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#NeverTrump7 = BREAK GLASS in CASE of “A Republic, if you can keep it” EMERGENCY

by Annie | Leave a comment

I’ve had this tweet pinned since before Memorial Day:

A week or so later, I was thrilled beyond description to see this paragraph in The Hill:

And then June 4th I see this, “Dear GOP Convention Delegates: Declare Your Independence”  by Steave Deace at Conservative Review, which I have excerpted below the line.

I sure hope this is the beginning of something…

If you’ve ever asked yourself “Why do we have conventions anyway? Who are these delegates? These crazy people on the floor with the straw hats and the pins and the red/white/blue shirts?” Steve offers an answer* but I would like to offer my own.

What if the primary winner dies? (God forbid! And I mean that sincerely. As catastrophic as I believe a Trump – or Hillary – Presidency would be, we don’t want anyone harmed. Ever.) Think about it. What if it’s right now, the beginning of June, 5 weeks from the convention, 5 months from the November election. We’ve just had a year of campaigning. Seventeen candidates, save one, dispensed with. What if something happens?

We couldn’t POSSIBLY get a 50 state mulligan (57 states & territories, actually, but let’s not be persnickety). There’s NO WAY we could have a do-over. For the OBVIOUS logistical reasons, but also the Constitutional question. The people had their say. They cast their votes, chose their delegates. It’s done. You can’t disenfranchise those millions of people. You just can’t.

Thus, the delegates system. THAT’S WHY THEY’RE THERE. “Break Glass in Case of Emergency.” Now, typically, they vote the way their states voted and it’s desperately anti-climactic, the nominee having achieved 50%+1 of his party’s popular vote and 50%+1 (=1237) of his party’s delegates.

But we don’t have that this time. Trump’s achieved roughly 40% of the popular vote of his party. 2 of every 5 Republicans. 3 of every 5 Republicans voted NOT Trump. Perhaps not affirmatively negative (!) but OTHER than, to be sure.

And the delegates “win”? Hardly resounding. Trump will be sent limping to Cleveland. The stupid frickin’ corrupt RNC purposely crowded the field with a dozen candidates knowing Jeb was worse than beige-Volvo-vanilla and needed the field fractured to emerge with the most votes/delegates.

Then Trump happened. And it backfired spectacularly. S-P-E-C-T-A-C-U-L-A-R-L-Y.

I won’t go through the whole history of 2nd ballot Presidents (or 2+ ballots) but it’s happened before. Several times. We got Lincoln that way.

Anyway… Trump should be any sane, sentient, moral person’s own personal red line. I can’t vote for him. I can’t. With Hillary or Donny it’s like being forced to choose which I wanted amputated: Hands? Or feet?

I choose neither.

I choose BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.

*I did not include that portion of his article below, but you can see it in his original text.

DEAR GOP CONVENTION DELEGATES: DECLARE YOUR INDEPENDENCE

…(The new book, “Unbound: The Conscience of a Republican Delegate” is) co-authored by Curly Haugland, a 17-year veteran member of the RNC, who also currently sits on the powerful rules committee for the convention[.] The book uses the RNC’s own actual rules to make its case all GOP delegates are not bound to vote for Donald Trump (or anyone else as the nominee) who violates their conscience. …

If Haugland is right, and he is on the rules committee after all, then not a single GOP delegate is bound to vote for Trump as the Republican nominee. Especially given that Trump’s politics and character make him a far better standard bearer for the Democrats.

And lest anyone think this sounds like Obama picking and choosing which laws he’ll uphold, these RNC rules are in place to protect the system from just such a leader. See, this is how a republican form of government works. The popular vote puts a check-and-balance on the political class, but elected representatives (in this case delegates) put a check-and-balance on the unbridled passions of a wayward electorate. It’s why the Founding Fathers gave us mechanisms such as juries and the Electoral College in the first place.

This is now your role in preserving our constitutional republic if you are a GOP delegate.

This is why our representatives take an oath “so help me God” and not “so help me will of the people.”  …Never fear, delegates. You have the green light. Now all you need is the same sense of duty and courage that drove our Founding Fathers to dedicate their lives, fortunes and sacred honors to a cause that would keep generations of Americans free from the various and relentless yokes of tyranny.

Oh, and that doesn’t mean “let’s compromise and move passive-aggressively on the floor to make Ted Cruz the running mate because, unity.” If you admire Cruz’s courage of conviction, and see him as a future standard bearer for our ideals, you will dare not paint him into such a corner. … Cruz has taken more flack on our behalf than pretty much any Republican in recent memory, so he deserves a much better fate than that no-win scenario. Instead, focus your ire where it belongs. …

Don’t let the media that hates you pick your nominee (again). Insist this July that we will be led by a leader who respects the laws of nature and nature’s God, instead of a crude populist whose tantrums seduce us from both the left and the right. The country deserves much better, as does the party of Lincoln and Reagan which you now steward. It’s either that, or we may sadly look back years from now as the moment you helped accelerate American Exceptionalism’s collective fade to black.

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Trump is Bat Guano Insane

by Annie | Leave a comment

Not an hour ago, a grown man, who happens to be the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party for President of the United States, Leader of the Free World, said this:


What does one even say? I’m utterly speechless.

Kevin Williamson at NRO, a favorite writer of mine, summarizes the book on one Donald J. Trump’s manifest unfitness for any office of public trust. I could not agree more. Enjoy.

This Election Is Not an A/B Test
‘Not Hillary Clinton’ isn’t good enough
By Kevin D. Williamson — May 6, 2016

As soon as it became clear that game-show host Donald Trump was the presumptive Republican nominee, the usual radio ranters and Fox News mouths began the inevitable litany: If you aren’t for Donald Trump, then you must be for Hillary Clinton — it’s Himself or Herself.

There is more to this than A/B testing.

“If you aren’t for Trump, then you’re for Clinton” is a cheap rhetorical ploy. I’d write that any thinking adult would be ashamed for falling for that kind of sixth-grade debater’s stratagem, but a Republican electorate capable of choosing Donald Trump as its standard-bearer is incapable of shame.

The angry insistence — him or her! — is, for the moment, mainly an attempt to forestall further criticism of Trump. That criticism consists of stating a fact that is not a matter of degree but a binary proposition, a yes/no question. It is not that Trump is less mentally stable than Mrs. Clinton (probably true) or that he is more dishonest than Mrs. Clinton (difficult to say) or that he might do even more damage to the republic, or any other point of comparison between the candidates.

The issue, instead, is this:

Donald Trump is unfit for the office.

He is unfit for any office, morally and intellectually.

A man who could suggest, simply because it is convenient, that his opponent’s father had something to do with the assassination of President Kennedy is unfit for any position of public responsibility.

His long litany of lies — which include fabrications about everything from his wealth to self-funding his campaign — is disqualifying.

His low character is disqualifying.

His personal history is disqualifying.

His complete, utter, total, and lifelong lack of honor is disqualifying.

The fact that he is going to have to take time out of the convention to appear in court to hear a pretty convincing fraud case against him is disqualifying.

His time on Jeffrey Epstein’s Pedophile Island, after which he boasted about sharing a taste with Epstein for women “on the younger side,” is disqualifying.

The fact that he knows less about our constitutional order than does a not-especially-bright Rappahannock River oyster is disqualifying.

There isn’t anything one can say about Mrs. Clinton, monster though she is, that changes any of that.

Donald Trump is not fit to serve as president. He is not fit to serve on the Meade County board of commissioners. He is not fit to be the mayor of Muleshoe, Texas.

If he indeed is the Republican nominee, Donald Trump almost certainly will face Hillary Rodham Clinton in the general election. That fact, sobering though it is, does not suddenly make him fit to serve as president, because — to repeat — the problem with Trump isn’t that he is less fit to serve in comparison to Mrs. Clinton, but that he is unfit to serve, period.

Paul Ryan is right to withhold his support, and those who have suddenly discovered that attending the Republican convention conflicts with their cat-shampooing schedule — both Presidents Bush, nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney — have in this matter chosen the better part, while former Texas governor Rick Perry has shown poor judgment. Trump, who long claimed (falsely) that he was self-funding his campaign and therefore was beholden to no one, has just named a hedge-fund boss and former Goldman Sachs partner to raise money, but donors are walking sideways away from him—as they should.

“Unite the Party” talk ignores the question: “Unite with what?” The answer, in this case, is a coddled, petulant, celebrity megalomaniac leading a small movement of cable-news-inspired populist drama queens whose motto is “Eek! A Mexican!” It is shallow, but celebrity is the most powerful force in American culture, more powerful than money and certainly more powerful than argument. Those of you joking about Kanye West running in 2020 shouldn’t laugh too hard.

But celebrity isn’t all-powerful. Trump had a smashing victory in the New York Republican primary, but he received far fewer votes than did second-place Democratic finisher Bernie Sanders, and barely half of Mrs. Clinton’s votes. The idea that a Trump candidacy is suddenly going to put into play states such as New York and New Jersey is fantasy. Those crying “Unite the Party!” might want to think about how closely they wish to be united with a candidacy that may very well lose 35 states and hand the Senate over to Chuck Schumer, who is of course another recipient of Trump’s many generous donations to progressives.

Those shouting “If you don’t support Trump, you’re for Clinton!” do not wish to speak or think very much about what the Trump movement and its enablers, from Sean Hannity to Ann Coulter, have done to the Republican party and to the conservative movement. They’re going to want to think about that even less as the months go by, and by January there’s very likely to be an outbreak of convenient amnesia. But the rest of us should be frank about what has happened.

The Republican party is preparing to nominate for the presidency a man grossly unfit for the office.

— Kevin D. Williamson is the roving correspondent at National Review.

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Trump Liquefaction

by Annie | Leave a comment

liquefaction
noun. [lik-wuh-fak-shuh n]

  1. the act or process of liquefying or making liquid.
  2. the state of being liquefied.

Geology: The process by which sediment that is very wet starts to behave like a liquid. Liquefaction occurs because of the increased pore pressure and reduced effective stress between solid particles generated by the presence of liquid. It is often caused by severe shaking, especially that associated with earthquakes.

I first learned of liquefaction by having an example of it quite literally shaken into me. Though I was “safely” on the bedrock of North Beach when the Great Quake of 1989 struck, the bruised cloud of the fires that burned in the Marina District of San Francisco were visible from my window. Why did the Marina burn? Well, turns out the Marina District of San Francisco, like the Back Bay of Boston, are landfill. Just… sand. Lots of it. Manufactured land that is there not by the Grace of God but by the hand of man. We built it. To make extra room. Which is all fine and good until there’s an earthquake. Then all that cemented over sand acts like, well, sand. And gives way.

The cement roads in North Beach looks just like the cement roads in the Marina. You can’t tell just by looking at them that beneath the former is bedrock and the latter is sand.

Until something destructive happens.

In the political arena, that’s Trump. We’ve found out the hard way who’s bedrock and who’s sand. I opined on this the other day, but Did They Ever Believe? says it better.

Enjoy.

Townhall.com 4/21/2016
Did They Ever Believe? by Derek Hunter

To hear TV personalities and pundits who’ve espoused conservative values and policies for years abandon them for an egomaniac incapable of the most basic discussion of policy makes you wonder if they ever meant it.

Is the desire for relevance so strong that principle can be cast aside? Or did they ever hold those principles in the first place?

Are they so beholden to ratings and money they’re willing to betray all they’ve presented themselves as for access?

Either they’ve been lying all along, they’re lying now, or they never had any idea what conservatism is about.

Trade wars, government intervention in the economy, ordering businesses around about how to operate, health care mandates, whining about rules, etc., etc., … Republicans have espoused all of them in the past. But that doesn’t make them conservative.

Truth can’t be situational. Principle is not dependent upon circumstance. Yet these “leaders” swept aside reality in Colorado, which held a caucus on May 1, and embraced the “voterless victory” lie. To do anything else would risk their access to Trump, who won’t return to interviewers who ask real questions and call him out on his non-answers.

Did they fall for a bumper sticker? Is it all that simple? Are they that open to suggestions written on hats? Do they follow people home to ask them about their grandchildren because they read it on the back of a minivan?

“Make America Great Again” reads well, as long as you don’t ask the only follow-up question that matters: How? Does citing poll numbers wipe the section of the brain containing the fact Social Security and Medicare have 100+ trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities and Donald Trump said straight out he doesn’t want to reform them at all?

These pundits and hosts have become unwatchable. They’ve betrayed all they’ve done to this point. So much so, you have to wonder if they were this awful all along. Did they pull the greatest hoax in history?

Like the “GOP establishment” they decry, they’ve been selling one thing but became something else when the chips were down. After years of demanding accountability from squishy Republicans in Congress, they’ve become John Boehner.

They plead neutrality, but they embarrassingly badger other candidates to justify playing by the rules because Daddy Trumpbucks whines about a “rigged system.” If the system is so corrupt, and he’s winning, what’s that say about him?

The throne-sniffing media “conservatives” know not to bother with difficult questions on complex issues. Substantive discussions with Trump are like throwing a newborn into the deep end of a pool. So they don’t happen, no matter how many times they interview him.

When not kissing Donald’s ring, these establishment media types can be heard sucking up to his children. It is embarrassing.

No, they couldn’t have switched on everything overnight. They must’ve been playing a role. Conservatism sells, especially on radio and in cable news. So you just have to say a few buzzwords, go “rah-rah” for this or that cause, feign outrage at all the right times, and boom – job security.

When that security is threatened by the most powerfully addictive drug America has seen since Heisenberg’s blue meth – a celebrity – a course adjustment becomes easier if your highest principle always has been yourself.

We’ve been duped by a marketing gimmick akin to “Batman vs. Superman,” which left us thirsty, holding cases of “New Coke.” These weathervanes of the right are the father who went out for a pack of smokes and never came back.

If Donald Trump doesn’t reach 1,237 delegates before Cleveland, count on these mic’d up megaphones to maintain their silence as Donald’s goon squads make good on their promise to threaten and harass delegates to get their way.

Be it by stalking them in their rooms or preventing them from even getting to the convention, this subject will remain a blow-off topic in their sessions with The Donald. They’ll mention it, and he’ll say those people have no connection with the campaign. Since Trump’s company is private, and he won’t release his tax returns despite not actually being under IRS audit (another no-go topic for interviews), we’ll never know if they’re getting money from him or how much.

We’ll be left to wonder why these people are so devoted to a man they’re willing to work tirelessly for him for free.

Then again, that’s what these “titans” of conservative media have been doing, so maybe it’s not so farfetched.

In the end it doesn’t much matter if they ever believed. It’s clear they don’t now, and now is all there is. Well, now and tomorrow. After November, the tomorrows for these soothsayers of victory will run as dry. Their audiences will wonder how “the man who was going beat Hillary” lost. To paraphrase the mythical Pauline Kael quote, they won’t know how Trump lost … everyone they listened to said he was the only one who could win.

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Trumpfeasance

by Annie | Leave a comment

Trump’s entire argument for being President is competence as a manager & negotiator.

I ask you: What’s the first thing you would do if you decided to run for President? Hm? Answer: Hire a competent campaign manager. Someone who knows the rules. How’s it done. What you need. The candidate himself doesn’t have to be an old hand at politics, just have the wit to know you need to hire one. There are no mysteries to this. We have 50 individual elections (56 if you count the territories). We’re not a democracy. We’re a Constitutional Republic. We have a *representative* form of government. We have a whole series of emergency brakes built in in case there’s some kind of unforeseen disaster. Consider: what if the day before the convention Trump had a heart attack? Became incapacitated? You would want a failsafe in place to manage this. You can’t re-do the entire year of primaries, obviously. So there are rules & processes in place to manage these things.

The recipe to become the nominee has been unchanged since the days of Lincoln. 50% + 1 delegate = GOP nominee. If you don’t win 1237, you haven’t won. That’s why we have conventions. So if someone hasn’t won, or has a heart-attack, or there’s some other unforeseen situation, these people, these delegates, who our representative process has freely and fairly put there can finish the job. Every candidate has equal access to exactly the same process to get there. Despite what Trump would have you believe, nobody was handcuffed naked to his plane unable to read the rules.

With that in mind, consider the following April 12 article from AP* describing Mr. Art-of-the-Deal’s weapons-grade failure to manage his own campaign. To do the most basic friggin’ things.

How can anyone vote for this jerk?

*Bolds are mine, with a few snips […] taken out here & there for brevity.

Trump Amassing Delegates Who Might Not Be Loyal to Him

Already behind the curve in organizing for the Republican convention, Donald Trump has missed crucial deadlines in a number of states to lock up delegates who would stay loyal beyond the first ballot.

Trump’s shortcomings in this behind-the-scenes campaign, which hasn’t played much of a role in selecting the GOP nominee in decades, could doom his presidential candidacy if he is unable to win the nomination in the initial voting at this summer’s national convention in Cleveland.

After that first ballot, most delegates are no longer bound to support the winner of their state’s party primary or caucuses — they’re free agents who can support the candidate of their choosing.

Most of the actual delegates are elected at state and congressional district conventions run by party insiders, members of the Republican establishment that Trump has run against from the outset of his campaign.

And while Trump’s team has had little contact with these loyal party activists, his chief rival for the Republican nomination, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, has been actively courting them for months.

Trump has spent the past three days hammering at his party’s delegate selection process as “unfair.”

At a rally in Rome, New York, Tuesday evening, Trump angrily denounced Saturday’s final allocation of all of Colorado’s delegates to Cruz, blasting the party’s system as “rigged” and “corrupt.”

Trump’s team is only now starting to engage in the delegate selection process, the choosing of the actual people who will attend and vote at the convention. Republicans have already selected delegates in at least nine states. And in others, such as Virginia and Arizona, the deadline to apply to be a delegate has passed.

Indiana‘s primary, for example, won’t take place until next month. But the deadline to become a national convention delegate was in mid-March. “Are we concerned? Yes, definitely,” said Tony Samuel, vice chairman of Trump’s Indiana campaign. The Cruz team feels the opposite. “Even if (Trump) jumped into high gear, he can’t do it,” said Shak Hill, a Cruz campaign leader in Virginia. “That’s where he’s been shut out of the game.”

Trump’s delegates must vote for him on the first ballot at the convention. But if no one gets a majority, most of the delegates can then bolt if they choose. … Cruz has built an organization of volunteers who are working in state after state to get his supporters selected as delegates, even those who must vote for Trump at first.

Trump is just ramping up his operation, but in some states he’s too late.

In Virginia — a state where Trump won the primary — he has missed the deadlines to assemble lists of potential delegates. Cruz, however, has delegate candidates in 10 of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts.

The application deadline was last month.

Indiana‘s primary is May 3, but 27 of the state’s 57 delegates — the actual people — have already been selected at congressional district caucuses. The deadline to register as a candidate for delegate was March 15.

In all, at least nine states have picked some or all of their delegates: Colorado, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, North Dakota, Tennessee and Wisconsin.

Trump has won a total of 100 delegates in primaries and caucuses in these states. In most, however, the candidates had no formal role in selecting the people who will fill those slots.

To help manage the process, Trump’s campaign hired a convention manager, Paul Manafort, last week. … He said Trump was successful in selecting delegates in Michigan, and predicted the same in Nevada. “In fact, we wiped him out,” Manafort said in an NBC interview Sunday. “And we’re going to see Ted Cruz get skunked in Nevada.”

Former South Carolina Republican Chairman Katon Dawson, who has been publicly neutral in the race, said he’s seen no difference in Trump’s delegate strategy since Manafort’s hire. Said Dawson, a veteran national GOP strategist, “He’s not a household name or miracle worker by any stretch.” Trump won all 50 of South Carolina’s delegates. But in order to be a delegate at the national convention, you had to be a delegate at last year’s state convention. “The people that are going to fill those slots were already selected anyway,” said Republican political consultant Tony Denny, who has been a delegate to three previous GOP national conventions. Cruz has already done a lot of groundwork to get supporters selected as delegates in South Carolina. “The delegate selection process is in their DNA,” Denny said of Cruz’s ground operation.

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Who’s Zoomin’ Who, Donny?

by Annie | Leave a comment

I have long contended that if the GOPe (GOP Establishment) were forced to choose between the two, Cruz or Trump, they’d choose Trump in a heart beat. Why? Here’s why (You can click the image on the right to enlarge it):


Gravy train. “Trump train” my ass . It’s the gravy train that’s now a’rollin’. Of the two, Trump will deal. Cash. Cruz will always choose the Constitution.

And cash is more fun, isn’t it?

Add in this excellent article below from American Thinker by Daren Jonescu, and it appears my thinking is now being actively validated.

 

Is Trump a McConnell-Rove Establishment Tool?

On January 19, Donald Trump, the loudest Republican claimant to the anti-establishment label, filled out his recent attacks on Ted Cruz in a very telling way, as revealed on Mark Levin’s radio program (click here, select the 1/19/16 podcast, go to the 23 minute mark):

We've been contacted by the establishment types.  They all want to know, how do they get involved with the campaign?  They're giving up on their candidates…and I mean these are real establishment people, that I've known when I was a member of the establishment -- meaning a giver, a big donor.  But they are contacting us -- Corey [Trump's campaign manager], I think we can say that very honestly, they're contacting us left and right about joining the campaign, and these are serious establishment types.

Who might these “real,” “serious” establishment types be?  Perhaps there is a hint in this subsequent comment, a follow-up to his recent pro-establishment assault against Ted Cruz:

So when you talk about temperament, Ted has got a rough temperament, I don't know.  You know, you can't call people liars on the Senate floor, when they're your leader.

This, of course, is a direct reference to Cruz’s criticism of Mitch McConnell regarding the GOP establishment leader’s secret deal with Barack Obama prior to a trade vote.

Donald Trump defending Mitch McConnell, you ask?  The answer is yes, and the explanation may be found by examining Trump’s recent history as a political donor.

Back in early 2013, Tea Party conservatives, fed up with McConnell’s feckless (to be generous) Senate leadership, his semi-tough talk that never seems to match his legislative decisions and results, and his relentless suppression of the conservative minority in the Senate, sought to supplant this establishmentarian’s establishmentarian by supporting a conservative rival in the 2014 Kentucky primary.

In response to this challenge, a super PAC called “Kentuckians for Strong Leadership” was formed to raise funds for McConnell’s scorched earth campaign against not only his own Tea Party rival, but the whole Tea Party movement.  I put the group’s name in scare quotes because, of its fifty-eight major donors — those who had given $1000 or more as of May 15, 2014 — the Louisville Courier-Journal identified only five with Kentucky addresses.  “Kentuckians for Strong Leadership” was in fact, as Tony Lee reported at Breitbart at the time, a re-branding of Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, an organization expressly dedicated to destroying the constitutionalist movement in favor of the old guard GOP establishment.

The big donors to Mitch McConnell’s anti-Tea Party defense fund gave amounts ranging from $1000 to $250,000.  In the upper half of this donor list appears one Donald J. Trump, who gave $50,000 to the group.  Five days earlier, he had already donated a few thousand dollars to McConnell’s campaign directly.  This total donation is far and away the largest contribution Trump has ever made to any individual Washington politician’s campaign — at least ten times larger than any other contribution he has made to a national Republican candidate.  Indeed, one has to cross over to the Democrat side of his donor history to find anything comparable to this contribution at any level of government.  That would be his $50,000 donation to Rahm Emanuel’s mayoral campaign in December 2010.

Mitch McConnell has been perhaps the single most prominent leader — certainly the most powerful — in the Republican Party’s long-standing effort to “crush” (McConnell’s word) the grassroots constitutional conservative movement that threatens the privileged status of the Washington Brahmin caste, aka the American political establishment.

In 2014, the Tea Party had the temerity to challenge McConnell directly on his own home turf.  He did indeed crush them there, as he would happily crush them in the Senate.  His effort to annihilate the constitutionalist resistance was funded heavily by a nationwide group of donors affiliated with Karl Rove, who presumably shared McConnell’s and Rove’s desire to defend the establishment against the belligerent serfs who were daring to assert their liberty against its permanent privilege.

Donald Trump was a major donor to that effort.  He even threw another $10,000 into the pot in October 2014, to bring his total contribution to McConnell to more than $60,000.

Now he is attacking his primary rival, Ted Cruz, on the grounds that “Nobody in Congress likes him,” and, more specifically, that “you can’t call people liars on the Senate floor, when they’re your leader.”

Donald Trump is no longer making a generic accusation against Cruz’s demeanor or reputation.  He is slapping him on behalf of the Republican he has supported most generously, Mitch McConnell.  I have previously argued that Trump’s reputation as anti-establishment is all hot air, corresponding to nothing he has ever really done.  Here we have just one more clear example of that.

A conservative blogger friend recently suggested to me privately that he is not ready to reject outright the possibility that Trump is actually the establishment’s clever creation — that, after years of deepening threats from an increasingly serious constitutionalist faction within the GOP, the progressive Republicans may have surmised that the best path to victory is, as my friend puts it, to “run against themselves.”

Whether strategic or merely fortuitous, the alliance between Donald Trump and the GOP establishment, which has lurked verifiably behind Trump’s brash mask for years, has now become an open feature of his primary campaign.  And the chief target, Enemy Number One, of both parties in this alliance is Ted Cruz.  Cruz is “nasty” and “nobody likes him,” as Trump says, because he is brazenly defiant toward the GOP establishment’s leaders.

And you thought the whole point of being anti-establishment was to be brazenly defiant toward the establishment’s leaders.  Silly you.  Apparently, a real anti-establishment candidate would not donate $60,000 to Mitch McConnell’s “crush the Tea Party” campaign.

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