Based on Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday dominance, it seems likely that the remainder of the GOP nomination process won’t be a battle between Trump and either Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, it will be a war between Trump and the Washington, D.C. / Wall Street establishment that will attempt to bring Trump down in any way possible. The mainstream media is colluding with the establishment by launching a virulent assault on Trump’s character and qualifications. Political analysts of all stripes aren’t even pretending to maintain journalistic integrity. They simply can’t believe that such an unconventional interloper would dare threaten to dismember the current political infrastructure.
Instead of celebrating Trump’s inevitable GOP nomination, a well-funded super PAC is now arranging attack ads designed to destroy Trump’s credibility. There’s no telling how many millions of dollars will be spent on this mission over the next few months. These efforts will hardly matter. Trump isn’t winning niche markets and failing in others. He’s proven he can win in southern, northeastern, and western states. Evangelicals and secularists back him. Working-class centrists support him as well, and contrary to some initial claims, well-educated voters choose him over Cruz and Rubio, as evidenced in Massachusetts primary voting. Cruz took his home state of Texas. This might be his last big hurrah. Unless something changes dramatically over the next few weeks, Rubio won’t even take his home state of Florida. Even if Rubio drops out of the race, which he probably won’t prior to the Florida primary, there’s no guarantee that those voting for him now would vote for Cruz by default.
In all likelihood, the only way Trump’s many GOP enemies might beat him is via a “brokered” GOP convention in July. If Trump enters the convention with less than the 1,237 delegates needed for outright nomination, and if there’s no nominee after the first round of balloting, convention delegates could be eligible to vote for any candidate. If something strange occurs in this regard and Trump isn’t nominated, he’ll simply pull his support from the GOP, thus destroying any chances for the party to win the presidential election. Corporate, political, and media upset can’t change this.
In other words, the Republican Party establishment is facing perhaps its biggest crisis ever. GOP insiders seem to be in an ongoing state of denial over unfolding events because they keep ignoring what voters are trying to tell them. A now-significant number of Americans will no longer tolerate a surging $19 trillion debt, disastrous and dishonest military policies, the evaporation of the middle-class due to outsourcing, Beltway deception, greed, and arrogance, and so on. Donald Trump is merely a symptom of this upset. People vote for him because he’s not a Beltway insider like Cruz or Rubio.
If Trump does win the GOP nomination, which will surely be a circus, Democrats should be very nervous. Trump has been growing the Republican voting base just by his presence, and who would have expected the current voting outcomes just a year ago? Practically no one. If Trump does, indeed, win the presidency, the Republican Party will change considerably from its current configuration, and a Trump presidency will serve as a bridge between what the GOP represents now and what it might become in order to better serve the American public in the coming decades. This means balancing the budget, rebuilding the middle class through new and visionary homegrown industry, upgrading our decaying infrastructure, protecting individual liberties, avoiding military adventurism while maintaining a strong national defense, respecting science and technology, and working across the aisle for legislation that benefits as many Americans as possible.
