Right now we are witnessing one of the reasons the Left is winning and the Right losing America.

No Democratic Party president or presidential candidate in history has ever been subjected to, or will be subjected to, the kind of savage attempted assassination by his own party’s leaders that Donald Trump is now enduring from the great and the good among Republicans and “respectable” conservatives.

All for a locker room crudity that he thought he spoke in private.

Without the active, enthusiastic support of Republican office holders, present and former, this distraction from the real issues would have dried up and blown away in two days. But the ugly truth is Trump’s own party’s leaders are leading the pack of baying hounds.

Contrast this with the Left’s reaction to indiscretions by its presidents or presidential candidates: No matter the infraction, the moral failing or the actual crime, the Left stands by its main man. Always.

Of course, the band of Never Trumps now trying to destroy their voters’ choice for the presidency were already looking for an excuse to commit this coup against the party base well before the current opportunity arose.

But the reality is that in similar circumstances the feckless Republican Party, along with much of the “respectable” American Right, would be administering the same slashing to a candidate they liked.

Richard Nixon was not destroyed by the Democrats and the Left.  They were merely his tormentors, in Congress and the press.  Nixon’s presidency was ended by the prissy elders of his own party. The committee of Republican senators sent to deliver the political death sentence was chaired by none other than conservative icon Barry Goldwater.

If Lyndon Johnson had found himself in similar circumstances (participant in the cover up of a silly burglary of his opponent’s campaign headquarters), his party would have rallied round him and saved his presidency. They would have called it a witch hunt over a minor matter and, even if the Democrats had been a minority in Congress, as the Republicans were when Watergate broke, they would have blocked his impeachment in the Senate.

To the Left the agenda and power are everything. Character, peccadillos, and personal pastimes are nothing.

This is the cold-blooded attitude that makes for political victories in universal suffrage democracies.

Bill Clinton brings to mind another example of the Left’s unfailing loyalty to its leaders. Bill’s lifelong hobby of rape, molestation and harassment of women was open and notorious … and of absolutely no concern to the Democratic Party or organized feminists, though it violated every precious precept of the Party’s alleged fealty to the cause of the female sex, along with some of the most salient complaints of organized feminism. Through it all, the Left’s swords were wielded in faithful and successful defense of their leader.

You’ve got to give them credit: The Democratic Party, now the American Left, plays for keeps, and they never, ever, ever … take their eye off the ball.

And, as everyone seriously involved in politics knows, the ball is: the Agenda and the Power to enact it.

Republicans and conservatives, on the other hand, are represented by leaders whose primary concern is to be well regarded by ladies who lunch at the club.

And so, because Trump, believing his conversation private, made a crude comment -- the likes of which most men have heard several times in their lives and which pales into risible insignificance alongside Bill Clinton’s sexual hobbies, or his and his wife’s rapid accumulation of great wealth through some of the most poorly concealed acceptance of bribes in the history of influence peddling -- Republicans and conservatives are told to abandon their candidate.

Not this writer.

And, it is to be hoped, not the overwhelming majority of Trump’s supporters and those who should be supporting him.

Keep your eye on the ball: The Agenda and the Power to enact it.  When you take your eye off that, you will lose to those who never do. Religious people, evangelicals, Mormons, middle and upper middle class suburban women, all take note. Yours will be the greatest losses if the Left returns to power for eight more years.

What needed to happen was simply this: Trump issuing an apology -- just this once -- for his locker room vulgarism. This he did in his Sunday evening debate.  It was classic Trump, short and to the point, but adequate to the puniness of the matter at hand.  

And now the Republican Party, including and especially its major office holders, conservative commentators, and the Trump Campaign, need to say something along the following lines every time this matter, or God knows what other distraction, is brought up:

“We understand why you don’t want to talk about the issues of greatest concern to the American people, including and especially to American women; we understand why you’re trying not to talk about the atrocious economy and scarcity of good paying jobs, the open borders that you’ve created and the mass invasion of America by illegals it’s caused; we understand why you don’t want to talk about the general amnesty for illegals you’re planning; we understand why you want to avoid discussing the violence, danger and insecurity you’ve created in America by your vicious  attacks on America’s police and by your refusal to forcibly identify and confront radical Islam; we understand why you don’t want to talk about the truly awful Obamacare, that’s being paid for by enormous increases in health care premiums imposed on America’s working and middle classes.

“You don’t want to talk about any of these issues because a very large majority of Americans detest what you’ve been doing on all of them. And because Hillary Clinton is promising eight more years of all these disasters.”

“But no matter what distractions you bring up, we are going to talk about all these issues of intense concern to the American people, and only these, from now till Election Day.”

This would all work out well in a rational political world.

But the Republican Party today is led by men and women who would rather lose the presidency and subject America to the Left’s agenda, perhaps permanently, so they can maintain their control of the Party -- or, in the case of conservative commentators, so they can maintain their control of the politically ineffective “conservative movement.”

Trump’s handling of the matter will be decreed insufficient by the Ladies lunch moralists of the Republican Party leadership and by the equally testosterone deficient conservative intellectuals among the NeverTrumps.

But if this distraction, or any other, derails the candidacy of Republicans and conservatives’ choice for the presidency, it will be solely because Republican Party leaders and the NeverTrump turncoats led the mob or joined it.

Just as Nixon could not have been brought down if the Party he served so long and so well had stood by him, no locker room vulgarism, spoken in reasonable expectation of privacy, could destroy Trump.  Unless its prosecution had the enthusiastic complicity of Republican and conservative leaders, to whom personal position is more important than the conservative agenda and the power of the presidency to pursue it.

If the Left again gains the presidency, as I’ve argued before, it will be a terminal defeat for conservatism. Demographic changes that will be intensified and fanatically promoted by the Left for the next eight years will effectively establish a one party state in the governing branches of the federal government: The presidency and the activist federal judiciary. 

In the short term the Republican Party will dissolve. An American political party can survive many things, including a great defeat. But it cannot survive its leadership’s deliberate destruction of a presidential candidate chosen by its own voters.

We continue to support Trump with great enthusiasm, and with great admiration for his courage and fighting spirit.  We urge him, for the duration of the campaign, to focus exclusively on the issues that brought him this far in his, and our, struggle to preserve and restore America.