RUTHFULLY YOURS

“More thoughtful G.O.P. voices argue that risking a bad Supreme Court nominee from Trump is better than guaranteeing a bad one from Hillary. And also: a Trump beholden to conservative voters is better than a Hillary at odds with them. But it won’t wash. American politics is a binary game, I know. Normally, I’m for the Buckley rule: go for the most conservative candidate you can get elected. But a dishonest big-government bully with a tendency to urge his crowds to violence exists nowhere on the spectrum of conservatism as I understand it.”

“As Donald Trump Rolls Up Victories, the G.O.P. Split Widens to a Chasm,” read the headline on the post-Super Tuesday analysis in the New York Times, a former newspaper. The article was typical of the Times’ modern work: a house of facts with a family of lies living inside. The gloating lede — “Democrats are falling in line. Republicans are falling apart” — was fair enough. It was even hard to argue with the accompanying front-page photo. It nastily captured Trump wearing a particularly supercilious smirk — and okay, fine; though I doubt any equally representative photos of a cackling, screeching Hillary Clinton have made the paper on any page.

But throughout the rest of the piece was scattered the usual Timestuff: dishonest leftist assertions casually tossed off as fact. The Republicans’ unwillingness to hold hearings on a replacement for Justice Scalia is a tactical error because it has energized the leftist base. (Ha.) The Obama economy is improving and unemployment is low. (That’s not what the Democrat candidates say.) Obama has a “nearly 50 percent” approval rating. (It’s closer to 46 percent, but more importantly he has plunged the nation into divisive rancor and racial violence we haven’t seen in years.)

But the worst was this:

Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College professor and the author of a new history of the Republican Party, predicts a violent rupture that cleaves the party in two: a hard-line conservatism, as embodied by Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Mr. Trump, and an old-fashioned strain of moderate Republicanism that recalls Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller.

If Professor Richardson thinks Donald Trump is a hard-line conservative, she should no more be writing about Republicans than I should be writing about quantum mechanics. Because she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

What is splitting the Republican Party in two is the very fact that Trump is not a conservative. He favors government health care. He favors disastrous protectionism. He favors less freedom of speech in the form of new libel laws making it easier for him to sue those who criticize him. He sends friendly signals to the haters of blacks and Jews. Plus he’s a foul-mouthed thug who treats women like dirt — which may be fine for the Clintons, but is unacceptable behavior in any conservative circle I’ve ever been in.

I still like Rubio but this is a persuasive column…..because I still loathe Trump….more than ever….rsk

“Trump will destroy first the Republican Party and then, with a likely Democratic victory, the nation. It’s now or never. Let all who recognize the train wreck that is Donald Trump unite. Cruz is not perfect. He’s not the Messiah (that role is already taken). But he has the brains, the conviction, and the guts to lead our nation in the direction that we want it to go and that the country needs it to go.”

With almost all the votes counted on Super Tuesday, Cruz finished with 2.5 million votes, compared to Rubio’s 1.9 million and Trump’s 2.9 million. Cruz bettered Rubio by 600,000 votes, which makes him the candidate around which other Republicans opposed to Trump need to coalesce. The latest polls before Super Tuesday indicated that Texas would be a close race between Cruz and Trump, yet Cruz ended up crushing Trump by 17 percentage points and nearly half a million votes. Trump was expected to beat Cruz in Oklahoma – so the latest polls told us. Yet Cruz defeated Trump decisively there. He also won the small-population state of Alaska.

What of Rubio? He did better in Virginia than polls predicted but still finished second to Trump. He won one primary, Minnesota, beating Cruz by only 8,000 votes. He did overtake Cruz for second place in Georgia, but only by less than one percent. He finished a distant third to Trump and Kasich in tiny Vermont and third to the same pair in Massachusetts. Cruz finished ahead of Rubio everywhere else, with second-place finishes in Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee, in addition to his three victories.

In the latest Florida poll (Feb. 26), Trump was leading Rubio in his home state of Florida by 20 percentage points. If Rubio cannot carry even his own home state, and that by a wide margin (as Cruz crushed Trump in his own home state), he stands no chance of beating Trump. It is time to face the math. It is time for Rubio supporters to come around to Ted Cruz as the only candidate left who both respects our values and can beat Trump. Let’s put our differences aside and make this a two-person race, before it is too late.

Questions have dogged the Donald Trump campaign from the start. Who is this guy? What does he believe? What are his party loyalties? And finally, will Trump run as a third party candidate if Republicans try to torpedo his quest for the White House?

Third Party?

Let’s start with the easiest question first. Donald Trump has already staged a coup. He is the third party candidate, albeit campaigning under a Republican guidon. Given his success up to this point, Trump seems to have outmaneuvered his critics on all sides. Indeed, he has hijacked a major political party and is now reshaping it to his purposes. Trump believes that he has the answer to national malaise and he is willing to pay his own way to the levers of power.

Self-funding alone makes Trump revolutionary. He’s “all in” to resuscitate his vision of the American dream.

Say what you will about Trump, but the phenomenon is vintage Americana. He has reinvented himself, reinvented political campaigns, reinvented American politics, and may be on the way to reinventing the country too. Trump is a third party, a party of one until done.

Now, to those other questions.

Who is Trump?

Defining Donald Trump is best done by saying what he is not. He is not a Republican, nor a Democrat. He is not a liberal, nor a conservative. And surely, he is not a lawyer. Not that any of the usual branding means much these days.

Most traditional labels are now captured in a few words: call them elites, establishment, or the usual suspects. Personalize the left as Chris Matthews or the right as George Will; it really doesn’t much matter. Both represent varieties of tired platitudes.

Trump isn’t running against, or for, any labels or specific ideology. He’s running against “business as usual,” or for an opportunity to make things work again. Trump wants to win first and sift the details later. Whether or not he is the guy to fix Washington is arguable, but none of the traditional pigeonholes apply in his case.

For the moment, you could call Trump a pragmatic populist. If business models are relevant, he probably thinks that he can build a better mousetrap. If his career and campaign to date is evidence, the Donald is pretty good at building, period.

Lawyers have dominated American politics now for generations. The time may be right to give a cocky guy who has had a real job, and concrete accomplishments, a shot at fixing decades of domestic and foreign policy folly. The Beltway status quo is Trump’s real target in 2016.

What does He Believe?

At heart, Donald Trump probably believes in three things: God, country, and Donald Trump. Surely God and America have been good to him and his family. Why should he not believe in himself?

Trump had the opportunity the other day to shame a pandering prelate in Mexico, a papal hypocrite — and he didn’t. Such restraint might be the fear of God — or intimations of a lighter touch once the electoral battles are done.

If Trump picks a fight with a church, it will not be Christians or Jews in any case. Francis and Bibi, like Trump, are both fond of walls too. And bye-the-by, Trump could pay for his southern wall with tariffs, applying a tax on the $20-some billion in annual remittances to Mexico, or withholding foreign aid from Mexico.

Vicente Fox and other scions of dystopic narco-states south of the border should be careful about “f—king walls” and related obscenities. If Trump becomes president, Vicente may have an open-ended opportunity to “foxtrot” himself and Mexico on a grand scale.