Rules are rules, and rotten
Monday the 11th of April was maybe the finest day of Donald Trump's campaign to that date since the new year. That Saturday the Republican Party of Colorado had held something of a coronation for Ted Cruz. The state party having anticipated the ascendancy of Donald Trump and revised the rules to place their presidential nomination in the sure hands of 34 party muckety-mucks, those exalted 34 had voted Cruz to a man, at which point the party took to Twitter to gloat "We beat Trump," as if to dispatch all doubt as to their purpose.
The Republican establishment had by this time lit on Ted Cruz, not out of any affection for Cruz but on the calculation that Cruz was the candidate to deny Trump an outright majority of 1,237 delegates, throwing the nomination to a second ballot where those delegates bound by the votes of the people to nominate Trump would be unbound, and the establishment might bring to bear their inordinate influence and institutional power. And if somehow they could get away with it the establishment would love him and leave him, discarding Cruz on that second ballot and handing the nomination instead to some more reliably pliable establishment man.
On Monday while Cruz ran a victory lap, Trump upturned the campaign. Trump made of the Colorado coronation a kiss of death. Had Cruz seen ahead, seen that to win the delegates was to lose the people, he might've repudiated those 34 delegates from Colorado, or at the very least not gloated in them. Cruz' unlikely alliance with the party establishment puts one in mind of a groupie who spends the night with the lead singer and then the morning after when that singer is onto the next stop and the next groupie, plans her wedding to him and wonders how many children they'll have and what they'll choose for names.
Trump's charge is not that the rules have been bent or broken but that they needn't be broken or bent, the rules are themselves rotten, written and rewritten to suit the party muckety-mucks. He elevated that by Monday to a theme of his campaign and by Friday to a plank in his platform, proposing that Republican Party presidential nominations be democratized, which is as much shrewd politics as sound principle.
And the racket which Trump proposes to reform, the party presidential nomination, was not conceived by the Founding Fathers or enshrined in the Constitution, is not the law of the land duly enacted by duly elected representatives, and does not derive from founding principles or democratic ideals, so that when the Against-Trump types taunt that Trump is "whining" or wag their fingers that "rules are rules" and any other clueless, cringe-making cliches, they defend only the residue of antidemocratic smoke-filled-rooms-behind-closed-doors party nominations as before the democratization of the process in the last half-century.
When the rules are not law and not democratic and not unchanging -- having been amended within a matter of months precisely to deny delegates to Donald Trump -- then to answer Trump's "Let the people decide" with "Rules are rules" is to lose the argument.
Confident as they are clueless
The cluelessness -- and I hesitate to invoke so strong a term inasmuch as I esteem some of the parties to the cluelessness -- of the elite and establishment and assorted others who've arrayed against Donald Trump, is something to behold: after misjudging Trump and the primaries practically daily since the summer of '15, their confidence in their judgment is undented.
When Trump observed that "Islam hates us," the question put to the talking heads was, "Can Trump recover from this latest gaffe?" Never mind that Trump's pronouncement was an objective and obvious observation, to real people in the real world; it's precisely that sort of wrecking-ball-to-political-correctness truth-telling and vows to act on it that have elevated Donald Trump from real-estate celebrity and reality-TV showman to one of two candidates for the most exalted office on God's earth.
Or while Trump hung the Colorado coronation around Cruz' neck and sunk him with it, that larger part of the commentariat who disdain Donald Trump, or what I saw of them, sat before the cameras as confident as they were clueless and declared in defense of the coronation, "That's the way the game is played," and "The Cruz campaign has the better ground-game," etc., despite that Cruz could hardly have lost Colorado and Trump could hardly have won it, and "the game" is an antidemocratic vestige. Then toward the end of that week after Colorado, when there was national polling to show Trump lengthening his lead over Cruz to 18 points and Cruz collapsing to two points up from the no-hoper Kasich, the question put to the talking heads was, "Has Trump been drawn off-message by Colorado?" Colorado was the making of Trump, or rather his re-making, and the unmaking of Cruz.
But then, if the many and sundry Against-Trumps had a clue between them then it might be their man standing atop the hill and Trump tumbling down it.
Blessed in his enemies
Donald Trump's 2016 had not been spectacular. He had for too long been seized by a birther mania to disqualify Ted Cruz from the presidency, he skipped the debate in Iowa and placed three points back in second in the first-in-the-nation caucus there, and then came the debate of February 13 and the half-week thereafter, in South Carolina which had been Trump country from the first, when Trump waded well into the swamp of conspiracy-theory kookery, flogging fevered fantasies of events from 2001 and '03. I'd guess that some part of that episode owed to Trump's temperament as well as to his "Art of the Comeback" lesson of answering a punch with a punch: the man lashes out wildly with whatever's to hand, which may be excusable in a private citizen but is not helpful in a candidate for POTUS much less a commander-in-chief. But Trump was a Democrat at the time of the Iraq War, and it shows. And never mind that his conspiracy-theorizing was demonstrably and even self-evidently bunkum; to relitigate Iraq and the 9/11 attacks in the 2016 presidential campaign was nothing to do with the price of tea, something like arguing that Normandy wasn't the optimal site for the D-Day landings, in the campaign of 1960.
Then came February 17, I believe it was, or three days before South Carolina was to vote, when "His Holiness" the "Holy Father" Pope "Francis" of Rome ordained that the people of South Carolina and America were not to vote Trump. Pope Francis is of course a leftist and to be charitable doesn't have the interests of the United States at heart. But more than that, Pope "Francis" of Rome is or rather was Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, and your average Latin American takes a different view of the Latin American invasion and colonization of the United States than your average American, something like your average German took a different view of the Nazi-Soviet conquest of Poland than your average Pole. So the pope formerly known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not high on the Trump proposal of turning back that Latin American conquest of America, and couldn't restrain himself from saying as much, from getting in the middle of an American election, or more precisely from getting in the middle of just one of the two major-party presidential primaries, to damn just one of its half-dozen candidates. And at once the clutter of the campaign cleared, and those folks who had thrown in with Trump saw again why it was that they had thrown in with Trump, and had new cause for demonstrating their throwing-in.
I can only assume the understanding of America in Pope Francis' Vatican is not intimate, because it happens that South Carolina is among the more self-consciously Protestant jurisdictions in Christendom. I.e., in ordaining that they mustn't vote Trump the pope of Rome left the good and great Americans of South Carolina with no self-respecting alternative but to vote Trump and affirm their independence from the Vatican, lest the Reformation be undone and citizens be vassals.
And so it was that Pope Francis blessed Donald Trump by damning him, or anyhow that's the story as it looked to me. Three days after the pope stuck his nose in, Trump won South Carolina with a spread of 10 points. SC GOP to Pope: Drop dead. Then after another three days Trump won Nevada in a rout, taking a greater share of the vote than the first and second runners-up together, etc., etc., and the rest is history.
The race is run
One afternoon sometime in November of 2000, I tuned my radio to a station out of Maine to hear an extraordinary announcement. The disputed vote for president wouldn't be resolved formally 'til December, but on that day in November Rush Limbaugh opened his show with the declaration that he was about to break news, news which wasn't to be found elsewhere, that the recount of the votes for president in Florida was complete and George W. Bush was president-elect. The period for the recount as per Florida election law having passed without an overturning of the result, the state attorney general had certified that result, as of which moment Bush was president-elect. To hear the press tell it, the recount was on and the result was unknown, but Limbaugh understood what the Supreme Court in the end was compelled to ratify, that the voting and the counting and the recounting were through, the result was certified, and the president-elect was Bush.
I'm reminded of that lately in following these Republican presidential primaries. Not to say the decision is anything like as official in these primaries as in that recount, but the facts are these: by the first of April or thereabouts there were nominally three men left standing in the Republican primaries, but to make it to that magic number of 1,237 delegates the first runner-up Ted Cruz would've had to collect something like 86% of the delegates remaining, i.e., a practical impossibility, and for the also-ran John Kasich to make 1,237 would've taken more delegates than there were delegates to be had, i.e., a statistical impossibility. And more than that, by the first of April Donald Trump had been at or occasionally near the top of the Republican primary polling through the summer and fall and winter and into the spring, and had won far-and-away the most votes and states and delegates, and I cannot name a candidate since the democratization of the major-party presidential nominations who managed all that but somehow did not manage to secure his party's nomination.
The conventional wisdom has it that if Donald Trump comes to the end of the voting in June with a plurality but not a majority of delegates, then come the Republican National Convention in July the party muckety-mucks will muck things up and try by hook or by crook to strip Trump of his nomination, handing it instead to a pretender, some candidate who had lost to Trump or not so much as offered for the nomination but who is more amenable and agreeable to the establishment. But if it comes to that then what comes next would be as ruinous as it is predictable: Trump would bolt the Republican Party taking with him not only his plurality but a good part of the rest of the base, outraged as they'd be by the hijacking of the vote by the same elites who had for so long disappointed them and worse than disappointed them, leaving Hillary Clinton a cakewalk to the White House with considerably less than half the popular vote, and Trump would form an "alt-Right" conservative alternative party placing second in the general election, leaving the old-line rump Republican Party as third-party also-ran. Unless I'm mistaken in all that then the party muckety-mucks may be expected in the end to think better of stripping Trump of his rightful nomination, and thus the race is run and Donald Trump has won it.
Things to come
This vision of the future is less statistical than mystical, but for whatever little it's worth it's my sense that any candidate for a major-party presidential nomination who even before he has secured that nomination has driven the news practically daily from summer to spring, has been damned by the lame-duck administration on diplomatic missions, has been the object of debate in the Mother of Parliaments, has been damned by the pope of Rome, and has been protested by the Left as though he's a sitting president already, is not a candidate who'll be swept aside come Election Day, powerless and forgotten.
Monday the 11th of April was maybe the finest day of Donald Trump's campaign to that date since the new year. That Saturday the Republican Party of Colorado had held something of a coronation for Ted Cruz. The state party having anticipated the ascendancy of Donald Trump and revised the rules to place their presidential nomination in the sure hands of 34 party muckety-mucks, those exalted 34 had voted Cruz to a man, at which point the party took to Twitter to gloat "We beat Trump," as if to dispatch all doubt as to their purpose.
The Republican establishment had by this time lit on Ted Cruz, not out of any affection for Cruz but on the calculation that Cruz was the candidate to deny Trump an outright majority of 1,237 delegates, throwing the nomination to a second ballot where those delegates bound by the votes of the people to nominate Trump would be unbound, and the establishment might bring to bear their inordinate influence and institutional power. And if somehow they could get away with it the establishment would love him and leave him, discarding Cruz on that second ballot and handing the nomination instead to some more reliably pliable establishment man.
On Monday while Cruz ran a victory lap, Trump upturned the campaign. Trump made of the Colorado coronation a kiss of death. Had Cruz seen ahead, seen that to win the delegates was to lose the people, he might've repudiated those 34 delegates from Colorado, or at the very least not gloated in them. Cruz' unlikely alliance with the party establishment puts one in mind of a groupie who spends the night with the lead singer and then the morning after when that singer is onto the next stop and the next groupie, plans her wedding to him and wonders how many children they'll have and what they'll choose for names.
Trump's charge is not that the rules have been bent or broken but that they needn't be broken or bent, the rules are themselves rotten, written and rewritten to suit the party muckety-mucks. He elevated that by Monday to a theme of his campaign and by Friday to a plank in his platform, proposing that Republican Party presidential nominations be democratized, which is as much shrewd politics as sound principle.
And the racket which Trump proposes to reform, the party presidential nomination, was not conceived by the Founding Fathers or enshrined in the Constitution, is not the law of the land duly enacted by duly elected representatives, and does not derive from founding principles or democratic ideals, so that when the Against-Trump types taunt that Trump is "whining" or wag their fingers that "rules are rules" and any other clueless, cringe-making cliches, they defend only the residue of antidemocratic smoke-filled-rooms-behind-closed-doors party nominations as before the democratization of the process in the last half-century.
When the rules are not law and not democratic and not unchanging -- having been amended within a matter of months precisely to deny delegates to Donald Trump -- then to answer Trump's "Let the people decide" with "Rules are rules" is to lose the argument.
Confident as they are clueless
The cluelessness -- and I hesitate to invoke so strong a term inasmuch as I esteem some of the parties to the cluelessness -- of the elite and establishment and assorted others who've arrayed against Donald Trump, is something to behold: after misjudging Trump and the primaries practically daily since the summer of '15, their confidence in their judgment is undented.
When Trump observed that "Islam hates us," the question put to the talking heads was, "Can Trump recover from this latest gaffe?" Never mind that Trump's pronouncement was an objective and obvious observation, to real people in the real world; it's precisely that sort of wrecking-ball-to-political-correctness truth-telling and vows to act on it that have elevated Donald Trump from real-estate celebrity and reality-TV showman to one of two candidates for the most exalted office on God's earth.
Or while Trump hung the Colorado coronation around Cruz' neck and sunk him with it, that larger part of the commentariat who disdain Donald Trump, or what I saw of them, sat before the cameras as confident as they were clueless and declared in defense of the coronation, "That's the way the game is played," and "The Cruz campaign has the better ground-game," etc., despite that Cruz could hardly have lost Colorado and Trump could hardly have won it, and "the game" is an antidemocratic vestige. Then toward the end of that week after Colorado, when there was national polling to show Trump lengthening his lead over Cruz to 18 points and Cruz collapsing to two points up from the no-hoper Kasich, the question put to the talking heads was, "Has Trump been drawn off-message by Colorado?" Colorado was the making of Trump, or rather his re-making, and the unmaking of Cruz.
But then, if the many and sundry Against-Trumps had a clue between them then it might be their man standing atop the hill and Trump tumbling down it.
Blessed in his enemies
Donald Trump's 2016 had not been spectacular. He had for too long been seized by a birther mania to disqualify Ted Cruz from the presidency, he skipped the debate in Iowa and placed three points back in second in the first-in-the-nation caucus there, and then came the debate of February 13 and the half-week thereafter, in South Carolina which had been Trump country from the first, when Trump waded well into the swamp of conspiracy-theory kookery, flogging fevered fantasies of events from 2001 and '03. I'd guess that some part of that episode owed to Trump's temperament as well as to his "Art of the Comeback" lesson of answering a punch with a punch: the man lashes out wildly with whatever's to hand, which may be excusable in a private citizen but is not helpful in a candidate for POTUS much less a commander-in-chief. But Trump was a Democrat at the time of the Iraq War, and it shows. And never mind that his conspiracy-theorizing was demonstrably and even self-evidently bunkum; to relitigate Iraq and the 9/11 attacks in the 2016 presidential campaign was nothing to do with the price of tea, something like arguing that Normandy wasn't the optimal site for the D-Day landings, in the campaign of 1960.
Then came February 17, I believe it was, or three days before South Carolina was to vote, when "His Holiness" the "Holy Father" Pope "Francis" of Rome ordained that the people of South Carolina and America were not to vote Trump. Pope Francis is of course a leftist and to be charitable doesn't have the interests of the United States at heart. But more than that, Pope "Francis" of Rome is or rather was Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, and your average Latin American takes a different view of the Latin American invasion and colonization of the United States than your average American, something like your average German took a different view of the Nazi-Soviet conquest of Poland than your average Pole. So the pope formerly known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not high on the Trump proposal of turning back that Latin American conquest of America, and couldn't restrain himself from saying as much, from getting in the middle of an American election, or more precisely from getting in the middle of just one of the two major-party presidential primaries, to damn just one of its half-dozen candidates. And at once the clutter of the campaign cleared, and those folks who had thrown in with Trump saw again why it was that they had thrown in with Trump, and had new cause for demonstrating their throwing-in.
I can only assume the understanding of America in Pope Francis' Vatican is not intimate, because it happens that South Carolina is among the more self-consciously Protestant jurisdictions in Christendom. I.e., in ordaining that they mustn't vote Trump the pope of Rome left the good and great Americans of South Carolina with no self-respecting alternative but to vote Trump and affirm their independence from the Vatican, lest the Reformation be undone and citizens be vassals.
And so it was that Pope Francis blessed Donald Trump by damning him, or anyhow that's the story as it looked to me. Three days after the pope stuck his nose in, Trump won South Carolina with a spread of 10 points. SC GOP to Pope: Drop dead. Then after another three days Trump won Nevada in a rout, taking a greater share of the vote than the first and second runners-up together, etc., etc., and the rest is history.
The race is run
One afternoon sometime in November of 2000, I tuned my radio to a station out of Maine to hear an extraordinary announcement. The disputed vote for president wouldn't be resolved formally 'til December, but on that day in November Rush Limbaugh opened his show with the declaration that he was about to break news, news which wasn't to be found elsewhere, that the recount of the votes for president in Florida was complete and George W. Bush was president-elect. The period for the recount as per Florida election law having passed without an overturning of the result, the state attorney general had certified that result, as of which moment Bush was president-elect. To hear the press tell it, the recount was on and the result was unknown, but Limbaugh understood what the Supreme Court in the end was compelled to ratify, that the voting and the counting and the recounting were through, the result was certified, and the president-elect was Bush.
I'm reminded of that lately in following these Republican presidential primaries. Not to say the decision is anything like as official in these primaries as in that recount, but the facts are these: by the first of April or thereabouts there were nominally three men left standing in the Republican primaries, but to make it to that magic number of 1,237 delegates the first runner-up Ted Cruz would've had to collect something like 86% of the delegates remaining, i.e., a practical impossibility, and for the also-ran John Kasich to make 1,237 would've taken more delegates than there were delegates to be had, i.e., a statistical impossibility. And more than that, by the first of April Donald Trump had been at or occasionally near the top of the Republican primary polling through the summer and fall and winter and into the spring, and had won far-and-away the most votes and states and delegates, and I cannot name a candidate since the democratization of the major-party presidential nominations who managed all that but somehow did not manage to secure his party's nomination.
The conventional wisdom has it that if Donald Trump comes to the end of the voting in June with a plurality but not a majority of delegates, then come the Republican National Convention in July the party muckety-mucks will muck things up and try by hook or by crook to strip Trump of his nomination, handing it instead to a pretender, some candidate who had lost to Trump or not so much as offered for the nomination but who is more amenable and agreeable to the establishment. But if it comes to that then what comes next would be as ruinous as it is predictable: Trump would bolt the Republican Party taking with him not only his plurality but a good part of the rest of the base, outraged as they'd be by the hijacking of the vote by the same elites who had for so long disappointed them and worse than disappointed them, leaving Hillary Clinton a cakewalk to the White House with considerably less than half the popular vote, and Trump would form an "alt-Right" conservative alternative party placing second in the general election, leaving the old-line rump Republican Party as third-party also-ran. Unless I'm mistaken in all that then the party muckety-mucks may be expected in the end to think better of stripping Trump of his rightful nomination, and thus the race is run and Donald Trump has won it.
Things to come
This vision of the future is less statistical than mystical, but for whatever little it's worth it's my sense that any candidate for a major-party presidential nomination who even before he has secured that nomination has driven the news practically daily from summer to spring, has been damned by the lame-duck administration on diplomatic missions, has been the object of debate in the Mother of Parliaments, has been damned by the pope of Rome, and has been protested by the Left as though he's a sitting president already, is not a candidate who'll be swept aside come Election Day, powerless and forgotten.
