Republican elected officials, take note. Donald Trump is not malleable.
How do we know this? There is the fact, of course, that people have been pressing him since the last northern Autumn to name his foreign policy advisers and last Thursday he admitted that he consults primarily with himself. "I'm speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I've said a lot of things," he said. "My primary consultant is myself, and I have a good instinct for this stuff."
But even more importantly, we know that he is not malleable and will not take advice because we've seen a specific case of it acted out in relation to the most important issue put on the table by Trump in this campaign: civil order.
As is now broadly recognised, Trump has routinely encouraged and condoned violence at his rallies. He has said a protester maybe "should have been roughed up". He has encouraged his followers to "knock the crap out of" protesters and promised (perhaps emptily in the end) to pay their legal bills if they did. He has waxed nostalgic for the good old days when protesters got carried out on stretchers.
The media, myself included, has been criticising him on this point for a solid month, at least. Voices from all over the political spectrum have weighed in on the view that the leaders of a democratic republic should never, not even on the campaign trail, call for or condone unlawful violence. To the contrary, it is their job especially, as the Wall Street Journal argued in an editorial last week, to maintain civil order and to establish a norm and culture of respect for civil order.