The violent disruption of and threats against the Democratic convention in Las Vegas last weekend raises serious suspicions of outside “agents provocateur” operations by enemies of the Democratic Party. The party and media need to refer to these people as “alleged” Bernie Sanders supporters, and then get to the bottom of this.

That said, former George W. Bush speechwriter and now neo-con columnist for the Washington Post Michael Gerson made a poignant point in his column this week, “Conservatives Make a Deal With the Devil.” He wrote, “Donald Trump has been exactly right in one important respect. He attacked the Republican establishment as low-energy, cowering weaklings. Now Republican leaders are lining up to surrender to him, like low-energy, cowering weaklings.”

Remarkably, so many of Trump’s most adamant former opponents are now wringing their hands with heads lowered, and are confessing the error of their past ways and now backing Trump. This although there is absolutely nothing new about Trump than when all these gutless wonders were denouncing him. If anything, there’s more and more bad stuff coming out to disqualify him as the leader of the free world.

This is a sad commentary on how mealy-mouthed and degenerate the GOP leadership has become, and the date when this particular curse began to infect the party can be put at 1980, or when the so-called “Reagan revolution” began to kick in. That marked the beginning of a abandonment of principles in favor of pure and unadulterated power-grabbing and pleasure-seeking in high places.

It was when everything became “free for the taking” that the Grand Old Party began to disgrace itself with its sordid excesses that led to the Great Crash of 2008 and the last eight years of complete and total refusal to compromise or work with the Obama administration in Washington, and the boundless fomenting of racist and nativist prejudices in their national rank-and-file.

Thus, it didn’t take long for crass greed to subvert anything associated with positive or constructive principles. Temptations of Biblical proportions began seducing and rotting the inner sanctums of the GOP hierarchy.

No wonder the rate of scandals has escalated on their side, pouring out beyond the bounds of politics per se to infect the ranks of right wing evangelists and other zealots of the new orgies of greed and selfish self-interest.

Horrified more mature leaders of the neo-conservative cause have watched their colleagues – from even such ostensibly principled leaders like Sen. John McCain and party chair Reince Priebus – display spineless, sniveling, weaselly disregard for any principles and a full hypocritical embrace of their new leader.

Like wild-eyed, clammy, sweating drug addicts, they’ve lined up in hopes that their new hero can deliver them one more fix, an election victory in November. They’ve completely abandoned any perspective for the longer-term interests of their party.

The Washington Post editorialized Tuesday exposing the “rank nihilism” that has taken over the party and its “amorality.”

Just prior to the morally degenerate GOP stampede to back Trump last week, it was Gerson who wrote, “Make no mistake, those who support Trump, no matter how reluctantly, have crossed a moral boundary. They are standing with a leader who encourages prejudice and despises the weak. They are aiding the transformation of a party formed by Lincoln’s blazing vision of equality into a party of white resentment.”

All that began for the GOP long before this past week. If the neo-conservative leadership of William Kristol, the Weekly Standard, Gerson and their ilk are mortified by Trump, and their own party’s capitulation to him, then maybe they should have been paying more attention to the inevitable, if maybe unintended, consequences of their own machinations for the last three dozen years.

Trump is a danger to the nation because he is always out of control, and his clearly sociopathic egomania knows no bounds. He is the troubled adolescent who thinks he can do anything and get away with it, because he’s failed, or refused, to see anyone stop him yet.

Too many “all talk” people are adopting the spineless behavior of Trump’s former GOP rivals, now his slavish peons.