RUTHFULLY YOURS

Marco Rubio’s speech suspending his campaign after his crushing loss in the Florida primary was a requiem for an entire style of Republican politics.

Rubio represented an upbeat, opportunity-oriented vein in the GOP that ran through George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism back to the late supply-sider Jack Kemp, who practically made a civic religion out of optimism and inclusivity.

Donald Trump has grabbed this Kempian tradition by the collar and frog-marched it from the room with all the delicacy of one of his security guards ejecting a troublesome protester from a rally.

Kemp, a former pro quarterback who was a congressman from Buffalo for years, was the chief proponent of the Reagan tax cuts. To read the recent biography of him by journalists Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke, Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America, is to be struck by Kemp’s touching naiveté by the standards of the 2016 GOP race.

Kemp eschewed personal attacks and opposed negative campaigning. He believed “the purpose of politics is not to defeat your opponent as much as it is to provide superior leadership and better ideas.” And the central idea was, always and everywhere, tax cuts.

Kemp wanted the GOP to be a “natural home of African-Americans.” He favored openhandedness on immigration. He cared deeply about the plight of the urban poor, and about what he called — long before Jeb Bush — “the right to rise.”

In foreign policy, he was a friend of freedom and stalwart advocate of human rights.

Kemp influenced the debate and a generation of conservatives, but his own flaws as a highly undisciplined candidate and the monomania with which he hewed to his ideas limited him as a candidate at the national level.

But Kempism lived on in George W. Bush, whose compassionate conservatism was latitudinarian on immigration and sought to win over minorities by softening conservatism’s edges.

Bush’s foremost domestic achievement was an enormous tax cut, and his Freedom Agenda was a Kemp-like advocacy of human rights on steroids.

Like the eye of a hurricane, Donald J. Trump almost magically keeps himself at the very center of attention, no matter what chaos surrounds him. This phenomenon and the relentless and exhausting drama of the Democratic and GOP presidential primaries largely have kept the eyes of the world off Hillary Clinton and the increasingly ominous developments in the E-mailgate scandal. Despite the former secretary of state’s impressive ballot-box victories, her ethical woes multiply.

The number of classified e-mails on Clinton’s private computer server totals 2,115. At her initial March 10, 2015, news conference on this fiasco, Clinton claimed that “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” Actually, “no” such e-mails actually exceed by 99 the number of years since the birth of Christ.

If the first reports on this intelligence catastrophe indicated that Clinton’s server contained two thousand one hundred and fifteen classified e-mails, the Duchess of Chappaqua would have left her press conference in the back of a squad car.

Clinton’s server held at least 22 e-mails that are too Top Secret to be made public, even if redacted. Moreover, the Washington Post reports that Clinton’s server contained 104 dispatches in which “officials have determined that material Clinton herself wrote in the body of email messages is classified.”

The Post quoted a former senior functionary who is angered by today’s public display of e-mails that were sent securely and expected to remain quiet.

“I resent the fact that we’re in this situation,” the official said, “and we’re in this situation because of Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private server.”

There is a line from John Adams of which conservatives, particularly those of a moralistic bent, are fond: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” The surrounding prose is quoted much less frequently, and it is stern stuff dealing with one of Adams’s great fears — one that is particularly relevant to this moment in our history.

John Adams hated democracy and he feared what was known in the language of the time as “passion.” Adams’s famous assessment: “I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either.” Democracy, he wrote, “never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

If you are wondering why that pedantic conservative friend of yours corrects you every time you describe our form of government as democracy — “It’s a republic!” he will insist — that is why. Your pedantic conservative friend probably is supporting Ted Cruz. The democratic passions that so terrified Adams have filled the sails of Donald Trump.

At some point within the past few decades (it is difficult to identify the exact genesis) the rhetorical affectation of politicians’ presuming to speak for “We the People” became fashionable. Three words from the preamble to the Constitution came to stand in for a particular point of view and a particular set of assumptions present in both of our major national political tendencies. Molly Ivins, the shallow progressive polemicist, liked to thunder that “We the People don’t have a lobbyist!” She liked to call lobbyists “lobsters,” too, a half-joke that she, at least, never tired of. Dr. Ben Carson likes to draft “We the People” into his service. Sean Hannity is very fond of the phrase, and so-called conservative talk radio currently relies heavily on the assumption that the phrase is intended to communicate: that there exists on one side of a line a group of people called “Americans” and on the other side a group called “the Establishment,” and that “We the People” are getting screwed by “Them.”

Donald Trump won’t debate his Republican rivals again but he will continue to argue on Twitter. On Thursday the businessman demanded an apology after we—“the dummies at the @WSJ Editorial Board”—accurately noted that Hillary Clinton has received about a million more votes than he has. The truth hurts, though Mr. Trump would rather walk down Fifth Avenue shooting the messenger.

Mr. Trump says his numbers can’t be compared to Mrs. Clinton’s because “she had only 3 opponents—I had 16.” Actually his rise has been cleared by the large and fractured GOP field. Of the 20.35 million GOP primary votes cast so far, he has received 7.54 million, or a mere 37%. Despite the media desire to call him unstoppable, Mr. Trump is the weakest Republican front-runner since Gerald Ford in 1976.
After Reagan, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000 romped to nomination victories with only minor early setbacks. Mitt Romney and John McCain faced protracted challenges beyond Super Tuesday like Mr. Trump. The primary calendar and delegate allocation methods change from cycle to cycle, but at roughly the same stage of the campaign, both were performing far better.

In 2012 Mr. Romney was in a three-way race with Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, with Ron Paul also nabbing votes. Yet by mid-March Mr. Romney had carried the popular vote in 21 states and won 57% of the allocated delegates, according to our calculation. Mr. Trump has 18 wins and 47% of allocated delegates. Mr. Romney swept the remaining primaries by convincing margins. Mr. Trump hasn’t won 50% in any state. CONTINUE AT SITE

Donald J. Trump has received the endorsements of conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Something doesn’t make sense here.

Schlafly has always been a realist on the matter of the aggressive foreign policy of the old Soviet Union and now Russia. On the other hand, as noted [1] by Josh Rogin at Bloomberg View, Trump has a “pro-Russian foreign policy” that could have something to do with the businessman’s history of trying to do business in Russia.

Trump is threatening riots if he doesn’t get the Republican nomination. But rank-and-file conservatives who make up the Republican Party could themselves protest if Trump walks out of the Cleveland convention with the nomination. Indeed, they could walk out on Trump and back a third party conservative candidate. It’s not just Trump’s pro-Russian views. It’s how his support for Russia and Putin threatens Israel.

The Forward has run an article [2] claiming that Trump has the strongest Jewish ties of all the GOP candidates. He has raised money for Jewish causes and members of his family are Jewish. But none of this can justify his support for Putin’s Russia. It is Russia that is backing Israel’s enemies in the region, most notably Iran.

Trump can’t have it both ways by supporting Russia while attacking Iran. The two regimes are engaged in a military alliance.

The Israeli left as a democratic political movement is dead. That piece of bad news was delivered by a recent survey which shows that only 8% of Israeli Jews identify with the left, 55% with the center and 37% with the right.

In the last election, the establishment Labor Party had to dress up as a wolf in Zionist centrist clothing by renaming itself the Zionist Camp (it still lost). The left had to create two other fake centrist parties to stop Netanyahu, but just ended up having to roll them into his center-right coalition.

The Israeli left still controls the usual undemocratic elitist outposts of the Deep State, media, academia, popular culture and the judiciary, but it can no longer even call itself the left and still hope to win. All it can do is undermine the will of the people and sabotage the country out of selfishness and spite.

The situation in Israel stands in sharp contrast to the United States where 49 percent of Jews lean to the left, 29 percent tend to the center and only 19 percent identify as conservative.

It’s a popular and simplistic conclusion on both the left and the right to attribute this split to terrorism. But if Muslim terrorism made people move to the right, New Yorkers would all be Republicans. And until the latest Knife Jihad, the Israeli right’s policies had ended Islamic terrorism as an everyday problem.

Or perhaps I should say “momentum” in scare quotes. For that, I suspect, is what Donald Trump has now: “momentum,” in quotes.

More on that in a moment. First, a word or two about the math. According to the current RCP delegate count, Trump now has 661 delegates, a little more than half the 1237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination. Cruz has 406.

661 – 406 = 255

Hmmm. But note that Rubio, who finally dropped out last night after his humiliating defeat in his home state of Florida, has 169. Tigger, aka John Kasich, has 142. John Kasich apparently hasn’t yet acknowledged it, but this is now (and has been for a while) a two-man race. More math.

406 + 169+ 142 = 717

Which leads us to:

717 > 661

i.e., hope for Ted Cruz.

At least, that’s how I see it, and how the Cruz campaign also is reported to see it.

“Throughout this race,” Daniel Horowitz writes at Conservative Review, “the polls and exit polls have consistently shown that Cruz would beat Trump head-to-head in almost every state, winning by wide margins in many of them. In most states Trump has a floor of about 35-38%, but he has an impervious ceiling in the low 40s.” Which means, Horowitz continues, that in a two-man race, “Cruz should be able to catch Trump in delegates and very likely come close to the magic number of 1,237.”

The current election cycle was shaping up as a difficult one for Republican senators even before Donald Trump became the leader in the battle for the GOP presidential nomination.

Just as Democrats were exposed in 2014 and lost nine Senate seats and their majority, Republicans have 24 seats to defend in 2016 versus only 10 for Democrats. And this is a presidential year, when Democratic turnout is usually far stronger than for midterms. In 2008 and 2012, the last two presidential election years, Democrats picked up Senate seats (a net of 10), while Republicans had substantial gains from the last two midterms in 2010 and 2014 (a net of 15).

In 2014 Republicans had many targets, as Democrats were defending seats in seven states Mitt Romney won in 2012: North Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana, and Alaska. Republicans also picked up an open seat in Iowa and won Colorado, two Obama states from 2012.

In 2016, the picture is almost reversed. Republicans are defending seats in seven states Obama won in 2012: New Hampshire, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Iowa. One big difference between 2014 and 2016 is that six of the Democratic seats Republicans won in 2014 were in states Romney had won by 14% or more (only North Carolina had been a narrow Romney victory by 2%). In 2016, only one of the Republican seats — Mark Kirk’s in Illinois — is in a state that is deeply blue, a 17-point Obama win in 2012. In the other six states, Obama won by 7% or less.

Which are the five most endangered Republican-held Senate seats? Most of the serious political analysts have rated Kirk’s and Ron Johnson’s in Wisconsin as the two most vulnerable in 2016, and regard both as, at best, toss-ups or as races leaning to the Democrats.

There is a fashionable argument going around in the conservative legal world which holds that, for all his faults, Donald Trump is preferable to Hillary Clinton because he would appoint more conservative Supreme Court justices.

There are several points to be made in response.

First, no one, including Trump himself, has any idea who he would appoint. He could appoint Judge Judy or Jeanine Pirro because he’s seen them on TV. He could appoint his sister, who is a liberal Clinton appointee on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. It’s pretty certain that Trump, who thinks that judges sign “bills” rather than opinions or rulings, has not the foggiest conception of what qualities to look for in a judicial nominee.

Today, I talked to a conservative lawyer who put the pro-Trump case this way: “There is a 5 percent chance Trump would appoint someone good to the court — but there’s a 0% chance Hillary would.” Fair enough. But is a 5 percent chance of a good Supreme Court appointment really worth running all the other risks that a Trump presidency poses?

Let me remind you that Trump is a candidate who has not evinced the slightest regard for the rule of law or the basic norms of democracy. He routinely threatens anyone who opposes him with dire consequences — “be careful” he always says in the manner of “The Godfather.” He just as routinely threatens physical harm against peaceful demonstrators.

Last Wednesday, at a North Carolina rally, he said, as protesters were being led out, “They used to treat them very, very rough, and when they protested once, they would not do it again so easily,” before lamenting “we’ve become weak.” Asked on Friday about a physical altercation at one of his rallies, he said: “The audience hit back, and that’s what we need a little bit more of.” On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, he offered to pay the legal fees of a white supporter who sucker-punched a black demonstrator and later threatened to kill him — an offer that Trump soon denied making but that was televised around the country (For links to these incidents and others, go here).

It is ludicrous to argue that, because the hard Left is primarily responsible for the outbreak of chaos and violence that caused Donald Trump’s Chicago rally to be canceled last night, it is wrong to condemn the thuggery Trump often encourages at his appearances.

Trump has encouraged physical battery at his campaign events, even telling supporters he’d pay their legal fees if they get arrested for assaulting dissenters. (See, e.g., Iowa event: ”So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ‘em, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise”; see also Las Vegas event: regarding an unruly protester removed by security, Trump tells crowd, “I’d like to punch him in the face. He’s smiling, having a good time.”) Trump has continued to fan these flames even after it has become obvious that some of his supporters are acting on the invitation to resort to violence. Incitement to violence is a crime; incitement to violence at a large rally is incitement to riot — a crime that can get people badly injured or even killed.

And it’s about more than incitement. As David has been chronicling, Trump’s top campaign guy, Corey Lewandowski, has been credibly accused of manhandling Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields. In case you haven’t noticed, one of the main tactics that has transformed Turkey, before our very eyes, from a reasonably democratic society into an authoritarian Islamist state is Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s green-light to his underlings to intimidate, assault, shut down, imprison, and trump up prosecutions against members of the press. Trump is not a conservative, so it is perhaps unknown to him that media hostility is something conservatives in a free society learn to deal with — even to become more effective communicators because of. What should really frighten people is that Breitbart is Trump-friendly media. It is unlikely that, at the time of the alleged assault, Mr. Lewandowski even knew for whom Ms. Fields worked … but it is highly likely that he knew she was a reporter. (And even if he didn’t, campaign officials don’t get to rough up non-media rally attendees, either.)