RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

“Coburn said he was picking Rubio because “America desperately needs a president who will appeal to people’s highest aspirations rather than their deepest fears; a president who will model servant leadership rather than self-promotion; and a president who will cast a vision and unite the country instead of denigrating dissenters as second-class citizens.”

A populist former senator who famously chronicled government waste and set the conservative austerity agenda blasted Donald Trump as “a populist without portfolio” in his endorsement of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) resigned at the conclusion of the last Congress to focus on his fight against cancer.

Rubio had already been endorsed in early January by Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe (R).

“Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, ‘Cowardice asks the question – is it safe? Expediency asks the question – is it politic? Vanity asks the question – is it popular? But conscience asks the question – is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right,'” Coburn said in a statement today.

Coburn said he was picking Rubio because “America desperately needs a president who will appeal to people’s highest aspirations rather than their deepest fears; a president who will model servant leadership rather than self-promotion; and a president who will cast a vision and unite the country instead of denigrating dissenters as second-class citizens.”

“…Marco is the only candidate in this race who is in the mold of President Reagan. While some are offering a message of victimization and helplessness against Washington, Marco understands that ‘We the People’ are the establishment and the elites in American society. We need a president who will reawaken our belief in the American idea and not merely complain about how things are but challenge us to dream of what could be.”

Coburn added that Rubio “has been an extremely effective Tea Party senator” in Washington.

“So one of two things are going to happen. Either people are going to expose Trump now for the reprobate that he is, or the Democrats will do it in the fall when he is the candidate. If you don’t want a Democrat in the White House come January 2017, now is the time to wise up to what a clueless low-life Donald Trump really is.”

So here we are on the eve of Super Tuesday, tha momentous day when a candidate can win more delegates than any any other single day of the primary.

“The Republican candidates can win about half of the 1,237 delegates needed,” Wikipedia tells us. “The two remaining Democrats are after 880 delegates, roughly one-third of those needed to win. The number of delegates from Texas is much greater than the other states: 155 for Republicans and 252 for Democrats.”

The rules for how the delegates are apportioned differ between the Democrats and the Republicans. “For the Democrats,” the Constitution Center explains, “about 22 percent of all convention delegates are selected for the national convention on Super Tuesday, with 11 states, American Samoa and overseas delegates in play. All votes are counted proportionately.”

For the Republicans, there is a more complicated set of rules to select delegates in a “winner-take-most,” and in a proportional fashion, for the 12 states in play. Depending on how well the leading candidate does, he can scoop up most of a state’s delegates, or only about the same number as a third-place finisher:

The “winner-take-most” states account for 438 delegates, or 70 percent, of the delegates picked on Super Tuesday. Of the 12 Super Tuesday GOP states, eight states follow “winner take most” rules that require the leading candidate to have more than 50 percent of the vote among congressional districts and at-large groups to get most of the delegates. Without a majority winner, the delegates are divided among candidates who receive at least 15 percent or 20 percent of votes.

And that model doesn’t favor a candidate greatly who is the voting leader, with less than 50 percent of the vote within a state.

This system provides a potential lifeline to Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, both of whom trail Donald Trump in most of the polls (except Texas, where Cruz is ahead). Ben Carson and John Kasich are both likely to get clobbered tomorrow, but Kasich, at least, can hope to do well in the coming weeks when big, “winner-take-all” northern states like Ohio — his home state — are decided:

After March 14, GOP primaries are allowed to use “winner-take-all” rules to settle their elections. In all, 15 states use winner-take-all rules, including Florida, Ohio and Illinois on March 15, and the winner-take-all states account for 36 percent of the national convention delegates. It is the winner-take-most states that account for about 37 percent of the national delegates, with proportional states and caucuses making up the remaining 27 percent.

Both Donald Trump’s supporters and detractors seem to agree that the rise of his rogue candidacy was precipitated by years of widening divergence between the Republican base and its established leadership. Trump, himself representing nearly nothing of substance, has become the consummate protest candidate. While many may be attracted to his nationalist rhetoric about rounding up illegals, taking on China, and making America great again, many others see through the facade, know Trump’s candidacy will mortally wound the party, and merely want to watch the world burn.

Regardless of how we came to this point, it seems clear that the rise of Donald Trump signals a transformative moment in American politics. No matter how things sort out, the Republican Party will change. A report from the Associated Press sets the stage:

On the eve of Super Tuesday’s crucial primaries, a sharp new divide erupted between Republicans who pledge to fall in line behind Donald Trump if he wins their party’s nomination and others who insist they can never back the bombastic billionaire.

The fissure could have major implications beyond the primaries, exposing the looming challenges in uniting the party after the election, no matter who wins.

Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, a rising star among conservatives, became the first current senator to publicly raise the prospect of backing a third-party option if Trump clinches the nomination. In a letter posted on Facebook late Sunday, Sasse urged Republicans to consider whether a party led by Trump would still represent their interests.

“If our party is no longer working for the things we believe in — like defending the sanctity of life, stopping Obamacare, protecting the Second Amendment, etc. — then people of good conscience should stop supporting that party until it is reformed,” he wrote.

Should he win the Republican nomination, the Clinton machine will pile so much dirt on Donald Trump that it will take an archeologist to find him. Even if there is absolutely nothing dirty in Trump’s past, the Clintons will manipulate the Democrat propaganda arm — i.e. the media — to persuade a majority of voters that there is.

This is, after all, the machine that convinced a certain percentage of the American people during the 1992 campaign that George H.W. Bush, not Clinton, was the philandering womanizer. The crew that persuaded Ross Perot that Bush was somehow scheming to disrupt the wedding of Perot’s daughter, just to control the ’92 presidential race. The posse that manipulated an independent prosecutor’s office into a last-minute indictment of Caspar Weinberger that included Bush’s name, the timing of which even Clinton confidante Lanny Davis later called “bizarre” and which many observers believe sewed up the election for Clinton.

The list of Clinton dirty tricks is longer than my arm. Longer even than the arm of one of Mr. Trump’s padded-shoulder suit coats. Dirty political tricks have been around forever, but the Clintons seem to have perfected them. The Clintons are the politics of personal destruction.

Enter Donald Trump.

His slate might be perfectly clean. Maybe all the lawsuits in his past are the result of others being overly litigious. Maybe all the Page Six articles won’t result in what Betsey Wright, of the Clinton camp, termed “bimbo eruptions” over Bill’s use, and abuse, of women. Maybe Trump’s past bankruptcies didn’t produce wounded vendors and former employees eager to seek revenge on a person they feel left them high and dry. Maybe the Trump University lawsuits will amount to nothing.

In the late 1950s, Bill Buckley decreed that nobody whose name appeared on the masthead of the American Mercury magazine would be published in the pages of National Review. The once-illustrious Mercury of H.L. Mencken had become a gutter of far-right anti-Semites. Buckley would not allow his magazine to be tainted by them.

The word for Buckley’s act is “lustration,” and for two generations it upheld the honor of the mainstream conservative movement. Liberals may have been fond of claiming that Republicans were all closet bigots and that tax cuts were a form of racial prejudice, but the accusation rang hollow because the evidence for it was so tendentious.
Not anymore. The candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism. This Super Tuesday, polls show a plurality of GOP voters intend to dive right into it, like the boy in the “Slumdog Millionaire” toilet scene. And they’re not even holding their noses.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has endorsed the Code Pink view of the Iraq War (Bush lied; people died). He has cited and embraced an aphorism of Benito Mussolini. (“It’s a very good quote,” Mr. Trump told NBC’s Chuck Todd.) He has refused to release his “very beautiful” tax returns. And he has taken his time disavowing the endorsement of onetime Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke—offering, by way of a transparently dishonest excuse, that “I know nothing about David Duke.” Mr. Trump left the Reform Party in 2000 after Mr. Duke joined it.

None of this seems to have made the slightest dent in Mr. Trump’s popularity. If anything it has enhanced it. In the species of political pornography in which Mr. Trump trafficks, the naughtier the better. The more respectable opinion is scandalized by whatever pops out of the Donald’s mouth, the more his supporters cheer him for sticking it to the snobs and the scolds. The more Mr. Trump traduces the old established lines of decency, the more he affirms his supporters’ most shameless ideological instincts. CONTINUE AT SITE