Allegedly, Donald Trump is supposed to be about unifying the GOP before the general election gets underway. I say “allegedly” because there is nothing in his words or actions that indicate he is saying anything but “my way or the highway.” He’s already put senators and members of congress on notice that he could really give a fat rat’s patootie if they win or lose, in his words, he’d be fine acting as a “free agent.”

In keeping with the conciliatory spirit of the man at the top, alleged Russian mob fixer, flack for murderous psychopaths, and Vladimir Putin fanboi Paul Manafort took a time out of his busy schedule yesterday to do a fat man’s, jiggly macarena on what he thought was grave of the #NeverTrump movement:

Back in New York after one of the most chaotic days of Donald Trump’s presidential bid, campaign chairman Paul Manafort wanted to boast about an important victory.

“So now do you finally accept the fact that the ‘Never Trump’ is nevermore?” he asked in a telephone interview as he was driven back to his apartment. “Period. End of sentence.”
…
Manafort: “First of all, the fairness of the argument was persuasive to people. Secondly, we have a machine, a political organization that we’ve been telling you about. And three, to those people who were not part of ‘Never Trump,’ they realized the race was over. And to try and change the rules now would destroy the party. It was a combination of people who were for Trump, people who care about the party and people who were persuaded by the moral argument as well.

“All the money that was spent by the Never Trump people, they weren’t even delegates. They’re sitting on the sidelines pretending that they had these votes, which they never did. I never had any doubt. I was never worried that they would get 28 votes. Plus, I was never worried that if they did that it would matter on the floor.

“It never had any credibility and there was never going to be anything to carry the floor. You saw the arguments being made. It wasn’t persuasive, it was desperation, it was meanness, people trying to break the system. It just wasn’t going to be credible.

“This convention is going to be a unifying convention. You’re going to see over the next five days the party coming together. I’m talking about on the convention floor, at the podium, and the distraction of the rules fight and the platform fight were just distractions. They were never threats.

“If you look back at this week, the platform hearings and now the rules hearings, we had a very good week. We have a platform that has Trump’s campaign positions all over it. and you’ve got the rules that were adopted that did two things. One, it took out Never Trump but it also will be calling for a commission to be formed to discuss the issues Trump talked about in the primaries. From our standpoint, this was not the time to tinker with the rules, but after he’s president – based on the commission that’s formed – we’ll deal with an investigation and figure out how best to make the system fairer and more transparent.”

This is how it is done, folks. This is how you convince someone to vote for Hillary Clinton rather that allowing this blow-dried, self-important, douche anywhere near the levers of real power.