The Trump train will not be stopped. Last night, Donald Trump won in Michigan and Mississippi, again proving the breath of his extraordinary coalition.
The Republican Party’s attempts to bring him down look increasingly pathetic. Last week, Mitt Romney and other grandees came out to denounce Trump. But the public just watched the videos of Mitt Romney praising the Donald four years ago, when he was running for the White House, and laughed at the hypocrisy.
Yesterday, excited party hacks spread word that, according to Google (Google!), ‘how to stop Donald Trump’ had been one of the most popular internet searches across Michigan. Such grasping at straw polls was a sign of desperation. Trump won Michigan by 12 percentage points. This is a blow for John Kasich, who hoped that a win in Michigan might set him up to win his home state of Ohio and then position himself as the GOP establishment’s last best hope. Bad luck John.
Poor Marco Rubio is now an embarrassment. He is effectively now battling Kasich for third place. He clings on to the hope that he will beat Trump in Florida, his home state, on March 15. But even if he does that — and the polls suggest he won’t — his candidacy is finished. People just don’t vote for him much, which is a problem for any democratic politician. He may still try to engineer a ridiculous coup at the Republican convention in July. But that would make him more unpopular.
Ted Cruz is unloved and unlovable in a different way. But he is now — surely — the only viable anti-Trump candidate. He won Idaho yesterday, and is still within touching distance of Trump in the delegate count (Cruz has 347 delegates to Trump’s 446).
But will the Republican Party elite swallow its pride and finally support a counter-establishment, hard conservative Tea Party figure such as Cruz? Will they heck! If the GOP were going to lump for Cruz, they would have done so after Super Tuesday on March 1.
No. The party establishment would rather try to undermine the whole nomination process at a brokered convention than accept they have lost their party’s soul.
It’s sad watching parties die. It’s also quite funny.
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