RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his victory speech after winning all five of the Northeast primaries on Tuesday, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump declared himself the “presumptive nominee.” As much as his fans liked it, the statement is, strictly speaking, just not true.

Despite big wins in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, The Donald still lacks the 1,237 delegates required to secure the nomination. It is true that his last remaining challengers, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, cannot gain enough pledged delegates to win outright, but that does not mean that Trump wins by process of elimination. The Donald cannot assume he wins just because his competition cannot claim the crown — he still has to pass the finish line himself.

That said, Trump is roughly on track to win the nomination. Even if Ted Cruz defeats him in the must-win states of Indiana and California, The Donald will only be about 100 delegates short. This is the scenario necessary to push the race to a contested convention, but even that does not guarantee a Cruz victory.

The Texas senator has the strongest grassroots operation focused on electing delegates who are friendly to Cruz. This is a brilliant strategy, so long as it does not distract from winning the two remaining states to block Trump’s nomination. On the first ballot at the convention, all pledged delegates will have to vote in the way their states decided. These are the raw numbers you see everywhere: Trump 950, Cruz 560, Kasich 153. After the first ballot, those delegates can start to decide for themselves.

Even before the air-clearing April 19 New York primary in which Bernie Sanders was trounced and Donald Trump was a big winner, word had come of a more presidential Trump soon to be revealed. The unveiling came with Mr. Trump’s victory speech, an event that occasioned near-universal excitement when the candidate used the word “senator” in front of Ted Cruz’s name—a reaction that said a good deal about Mr. Trump and his campaign, all of it deeply familiar.

Mr. Trump’s image refurbishing promises to become a show all its own, fascinating to behold, albeit with slim prospects of success. The same would be true for Bernie Sanders, also being pressed now to improve his tone—the nudging being another of the many things the two have in common in addition to the main thing, namely the enormous role both have played in advancing Hillary Clinton’s progress toward the White House.

Mr. Sanders is being urged, in the interest of Democratic unity, to temper his assaults on Hillary Clinton as a pawn of Wall Street and servant of special interests—no easy matter for a lifelong ideologue of the far left. But no accusation transmits more of a sense of high moral indignation than the regular reminders that Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war in 2002 and that he did not—a fact Mr. Sanders cites, by way of response, when facing questions about his qualifications for the presidency as compared with those of Mrs. Clinton.

To hear him again and again on Sen. Clinton’s war vote is to be struck by the unvarying intensity Mr. Sanders brings to the charge, the tone of a man delivering a bombshell, and one, for him, that never loses its power. His capacity to stay on message to the exclusion of all other concerns has been conspicuous throughout his campaign.

When news came in November that the topics for the Des Moines, Iowa, debate among the Democratic contenders would be reordered to include national security and terrorism, no one was taken aback. No one that is but the Sanders campaign, which made bitter protest to CBS, the debate host, over this sudden change in the agreed-on lineup of subjects. CONTINUE AT SITE

Count the reasons to oppose Donald Trump’s candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. His conservative credentials are thin, recent, and often haphazard. His brash style will likely alienate more voters than it will attract. What he calls being “direct” translates as gratuitously mean-spirited, rude, and even cruel. His knowledge of the issues, at least in traditional terms or compared with that of his Republican rivals, varies from spotty to nonexistent. And Trump often, like Hillary Clinton (e.g., dodging bullets in the Balkans) or Barack Obama (cf. the mythoi of his “memoir”), seems to make up details about his long business career.

All that said, there are two strains of opposition to Trump that seem incoherent. First is the suggestion that the majority of his supporters, the “Trumpsters,” are deluded — the naïve fooled by a buffoon. The second is the suggestion that the Trump candidacy marks a new low in American politics, in terms of decency and competence.

Let us quickly dispense with the second writ. Trump is a reflection of, not a catalyst for, a dishonest age. To illustrate my point, take a few of our contemporary public figures who are running for office on their assumed superior character and ethics. There is no need to dwell on the inveterate dissembler Hillary Clinton, with her labyrinth of e-mail, Benghazi, Clinton Foundation, and Wall Street speaking-fees deceit. Bernie Sanders, the archetypal socialist, calls for the wealthy to pay exorbitant income-tax rates. Yet Sanders himself paid an effective rate of about 13 percent, after taking thousands of dollars of itemized deductions, including a mortgage-interest deduction on a second home — all legal, and all just the sort of self-interested tax planning routinely embraced by Americans in the upper brackets, whose resulting reduced taxes the socialist Sanders is on record as abhorring. In recent interviews, the supposedly cerebral Sanders proved himself a veritable dunce, clueless about the U.S. banking system, current U.S. financial statutes, and the basics of how the U.S. criminal- and civil-justice systems work. I suppose if he were Trump, Sanders would argue that he was too busy making “huge” profits to sweat such details, but what is Sanders’s excuse for being so ill-informed? That he was too occupied as a U.S. senator to learn anything about the nation’s banking and legal systems?

When Trump’s unorthodox style of campaigning for president first took the political world by storm, I thought his ability to connect with the public is a real-life version of the movie A Face in the Crowd.

In the 1957 film, Andy Griffith played “Lonesome” Rhodes, a drifter discovered by a producer of a small-market radio program. Rhodes’s confident down-to-earth, everyman style of speaking ultimately won him great fame and influence on national television, beloved by millions.

I’ll be honest with you, folks. When Trump broke the mold with his bold, straight-talk, politically incorrect campaigning, I loved it. The arrogance of the mainstream media has frosted me for years. So Trump getting into the MSM’s face had me cheering him on. I was also hopeful that, as president, Trump would fulfill all the broken promises of the deceitful, traitorous GOP establishment.

As we move into the final months of the GOP nominating process, art is imitating real life. Trump’s behavior is similar to “Lonesome” Rhodes in the movie. Rhodes was not the person his millions of loyal fans thought him to be. At the end of a broadcast, the same producer who discovered Rhodes turned Rhodes’s microphone back on, unknown to him. Rhodes made shocking, hurtful comments about his audience, heard by and devastating millions.

Recent liberal positions on issues have exposed that Trump is not who he has presented himself to be. It has been reported that in a private meeting with GOP establishment leaders, Trump’s “chief lieutenants” said Trump has been “projecting an image.” They said that “the part that he’s been playing is evolving” to make him more palatable to general election voters.

Trump talking about raising taxes on the rich and saying it is okay for men to use girls’ restrooms confirm the leftward “evolving” his campaign spoke of.

Speaking of taxes, Trump’s tax returns reveal that he donated funds to homosexual activists, including a group whose motto is “championing LGBT issues in K-12 education.”

How bad is Hillary Clinton’s image? This bad:

Fifty-six percent of Americans view her unfavorably, according to the Huffington Post pollster trend.

One-third of New York Democratic primary voters say she is neither honest nor trustworthy.

Her image, writes Dan Balz, “is at or near record lows among major demographic groups.”

Like, all of them.

Among men, she is at minus 40. Among women, she is at minus 9. Among whites, she is at minus 39. Among white women, she is at minus 25. Among white men, she is 17 positive, 72 negative. Her favorability among whites at this point in the election cycle is worse than President Obama’s ever has been. . . . Among African Americans nationally the NBC–Wall Street Journal poll shows her with a net positive of 51 points. But that’s down 13 points from her first-quarter average and is about at her lowest ever. Among Latinos, her net positive is just two points, down from plus 21 points during the first quarter.

Emphasis mine. No doubt some of this degradation is related to a primary that has turned out to be much more competitive than Clinton imagined. But it’s also worth asking why that campaign has lasted so much longer than we assumed.

A lot of the reason is Clinton: her tin ear, her aloofness, her phony eagerness to please, her suspicion of the press and of outsiders, her — let us say –complicated relationship with the truth, the blithe way in which she dissembles and deceives.

Over the course of three decades in public life Hillary Clinton has misspoken and misled the public and mismanaged herself and her team to such a degree that voters cannot help noticing. Yes, many of her falsehoods are white lies. But white lies accumulate. They matter. Not only do they harm the truth. They are turning Clinton into one of the least popular candidates in history.

Since 1998 Clinton has blamed her poor reputation on the vast right-wing conspiracy. Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, the health-care disaster — it was all the fault of the Republicans. What’s forgotten is that Clinton has been lying in the service of her ambitions — most notably by protecting her husband from the truth of his infidelities — since long before Bill ran for president. Nor can she blame conservatives for her failure to win the Democratic nomination eight years ago. Hillary can’t help being secretive and deceptive. It’s her nature.

I’m so glad The Donald brings out the best in his supporters.

Politico:

First it was an email warning Steve House, the Colorado GOP chairman, to hide his family members and “pray you make it to Cleveland.” Then there was the angry man who called his cell phone and told him to put a gun down his throat.

“He said, ‘I’ll call back in two minutes and if you’re still there, I’ll come over and help you’,” House recalled.

Since Donald Trump came up empty in his quest for delegates at the Republican state assembly in Colorado Springs nearly two weeks ago, his angry supporters have responded to Trump’s own claims of a “rigged” nomination process by lashing out at Republican National Committee delegates that they believe won’t support Trump at the party’s convention — including House.

The mild-mannered chairman estimates he’s gotten between 4,000 and 5,000 calls on his cell phone. Many, he says, have ended with productive conversations. He’s referred the more threatening, violent calls to police. His cell phone is still buzzing this week, as he attends the RNC quarterly meetings in Florida, and he’s not the only one.

In hotel hallways and across dinner tables, many party leaders attending this week’s meetings shared similar stories. One party chair says a Trump supporter recently got in his face and promised “bloodshed” if he didn’t win the GOP nomination. An Indiana delegate who criticized Trump received a note warning against “traditional burial” that ended with, “We are watching you.”

The threats come months ahead of a possible contested convention, where Trump is all-but certain to enter with a plurality of delegates bound to him on the first ballot, but he could lose support on subsequent ballots as rules will allow delegates to vote however they choose. And although the harassers are typically anonymous, many party leaders on the receiving end of these threats hold Trump himself at least partly responsible, viewing the intimidation efforts as a natural and obvious outgrowth of the candidate’s incendiary rhetoric.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

I understand that Trump’s supporters — and most Americans — are angry. But this is something unique to the Trump campaign: the overt threat of physical violence that surrounds the candidate.