RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘I’m as conservative as anyone in this race, but I’m the conservative that can unify the Republican party,” Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) often says on the campaign trail. This is not just an empty slogan. Rubio already is keeping this promise.

The first indication that Rubio is welding together the disparate wings of the GOP came when he united two sons of the same state. Within hours on February 3, Rubio won the endorsement of both Senator Pat Toomey – the unassuming, easygoing free-marketer and former head of the economics-focused Club for Growth — and former senator Rick Santorum, a stalwart social conservative and sometimes strident opponent of gay marriage. While Toomey and Santorum are both Pennsylvanians, they epitomize different wings of the GOP. Toomey is an economic libertarian. Santorum is a cultural conservative.

Rubio also has gained supporters from the GOP’s third wing: foreign-policy conservatives. (In this vividly mixed metaphor, the Republican elephant is a three-winged bird. Also, the average Republican combines these elements, although typically with one of these three wings being first among equals.)

Rubio has scored an array of endorsements across the party’s philosophical spectrum. From roughly the center-right to the right-right, these include — among many others – liberal to moderate Republicans such as former governor George Pataki of New York, Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee, and Representative Peter King of New York, a national-security hawk. “Most important of all for me,” King said, “Marco has a thorough knowledge of foreign policy and fully understands the true nature of the terrorist threat.”

Moderate Republicans for Rubio include senators Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Orrin Hatch of Utah; former senators Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Bob Dole of Kansas; and former governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota. Hatch said, “Marco has a unique ability to effectively communicate detailed, conservative plans in a way that attracts people who do not normally vote for Republicans.”

Prominent economic/libertarian Republicans in Rubio’s corner include senators Jeff Flake of Arizona, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Representative Matt Salmon of Arizona, former senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and past president of the Club for Growth and former Indiana congressman Chris Chocola. “I am proud to support Marco Rubio, a strong fiscal conservative and living testament to the American Dream,” Chocola said.

Among social conservatives, Rubio counts Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas, former governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, and David Green, CEO of Hobby Lobby, the company that sued to stop Obama from forcing it to include free abortifacients in its employee health plan. “Marco Rubio has impressed us with his preparation and the way he carries himself,” Green said. “But most importantly, Marco regularly exhibits humility and gives the glory to God.”

Some of Rubio’s most fervent detractors will point to Rubio’s appeal across the Republican party as proof that he is the reincarnation of Nelson Rockefeller. This charge is utterly preposterous, given Rubio’s 100 percent legislative-vote ratings from the American Security Council, the National Tax Limitation Committee, and the National Right to Life Committee and his 0 percent approval from Peace Action West, Americans for Democratic Action, and NARAL/Pro-Choice America. Nonetheless, this accusation is virtually antibiotic resistant in some circles, largely due to lingering suspicions over Rubio’s membership in the Senate’s informal Gang of Eight comprehensive-immigration-reform task force.

Still, it’s important for Rubio’s fans and foes alike to remember that fighting the general election with the Republican party in splinters is a splendid way to lose to socialist senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont or socialist crook Hillary Clinton of New York. Party unity will be key to defeating the Democrats and their standing army of activists, street thugs, union volunteers, and loyal cheerleaders in show business and the old-guard news media.

The arch-villain in Donald Trump’s storybook account of American politics is the Republican party. The malign forces of progressivism may have been on the march for the past several years. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have been hovering like Nazgûls over the bucolic expanses of middle America. Barack Obama has wielded vengefully the One Pen to Rule Them All. But it’s Republicans who are the real problem. The Grand Old Party has aided and abetted the country’s leftward lurch, proving themselves quislings and cowards all the way down, from John Boehner to John McCain. Breitbart.com hath surveyed the nation, and, lo, there was not a conservative to be found among them!

It turns out that Trump fans were right all along — just not in the way they thought.

On Friday, New Jersey governor Chris Christie endorsed Donald Trump in what was surely the most transparent display of affection since Judas Iscariot’s Gethsemane smooch. Not only had Christie spent the last several months blasting his tri-state opponent on the campaign trail — for, among other things, his absurd promise to make Mexico pay for a wall on the United States’ southern border, his proposed ban on Muslims entering the country, and his refusal to address entitlement reform — he reportedly told the New Hampshire Union Leader’s publisher, Joe McQuaid, that he would “never” endorse Trump. Christie says McQuaid is misremembering.

Presumably, Christie thinks an endorsement will increase the likelihood of his securing a position in a Trump administration (and given Trump’s financial history, that is a likelier prospect than his receiving 30 pieces of silver). But he has agreed to be, for the next several months, willingly at the end of Trump’s leash, evidence of which was Trump and Christie’s brief exchange after Christie’s speech in Arkansas: “Get on the plane and go home,” Trump said, caught on a hot mic. “It’s over. Go home.” There are pimps and prostitutes with more equitable relationships.

Both Donald Trump and his opponents are up against the constraints of time.

Trump wants to run out the clock; Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio want overtime. Trump does not want any more Texas-debate–style fights with Rubio and Cruz, and yet he still has four more debates on his schedule. In each one, we will see a geometric increase in attacks on Trump — all the more so if Carson or Kasich, or both, drop out, and the allotted debate time is split just three ways.

For the first time in the already too long series of debates, candidates descended to Trump’s brash style of street fighting. And they wounded him — not enough to seriously injure his candidacy, but enough for us to see how more of the same certainly might (and how more far earlier might have done so already).

The problem for Trump is not just that he cannot score points on ideas and so he monotonously strikes back with ad hominem slurs, but also that, off the cuff and in passing, he is capable of saying almost anything. Over two hours, those anythings — especially when they are windows into his past and his present values — finally add up.

So far Trump’s supporters have put up with his hypocrisies, self-contradictions, and unhinged statements — as if all that is felt to be a small price for hearing him pulverize Washington careerists, media flunkies, hypocritical grandees, and Republican sellouts. Americans are sick and tired of Black Lives Matter careerists and abject racists calling them racists, of wealthy apartheid liberals lecturing them about their white-privileged middle-class status, of crony green capitalists with huge carbon footprints, of hypocritical multimillionaire Malibu scolds, of the media hectoring the 52 percent who pay income taxes and canonizing the 48 percent who do not, of illegal aliens laying down to them a set of ultimatums while praising the country they were glad to leave and ankle-biting the one they want to stay in, of elites worrying more about the feelings of Islamic radicals than the terrorism that jihadists commit, and of our elected representatives borrowing more money for more government programs that make things far worse for everybody except those who run them.