This presidential campaign season has seen an upsurge of acrimonious commentary within the Republican party, unparalleled in my lifetime — and I’ve been part of three Pat Buchanan races. Some observers think that the fissures within the Republican coalition exposed by Donald Trump’s campaign have yawned too wide to be bridged. Certainly, bitter words are being spilled on every side. Here’s a round-up of the most interesting, if sharply pointed takes, on the current campaign.

Ben Shapiro, who resigned from Breitbart News when that website refused to back a reporter who claimed that she was assaulted by Donald Trump’s campaign manager, offers a scathing psycho-spiritual diagnosis of a certain kind of die-hard supporter of the New York wheeler-dealer. Calling them “Trump Children,” Shapiro writes of voters who are “looking for a father figure, someone to protect them from threat, provide for them, threaten violence against their enemies. They defend Trump’s foibles with the passionate but misguided loyalty of the offspring of deadbeat fathers. Trump can do no wrong.”

Shapiro says of Trump:

He’s closest to a drunken deadbeat father, because like most drunken deadbeat fathers, he cares more about himself than the people who rely on him. The saddest group of Trump Children are those who see Trump for what he is, but lie to themselves that he’s something different. These are the voters who know that Trump lies routinely, that he has a history of betraying promises, that he will likely go off on another policy bender and abandon them for the next political skirt that catches his eye. But like abused children, they long for his loving touch, and they insist with fiery rage that he will come back home eventually. While Trump may not have done anything for them so far, they know deep in their hearts, where they cherish their most secret dreams, that he will hold them to him eventually.

He won’t, of course.

What created the Trump Children? Shapiro offers an answer.

America has become a country of people longing for a father. Long ago, we neglected God as our father figure, and replaced Him with bureaucratic government; bureaucratic government has failed us, and so now we replace bureaucracy with authoritarianism. But there is no political Allfather, as Trump’s supporters are about to discover. There are just liars who play the part, and Children who follow them.

David Brooks, a centrist columnist for the New York Times who once called Senator Ted Cruz a “pagan brutalist,” fired both barrels at Donald Trump today in a piece coyly titled “No, Not Trump, Not Ever”:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.

Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.

This week, the Politico reporters Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements, or one every five minutes….

Donald Trump is an affront to basic standards of honesty, virtue and citizenship. He pollutes the atmosphere in which our children are raised. He has already shredded the unspoken rules of political civility that make conversation possible. In his savage regime, public life is just a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.

On the other side of the race, pro-Trump conservative activist Diana West, who works as a watchdog on radical Islamist movements, has published a lexicon [warning: vulgar language] of what she considers the most over-the-top, even profane attacks on Trump by conservatives. Here are a few of the more printable entries:

“A” is for “Abortion.”

“C” is for “Contempt.”

“F” is for “Fascist.”

“M” is for “Monster.”

And so on, all through the alphabet, right up through W:

For his own part, as The Blaze reports, Trump launched a stream of bitter attacks on Twitter against targets ranging from Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, to conservative commentator Erick Erickson, and Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.

So vitriolic and personal were Trump’s attacks on Kelly that they provoked a stinging reply from Fox News:

Donald Trump’s vitriolic attacks against Megyn Kelly and his extreme, sick obsession with her is beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate who wants to occupy the highest office in the land,” Fox News said in a statement. “Megyn is an exemplary journalist and one of the leading anchors in America – we’re extremely proud of her phenomenal work and continue to fully support her throughout every day of Trump’s endless barrage of crude and sexist verbal assaults. As the mother of three young children, with a successful law career and the second highest rated show in cable news, it’s especially deplorable for her to be repeatedly abused just for doing her job.

According to Variety, “Fox News officials are growing increasingly concerned for Kelly’s safety.”