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Republican Elites Are Lining Up Behind Trump

Republican Elites Are Lining Up Behind Trump

Donald Trump’s strong showing in the last round of primaries looks set to continue today as Indiana voters go to the polls. As he has continued to win primary contests, he’s also forced supposedly committed Ted Cruz delegates and allies to reconsider their support.

“What I have said is I’m leaning towards Cruz, but I’m not committed to anybody,” said Dick Dever, a North Dakota state senator and Republican delegate, to The National Review. He effectively summed up the position many Cruz delegates have taken since Trump’s five state sweep last week. “And after [Tuesday’s vote], I think Trump has the momentum going forward.”

His latest position presents a reversal from remarks he made exactly a month ago. According to NBC, he said Trump would be his last choice if it weren’t for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. A meeting with Trump campaign surrogate/saboteur Ben Carson warmed him up to Trump, if only slightly.

“Yes, you’re unbound, you can vote for whoever you want,” said Rick Becker, a former North Dakotan gubernatorial candidate still committed to Cruz. “But if Trump gets really close, should you even ignore your wishes, ignore your congressional district’s wishes, and just vote for Trump to try to salvage the Republican party from being torn apart?”

In Louisiana, 10 uncommitted delegates are up for grabs, but Cruz has only secured the support of one, according to ABC. The rest were still undecided, perhaps waiting to see which way the political headwinds would blow in the upcoming weeks. They, of course, don’t have to come to a decision about who they would support until the convention in July. But if the words of Roger Villere, a longtime Louisiana state GOP chief and one of the national party’s vice chairmen, are anything to go by, a “clear supermajority” of attendees at the Republican National Committee spring meeting in early April were coming around to the idea of Trump leading the party in the election.

“There were a lot of them who Trump wasn’t their first choice, but when we got in closed rooms and everybody started talking, the general consensus was that he’s going to be our nominee, and we will rally around him,” Villere said to Business Insider. “I wouldn’t say it was even reluctance. It’s just the reality.”

Trump’s sustained dominance of the Republican nomination race has entered a new phase, one which will require delegates to make hard decisions about the party’s unity and its future. But further tipping the balance in favor of Trump has been a small but growing contingent of Republican congressmen who have embraced the man, most likely due to political survival, opportunism and a desire to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House.

“I don’t understand. I mean, it’s not ‘Never Trump.’ It’s ‘Never Hillary.’ Never, never, never Hillary. Come on. Wake up and smell the coffee,” said U.S. Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania. He, along with 57 percent of Republican voters, voted for Trump during last week’s primary contest. “I’ve never seen a party attack one of its own candidates with this aggressiveness.”

Pennsylvania was a key primary victory for Trump due to the 54 unpledged delegates the state carries, the majority of whom committed to support Trump at the convention. Their lopsided support for Trump (41 of 54 delegates plan on supporting him) was a reversal from similar contests, where Cruz’s ground game allowed him to capture most unbound delegates. In Pennsylvania, however, only three delegates pledged to support Cruz.

Meanwhile, Senator Orrin Hatch, who has served in the Senate since 1977, also pledged to support Trump to stop Clinton from winning the presidency, despite his own misgivings, and despite Utahans voting overwhelmingly for Cruz. “It looks to me like he’s going to win, and if he does, I’m going to do everything in my power to help him,” he said to Business Insider.

But Hatch already has a history of taking it easy on Trump. In March, he dismissed Trump’s failure to denounce the racism espoused by his supporters as an innocent failure to communicate. “I think deep down, I don’t think Donald Trump tolerates it either. I think he is just inexperienced in expressing himself at things like that,” Hatch said. The recent announcement that he would do everything in his power to stop a Clinton presidency was the result of the open-ended remarks he made in March.

The Utah senator’s strategic decision is just the beginning of conservatives’ acceptance that Trump will be the Republican Party nominee. Even Bill Kristol, one of the leading voices of the #NeverTrump movement, indicated that he may still vote for him. “On the one hand, I’ll say #NeverTrump, and on the other hand, I’ll say ‘never say never’. I’ll leave it ambiguous,” he said on Steve Malzberg’s Newsmax show yesterday.

Republican strategist Karl Rove, who clashed with the racist billionaire in March, calling his knowledge of policy “a millimeter deep,” predicted Trump would win the nomination outright if he won the Indiana primary, which he looks set to do. “If Trump wins — if the NBC/Wall Street Journal/Maris poll is correct — and he wins, the race is effectively over,” he said on Fox News yesterday.

This groundswell of change has hit the Cruz campaign hard at the worst possible time. A Gallup poll released yesterday showed Trump exceeding Cruz in favorability ratings among Republicans for the first time during the primaries. Equally important are the optics of the campaign. Cruz has suffered ambushes from Trump supporters, who called him a Canadian, slipped their hands away as he went to shake them, and in a truly bizarre scenario, had a 12-year-old who wouldn’t stop yelling “you suck!” get escorted out of a campaign event by police.

Endorse This: A Ted Cruz Farewell Special

Endorse This: A Ted Cruz Farewell Special

Let’s face it: Ted Cruz is not long for this campaign.

In Indiana, Cruz trails Donald Trump in all recent polls of likely Republican primary voters, sometimes by double digits. Indiana awards its delegates in a winner-take-all system both by district and overall, so if Trump does as well there as he’s expected to tonight, or if he outperforms expectations as he did last week in five eastern states, he may end the #NeverTrump movement altogether — at least what’s left of it in the Republican primary.

For his part, Ted Cruz seems unaware that he’s simply another character in Donald Trump’s masterful, avant garde performance art project. A project that, to be sure, threatens the earth, but an act all the same.

So while Donald Trump has spent the past day milking Cruz’s various misfortunes (most of them orchestrated by The Donald himself) the Texas senator seems determined to power through, addressing each point in earnest, as if this primary were a theater for politics, rather than political theater.

Take, for example, Cruz’s confrontation of a gaggle of Trump supporters yesterday in Marion, Indiana.

Cruz was on his way to a waiting car, busy primary schedule ahead of him, when a group of Trump supporters heckling him. Cruz seemed to think it was wise to address their concerns about his record, and so he walked over and began showing off his champion debate skills.

“I think that anyone who wants to be president owes it to the people of this state to come in front of you and ask for your support. And I’m running to be everyone’s president, those who vote for me, and –”

“We don’t want you,” one protestor interjected.

The rest of the exchange went about as well. Trump, of course, referenced it in a speech later that day, lauding the protestor for his guts and mastery of the facts.

A day earlier, after she unironically introduced “the next president of the United States, Ted Cruz” Carly Fiorina tripped and fell briefly, catching herself just as the Cruz family walked on stage. While the first video to surface of the incident made Ted Cruz look like an uncaring psychopath who ignored his future vice president’s safety, the more camera angles that came out, the more Cruz looked like he simply hadn’t seen Fiorina fall.

Fiorina was fine, if it matters. And Donald Trump, of course, didn’t wait for confirmation before calling Cruz “weird” for ignoring the fall.

Then, this morning, Donald Trump recalled a National Enquirer story (yes, this is our politics now) which linked Rafael Cruz, Ted’s father and a Cuban immigrant, to Lee Harvey Oswald. Apparently there’s a grainy photo of them together. Trump said that “no one talks about it” — the fact that Cruz and Oswald were, dubiously, in the same picture.

“This is nuts. This is not a reasonable position, this is just kooky,” Cruz said to a press gaggle this morning, in what will surely be remembered as his own anti-Trump farewell speech, similar to Marco Rubio’s a few weeks ago. “I’m going to do something I haven’t done for the entire campaign,” he said, “I’m going to tell you what I really think of Donald Trump.”

“This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies, practically every word that comes out of his mouth.” He continued, “Everything in Donald’s world is about Donald.”

“Morality does not exist for him.”

That’s a great speech, Ted. But it’s too little, too late. Good luck in the private sector, and God help us all.


Video: Fox News, WISH-TV, RealClearPolitics.

 

Clinton, Sanders Fight On In Indiana

Clinton, Sanders Fight On In Indiana

On the eve of Indiana’s primary, Hillary Clinton is looking to add the state to her list of electoral victories over Bernie Sanders. But even if Sanders were to somehow win the state, Clinton will likely still capture the party’s nomination.

Indiana is crucial for both camps. Going into Indiana, Clinton has 1,645 delegates to Sanders’s 1,318. With 83 delegates up for grabs, even if Sanders were to win the Indiana, the margins by which he would do so would not change the dynamics of the race by much.

And even then, he would have to pull an upset victory. FiveThirtyEight has the Vermont senator’s chances of winning Indiana at just 9 percent — not entirely out of the question, but highly unlikely.

Nevertheless, the two have been eager to pick up endorsements in the state. Clinton counts congressman André Carson, the second Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, Senator Joe Donnelly, and former governor Evan Bayh among her supporters.

Sanders’s most notable endorsement comes from United Steelworkers Local 1199, which represents 1,400 members due to be laid off by Carrier Corporation.

“The decision by United Technologies to ship 2,100 jobs from Indiana to Mexico is the latest example of how NAFTA and other trade policies have been a disaster for American workers,” said Sanders shortly after the closure notice, recorded on a worker’s phone, went viral. “In my view, we have got to fundamentally rewrite our failed trade policies so that American jobs are no longer our number one export.”

He also has earned the support of Indianapolis city councillors Zach Adamson and Jared Evans.

But Sanders seems to have seen the writing on the wall. In Indiana, he was reported to have scaled down his ad operation, taking $200,000 out of an initial $1.2 million ad buy, according to Politico. He and advisor/wife Jane Sanders — despite arguing that superdelegates should switch to their side — have openly discussed how they would advocate for progressive reforms to the Democratic Party’s agenda after the primary process is over.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, hasn’t spent any money on ads in Indiana, or any of the other remaining primary states, for that matter, an indication that she is getting ready for a general election battle against Donald Trump, barring a literal miracle for God’s anointed candidate.

“We’ve got a real assault going on, on the rights we have in our country, and in fact you’ve got it going on right here in Indiana,” Clinton said at a rally Sunday, referencing the incredibly restrictive abortion law signed recently by Governor Mike Pence. “I will work against the divisiveness, the mean spiritedness, the hateful rhetoric that we are hearing from Donald Trump and others.”

It’s Increasingly Unlikely That Ted Cruz Can Stop Trump

It’s Increasingly Unlikely That Ted Cruz Can Stop Trump

Ted Cruz is fighting for his political life in Indiana.

Coming off the back of a disastrous week, in which Cruz failed to win all but three delegates up for grabs across the five states that voted last Tuesday, the Texas senator faces a steep uphill battle.

This past weekend, former Speaker of the House John Boehner called Ted Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh.” The two have a known rivalry, ever since Ted Cruz needlessly shut down the government, twice, and it seems Cruz is so unpalatable Boehner doesn’t trust him to save the Republican Party from Donald Trump.

The Texas senator helped foment the revolt against Boehner back in October 2015, hardening the animosity between the two men. “I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life,” said Boehner.

The following day, Cruz appeared at the California Republican Party’s convention at Stanford University, where he received the endorsement of former California governor Pete Wilson. Despite the endorsement of the man who tabled Proposition 187, a ballot initiative to prevent undocumented immigrants from using the state’s public services, reporters noted a lack of both protesters and security presence. The protesters had shown up the previous day, blocking the highway to the hotel where the convention was being held, forcing Trump to cross highway barricades to reach the convention. Thus, the Christian-American-conservative-Republican senator was beaten again, this time by being less reviled than a racist, political opportunist from Queens.

On Sunday morning, The New York Times reported that a number of Cruz delegates were reconsidering their support for the Texas senator following Trump’s five-state sweep last Tuesday. The news will hurt the Cruz campaign, given how much he has bet on securing delegates through state party conventions in addition to the popular vote. And even in that endeavor, Cruz has shown signs of faltering: in Pennsylvania, he failed to secure anything close to a majority of Pennsylvania’s 54 unbound delegates, a bloc of potential kingmakers at a contested convention. Further compounding his flagging campaign are polls showing Trump with an unassailable lead just days before the crucial Indiana primary. Just a single poll shows Cruz ahead.

At a campaign event in La Porte, Indiana, a protester told him “You suck!” to which Cruz replied, “Thank you, son.”

With less than a day before voting begins in Indiana, it is highly unlikely that Cruz will be able to turn his campaign around. Nominating Carly Fiorina, who could very well not be his vice presidential pick if he somehow makes it to a contested convention, looks more and more to have been the political equivalent of an adrenaline injection than a sustained revival of the Cruz campaign.