Farewell then Ted Cruz, who has now accepted the inevitable and suspended his candidacy for the Republican Party Nomination.
Cruz ran a brilliant campaign but was endlessly undermined by his own unattractiveness as a human being. It wasn’t just his looks, and his unfortunate physical awkwardness. He came across as a duplicitous evangelical preacher, despised by everyone but his own flock. Donald Trump, who has genius for spotting weakness in others, nailed his opponent’s greatest flaw when he called him ‘Lyin’ Ted.’ ‘Nobody likes him,’ he said, and he was right. Trump is a dishonest monster, too, of course, but in 2016 he is the right kind of dishonest monster.
As for Trump’s candidacy, that would appear to be that. He won in Indiana last night, and the Republican nomination is now surely his — unless the Party establishment can somehow find a way of denying his victory at the Convention in Cleveland in July.
But now it looks as if the Grand Old Party elite, while still grumbling, might finally be coming to terms with the fact a billionaire egomaniac has taken over their party. The polls now suggest that Trump might give Hillary Clinton a much better fight than the experts have hitherto thought, and so the hierarchy is starting to creep towards him. Party operators like Karl Rove and others have started to make warmer noises towards the impending nominee.
They are moving through the stages of grief: shock, denial, depression, acceptance, Make America Great Again.
If Trump loses to Clinton in November, they can tell themselves they’ll get it right next time. If he wins, well, their party has just reinvented itself in a way that no psephologist could have ever predicted.
Donald Trump for President. Nobody saw that coming. Nobody quite understood how rotten the Republican Party had become. If Leicester City winning the Premier League this week was the world’s greatest sporting fairytale, then Donald Trump winning the presidency could be the worst horror story ever told.
Comments