Today comes news that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan endorses Donald Trump as the Republican Party’s candidate for President of the United States.

In my view, any Republican official who supports Trump forfeits any right to be considered a sound thinker or even a serious individual; I can only conclude that he or she believes that political power is more important than America as a country. Supporting a man whose faults are as manifest as Trump’s means that you put more value on your political party and its fortunes than you do on the United States and its standing in the world or even on common sense and morality. You apparently believe that it’s perfectly alright to say America will round up 11 million people and escort them out of the country; that it’s perfectly alright to ban all members of a great world religion from entrance into the country; that it’s perfectly alright to build a wall across the entire southern border of the country and somehow extort the cost of building such a barrier from the country whose citizens we’re trying to keep out; that it’s perfectly alright to say Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un are “people I can talk to,” and that it’s perfectly alright to demand NATO members leave the alliance if they don’t “pay up,” whatever that might mean.

If you endorse Donald Trump you endorse those views and even more extreme ones. What does that say about your judgment? Not much.