  Just stiff another line-up of naïve creditors who have bankrolled Trump Airlines, Trump casinos, and Trump University.  And walk away.

Not so easy if you are a neurosurgeon…once the scalpel or saw blade penetrates skin, skull, and tissue, there is no turning back.  No cold coin transaction – no simple write-off of another over-leveraged impaired asset.

Forgiveness doesn't register in Donald Trump's ledger-domain.  Donald's accountants only scribble down wins, assets, and income.  His failings, losses, and liabilities all accrue to somebody else.

Donald says he's a Norman Vincent Peale-style Presbyterian.  NVP was a middle-of-the-road hope-and-change pastor, but virulently intolerant – condemning JFK's Roman Catholicism as a mortal defect to Kennedy's presidential candidacy – with his "Power of Positive Thinking" trumping worship, salvation, and the magisterium. 

Donald can't just settle on revealing that his own contemporary Presbyterianism is pedestrian mush.  Far from the sterner stuff of Calvin's theology of Grace, where works have no currency in bargaining for salvation, Trump believes that his works – creating a real estate empire alone – are enough for his grand negotiated Justification, trading secular favors for an anointing, as messiah du jour.

When Donald disparages Ben Carson's faith, and Carson's longstanding adherence to the doctrines of Seventh-Day Adventists, Trump trashes the core of American exceptionalism – religious liberty and religious toleration.  Haven't we seen enough of that from Obama?

Liberty and limited government were envisioned and launched by non-conformist religious sects – or, as Trump harrumphs, "fringe denominations." 

Quakers, for example, were reviled, first banished from Salem and then hanged, per Mary Dyer:

The Reverend Urian Oakes denounced the Quaker principle of liberty of conscience as a "liberty of perdition" and "the firstborn of all abominations." In the forefront of the Quaker hunt was none other than the fiery Rev. John Wilson, leading persecutor of Anne Hutchinson. Wilson thundered in a typical sermon that "he would carry fire in one hand and faggots in the other, to burn all the Quakers in the world."

And this was ten years before William Penn became a Quaker.

Roger Williams, exiled from Salem in 1636, then founding the Baptist sect in Providence, inspired more Massachusetts Puritan slanders – e.g, "Rhode Island is the Stinke into which all the other Colonyes empty their heretics."  

Roman Catholics found only a shallow safe haven in Maryland, with dissenters subject to Church of England penal laws in their own colony, despite passage of the Maryland Act Concerning Religion in 1649.

With state-sponsored persecution extinguished by the First Amendment, the Second Great Awakening, spawned largely in western N.Y. State concurrent with the economic boom from the Erie Canal, was the catalyst for surging Baptist and Methodist evangelicals, inspiring the likes of William Miller and the Seventh-Day Adventists.  By the mid-19th century there were hundreds of Christian denominations and sects, all forming the fabric of American pluralism.

While Trump's disdain for religious diversity is bad enough, he assaults the accompanying bedrock of American liberty – the right to private property.  This is no benign musing of narrow circumstances, where eminent domain via the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment occasionally elbows out due process for purposes of "common good."  No, Trump actually agrees with the progressive state collective imperative that the private property of one citizen can be expropriated by the state for someone else's "private enterprise," masquerading as a public good, through which Trump's real estate empire has profited mightily.

Kelo v. City of New London, the 2005  Supreme Court decision secured from a reliably big-government majority, might as well have been derived from Georges-Eugene Haussmann's remake of Paris under the instructions of Napoleon III.  Twenty thousand buildings were demolished while thousands of Parisians were forcibly relocated.  Jules Ferry, later prime minister, perhaps uttered the best line decrying Haussmann's monstrous social engineering: "the triumphant vulgarity, the awful materialism, that we are going to pass on to our descendants." 

Sounds familiar.

As Justice Thomas quipped in his dissent, "[s]omething has gone seriously awry with this Court's interpretation of the Constitution. Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not."

How long before Donald invokes the Takings Clause to find space for the 11 million illegal aliens whom, when hard-pressed, he can't or won't round up for deportation?  Asinine, you say?  Tell that to the rank-and file everyday Europeans whose homes are being commandeered to welcome Muslim immigrants.

So when will Donald Trump give up wheel standing and instead stand up for liberty?  In the meantime, hey, Donald: occasional humility becomes a winner, too.