Sometimes, I truly wish that I could pull back the veil on the nonstop assortment of crazy emails that come through the RedState contact form – more than half of which I don’t even have time to open. We get incoherent rants, often written in several different font sizes and colors, calling us all manner of unprintable names and espousing all sorts of conspiracy theories.

On occasion, though, we get a thoughtful email from someone asking why we spend so much time attacking Trump these days. I chalk this up 90% to concern trolling, since RedState just finished our best traffic month ever, by a lot (to borrow a phrase from Trump). But I am definitely aware of the extent to which our coverage is dedicated to Trump these days.

Hey, I’d definitely prefer to never have to mention Trump again. There’s actually a lot interesting that’s happening in the world, from both a policy standpoint and a political standpoint. Our front pagers here actually have a lot of interesting life experience and background to bring to these subjects, and we would probably all prefer to talk about things other than Donald Trump’s stupid, orange face.

Here’s the rub, though: if Donald Trump gets the nomination, none of that is going to matter. Regardless of what some fake conservatives are trying to sell for the sake of their own ratings, the numbers do not lie: Trump will lose in epic fashion to Hillary Clinton, and he will take the GOP Senate and House down with him.

If that happens, conservatives are going to have no meaningful say in the policy direction of this country for at least two years, possibly longer. We’ll have things to say, but no one in any position of authority will be listening. And by the time the country reverses direction, it will be too late on a great many issues.

If Trump is the nominee, there will be no point in telling you about great conservative challengers and Congressional candidates who are coming up for election in 2016, because none of them are going to be able to swim against the tide of Trump’s landslide loss.

This week’s debacle sparked by Trump’s answer to Chris Matthews on the abortion question indicates that if Trump is the nominee, his utter lack of message discipline will even set back our causes and issues in the abstract, and damage the brand ID of conservative ideas to the point that they may be beyond repair.

In other words, stopping Trump from becoming the Republican nominee is a necessary condition to accomplishing literally anything that this website has stood for and fought for since its inception. It’s depressing that this is true when it comes to the Republican front runner, but we weren’t the ones who thought actually voting for Trump would be a good idea in the first place.

So until the Trump menace has been put down, we will probably be forced to continue pointing out how unfit Trump is to be President. Along the way, we’ll continue to hit Hillary and the Democrats, and talk about policy where applicable. But there’s no point pretending that Trump isn’t an existential threat to the conservative movement, when he so clearly is.