Donald Trump - the wait is over: I'm finally prepared to reveal my innermost thoughts

First, though, this made me laugh:

Because Donald Trump annoys left-wingers and conservative wets, I've seen it as my duty to try to take his pronouncements seriously. But I've failed. 

First, I've never really taken to the man or his buildings or "luxury developments" for golfing business bores, or his trophy wives or his ridiculous bouffant orange hair-confection or his boorish manner of speech. Second, I watched one series of his Celebrity Apprentice show, and he chose Piers Morgan: that's unforgivable. Third, he strikes me as an almost totally unreconstructed example of what, in the 1960s, used to be known as "The Ugly American" - vain, bullying, greedy and cultureless. I'm slavishly pro-American, and despise Europeans' snobbish attitudes to the country and its immensely likeable, admirable people. But Trump justifies every anti-American prejudice imaginable, and not in the good way that the Sainted Ronal Reagan did.

Fourth, I'm not keen on immensely rich people buying their way to the top in politics, especially when their wealth means they don't have to pay attention to the party they're trying to get to the top of - even when it's as divided and unlovely and centrist as the current Republican Party. Because, while it means you can espouse any amusingly shocking crowd-pleasing policy that pops into your head, it also means you never have to listen to counter-arguments - even when they're being put forward by sensible, principled, right-wing critics. 

Fifth, I'm damned if I can discern any coherent political ideology informing Trump's pronouncements. I only take seriously politicians whose views are based on readily identifiable conservative or right-wing principles: one of the many problems with populist leaders - especially one that has changed policy as Trump has on so many issues over the years (or weeks) - is that you never know what the hell they'll come up with next. He used to be pro-abortion, now he's against it - but, in the absence of a discernible moral or political compass, it's hard to know what made him change direction on this or any other issue.

Sixth, he's a protectionist rather than a free-trader: he wants to impose a 20% tax on imports and has promised to repatriate jobs from China and Mexico - but doesn't say how this could be practically or legally achieved. Protectionism sucks.

Seventh, he says disastrously stupid things ALL THE TIME: deciding on the hoof  that Senator John McCain, who spent five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of the Viet Cong, was "not a war hero" and glossing over the strange propensity of Vladimir Putin's journalistic critics to wind up dead with "at least he's a leader" makes one wonder what other weird opinions fester under the blow-dried candy-floss on his head.

I could go on. And on. And on. But that's enough for now. America desperately needs a principled, politically adept, right-wing president to put it on the right path after eight disastrous years of being run by a useless cultural Marxist Chicago community organiser - I'm just not convinced that Trump is either principled, politically adept or even right-wing. 

Ted Cruz is another type of American who gets right up Guardian-readers' noses: he looks and sounds like a tele-evangelist, he does God, he's a climate change sceptic, he's a small-government states-rights constitutionalist, he's anti-Obamacare - and he's as smart as a whip. A Cruz presidency would annoy Europeans and his policies would push his country relentlessly rightwards: that'll do for me.