So, yeah, we all got it wrong.

Everybody who wrote Donald Trump off as a political charlatan destined to flame out,

and everybody who called Trump a clown who would probably return to his reality show and leave us all alone,

and everybody who suggested that this circus couldn't just couldn't continue,

yeah, we were all wrong.

Maybe we were guilty of believing that Trump's mistakes would break out into the mainstream rather than dying slow deaths on cable TV.

Maybe we thought that voters would wake up to Trump's bombastic narcissism and just sort of turn away.

Or maybe, as statistician Nate Silver put it, we were guilty of not predicting that the Republican Party would lose its effing mind.

Whatever the rationale, Trump's definitely a shock to everybody but the political

commentator Ann Coulter and a few other Trump stalwarts.

So, here are five lessons to take away from Trump winning the nomination.

First, failure to utilize ideological purity tests actually leads to the rise of leftist

candidates in your own party.

So the bizarre paradox of people who think like Trump is that the same people complaining about Republicans caving to Obama

now want to nominate a lifelong Democrat ad hoc politician with no centralizing principle other

than his own glorification, a guy who brags openly, he'll cut more deals with Democrats.

And when conservatives object, Trump supporters point to GOP nominations of Mitt Romney, who created

Obamacare, and John McCain, who created campaign finance reform and amnesty.

And they're being hypocritical, these people say.

McCain and Romney were, by any measure, more conservative overall than Trump.

But the feeling that conservatism doesn't matter any longer,

it's hard to quell when, to so many major Republicans, it really didn't matter that much in 2008 and 2012.

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