RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump, fresh off his Northeast sweep, declared himself the “presumptive nominee.” He presumes too much.

For all the news of Mr. Trump’s victories and Ted Cruz’s veepmate, the essential action of this GOP contest continues to take place far from the media lights. It’s happening in towns like Harrisonburg, Va., where Republican voters will gather this weekend to pick a slate of delegates for the Cleveland convention. That’s the action that matters, and it’s not going Mr. Trump’s way.

With the media all but anointing the mogul, it’s worth a short primer on presidential nominations, why Mr. Trump is still far from claiming the title, and why (by the way) this is, in fact, democracy in action.

Start with this: The GOP is a collection of 50 state parties. Each gets a voice in choosing who the national party nominates for president. In long-standing deference to states’ rights (a concept conservatives are supposed to revere), the state parties have total control over how they pick delegates to the national convention.

Some states, like Colorado, still do this purely the old-fashioned way. Republicans meet at the precinct level, at the district level, and at the state level, and vote for delegates who will speak for them. This isn’t a “rigged” system, but representative democracy.

Other states think it useful to canvas wider views. They hold what the media call primaries, but what are technically “presidential preference polls.” (Note those words.) In many states, the results of these polls are supposed to bind “delegates” to candidates at the national convention.

Only here’s the rub: Even states with primaries still go through an independent process to elect the actual people who will serve as delegates. The Republicans at these events can still choose whomever they want. And they aren’t electing delegates who personally support Mr. Trump.

Look at Virginia. The Old Dominion held its statewide preference poll (primary) on March 1, and 35% of voters (who included independents and Democrats) preferred Mr. Trump. Some 17% preferred Mr. Cruz. On paper, the delegates are automatically apportioned based on these results.

Yet at the two district conventions so far (in Virginia’s 9th and 10th congressional districts), attendees have elected five delegates who personally support Mr. Cruz and only one who supports Mr. Trump. At the statewide convention in Harrisonburg this weekend, 4,000 attendees will choose another 13 delegates. Cruz supporters will likely dominate.

This is happening across the country, and no surprise. While some attendees at these events are “the establishment”—party officials and operatives—many more are intensely committed GOP activists. These are the people who brought you the tea party, the rebels in the U.S. House, and the cheers for government shutdown. CONTINUE AT SITE

In Wednesday’s foreign-policy speech, Donald Trump accurately described President Obama’s Iran deal, the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as “disastrous.” But his understanding of why this is the case is elusive — formed through his deal-maker prism, not by history, ideology, and the American interests he vows to prioritize. His remarks also raised more questions than they answered about his intentions. That means the speech was counterproductive because undermining the Iran deal — which is very much in America’s interests — requires presidential contenders to affect the behavior of the relevant players right now, not a year from now.

Trump pronounced the Iran deal disastrous because

In negotiation, you must be willing to walk. The Iran deal, like so many of our worst agreements, is the result of not being willing to leave the table. When the other side knows you’re not going to walk, it becomes absolutely impossible to win.

That is wrong. The JCPOA debacle is the result of being at the negotiating table in the first place. We gave the store away simply by sitting down, absent any conditions or changes in behavior, with a committed enemy of the United States, the world’s prime state sponsor of terrorism, while it was actively fueling anti-American jihadists, calling for “Death to America,” holding American hostages, threatening the annihilation of Israel, persecuting its own people, and developing nuclear power and ballistic missiles in violation of international law. Just by coming to the table, Obama signaled that he was ripe for the taking. It was never a matter of not knowing when to walk away.

As Donald Trump closes in on the Republican nomination, he’s rolling out a formal lecture series to detail his agenda and burnish a more dignified brand. His maiden policy speech on Wednesday, devoted to foreign affairs, earns an “incomplete” at Trump University.

“America First will be the major and overriding theme of my Administration,” Mr. Trump said in Washington. He called for “a new foreign-policy direction for our country—one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy and chaos with peace.” The businessman didn’t mention if the same principle will apply to his rallies or harum-scarum campaign.

The 5,000-word speech lacked specifics by normal political standards, if not his own. The central motif, like all of Mr. Trump’s political thought, is that the businessman has the brains and strength to solve a given problem, and everybody else is a pathetic loser, so trust his instincts and temperament. “I’m the only one—believe me, I know them all—I’m the only one who knows how to fix it,” he said.

Mr. Trump’s intuition does sometimes lead in constructive directions. He is right to identify rising world disorder as the pre-eminent threat to American security and interests. He said President Obama “dislikes our friends and bows to our enemies,” which is an overstatement that nonetheless captures the reality.

Mr. Obama leadership-from-behind philosophy has confused allies, and many have decided that they can’t depend on U.S. commitments. Adversaries like China, Russian and Iran are testing the limits of his resolve as they push for hegemony in their regions.

Mr. Trump is also correct that if he rebuilds alliances he ought to expect more from U.S. partners. And he has a point about the disproportionate burden the U.S. bears to guarantee European security, even if America’s forward deployments also secure U.S. security by deterring aggressive authoritarians. CONTINUE AT SITE

Donald Trump complained today that the United States has “lacked a coherent foreign policy” since the end of the Cold War. His vow that a Trump administration would impose coherence is about as credible as his vow to make Mexico pay for his fantasy wall. Indeed, the foreign-policy speech was itself incoherent . . . quite apart from the fact that, just the blink of an eye ago, Trump was enthusiastically supporting — with his tongue and his wallet — the very policies he now bemoans.

Let’s just consider American actions in Libya, Iraq, and Syria, which Trump blamed for helping to “unleash ISIS.”

There is some validity in Trump’s 20–20 hindsight. In Libya, for example, based on policy spearheaded by then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the Obama administration switched sides in a jihad: toppling Moammar Qaddafi, whom our government was then funding and describing as a key counterterrorism ally. The beneficiaries of this shift were rabidly anti-American Islamists in Libya, including jihadist factions about which Qaddafi had been feeding us intelligence. As Senator Ted Cruz (whom I support) has repeatedly pointed out, the easily foreseeable result of the Clinton/Obama policy has been Libya’s transformation into a terrorist safe haven, which is now a stronghold for both ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Actually, though, we should call it the Clinton/Obama/Trump policy.

You see, while conservative Republicans (like your humble correspondent) were pleading that we should stay out of Libya — that we should avoid siding with, arming, and training the “rebel” forces (the popular Washington euphemism for the Libyan mujahideen) — Donald Trump was squarely on the wrong side, demanding that Obama take action to overthrow Qaddafi.

Here is Trump in 2011 — at a point when Obama had not yet acted, and when it was abundantly clear that al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood were the backbone of Qaddafi’s opposition:

I can’t believe what our country is doing. Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all [over] the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is, it’s a carnage. . . .

Someone slap a photo of Mike Pence on a milk carton.

The Indiana governor may not have been abducted, but he’s certainly missing in action on the central question facing the Republican party: Are you with Trump, or against him?

Pence is hardly alone on the sidelines, of course. But the crowd of wet-fingered politicians trying to determine which way the wind is blowing doesn’t matter. Pence does. If Donald Trump loses the May 3 Indiana primary, it is all but certain he will fall short of the 1,237 delegates necessary to win the nomination on the first ballot. Indiana is now the Gates of Vienna for stopping the Trumpian takeover of the GOP.

That’s why Ohio governor John Kasich and Texas senator Ted Cruz have struck an admittedly awkward and somewhat unsightly deal to coordinate their campaigns to keep Trump from winning there. Kasich is dropping out of the Indiana race, and Cruz will clear a path for Kasich in New Mexico and Oregon. Kasich almost immediately stumbled trying to stick to the deal, but it remains as close to a united front against the longtime-Democrat-turned-Republican pretender as we’re going to get.

And where is Pence, longtime proponent of conservative courage? In his bunker, insisting that he’s “for anybody but Hillary and Bernie Sanders.”

To be fair, Pence is in a pickle because he’s up for reelection in 2016, and the beleaguered Hoosier thinks he can’t afford to alienate any Republican voters. Boo hoo.

If current general-election poll results are even remotely accurate, Trump would go down to a defeat of biblical proportions in November. His standing with women is so low, he even puts automatic Republican states such as Mississippi and Utah into play. He’s wildly unpopular with young voters — 17 percent have a favorable view of him in the latest Harvard Public Opinion Project poll. Only 37 of young Republicans view him favorably.

Trump’s new de facto campaign manager, Paul Manafort, recently told fellow Republican insiders not to worry. All of this can be overcome because Trump’s vulnerabilities merely reflect “personality” problems, while Clinton’s reflect “character” issues. “Fixing personality negatives is a lot easier than fixing character negatives,” Manafort said. “You can’t change somebody’s character, but you can change the way somebody presents himself.”

It is tempting, if disheartening, to believe that Donald Trump has irrevocably changed the GOP for the worse, imperiling conservatism’s hold on the party. But he hasn’t. The same dynamics and fissures that existed prior to this cycle remain intact today. Trump’s armies do, however, constitute a new “fifth faction” that now competes with the GOP’s traditional “four factions” for party dominance. This new faction is not wholly unconservative. It is instead a forceful reassertion of a kind of conservatism that has long lain dormant.

“Trumpism” is best understood as a resurrection of the conservative ideas of nationality and citizenship. Trump’s success shows how important it is to reincorporate these neo-Kirkian strands into modern conservatism, thereby creating a new fusionism that can command a national, conservative majority.

Republican nominating contests prior to this year were primarily battles between four factions. Two of these groups tended to identify as “very conservative.” Evangelicals constituted about 20–25 percent of the GOP electorate, and they liked candidates who focused on giving their religion a role in public life. Another 10–15 percent of GOP voters were hard-line fiscal conservatives, and they liked candidates who talked about cutting taxes and lowering spending.

The other two of the traditional four factions, often referred to as the “establishment,” were actually distinct groups with different priorities. Moderates, who accounted for about 30 percent of the national party, always liked candidates who downplayed religion’s public role and favored making government work over cutting it. “Somewhat conservatives,” the largest group of the four, were the remaining 35–40 percent of Republican voters, and they backed candidates whom movement conservatives considered “moderates”: Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney. Though they were not the preferred choice of the party’s “very conservative” factions, these men stood farther right than moderates would have liked, endorsing movement-conservative goals such as lower taxes and a strong national defense.

Trump’s coalition does not fit neatly into this paradigm. Although he does better with the two “establishment” factions than with the two “very conservative” ones, his support is strong in all four groups and seems to be driven by class more than ideology: The less formal education one has, the likelier one is to back Trump. The group that likes him the most has never been to college, and the group that likes him the least has post-graduate degrees. Since the race now seems to be defined in terms of whether one is for or against Trump, some pundits have contended that he has completely upended the party and made old distinctions irrelevant.

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?