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.

Washington (CNN)Bryan Pagliano, a former Clinton staffer who helped set up her private email server, has accepted an immunity offer from the FBI and the Justice Department to provide an interview to investigators, a U.S. law enforcement official told CNN Wednesday.

The FBI has been asking for Pagliano’s cooperation for months as dozens of investigators pored over thousands of Clinton emails in a secure room on the fourth floor of FBI headquarters.

The probe shifted into a new phase recently as investigators completed the review of the emails, working with intelligence agencies and the State Department to determine whether they were classified.

The Washington Post first reported Pagliano’s cooperation.

“As we have said since last summer, Secretary Clinton has been cooperating with the Justice Department’s security inquiry, including offering in August to meet with them to assist their efforts if needed,” said Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Fallon added that the campaign was “pleased” Pagliano was cooperating with the Justice Department.

Trump supporters opposed to bailouts ought to think twice before casting their vote. They’re about to bail out the Democrats.

Barack Obama has presided over the veritable collapse of the institutional Democratic party. Start with the statistics: Republicans have their largest majority in the House of Representatives since 1931, and they have commanding control of the Senate. At the state level, Republicans control 68 of 98 partisan state legislative chambers, and 31 governor’s mansions. Twenty-four states boast a GOP trifecta, where both legislative chambers and the governor are Republicans. That is largely thanks to President Obama, whose health-care takeover, rammed through Congress, gave rise to the Tea Party, and whose constitutional end runs (now that he can’t ram things through Congress) solidified the Tea Party’s gains in subsequent elections.

But the agenda and tactics that prompted a leftward shift in his own party threaten Democrats this election season. Hillary Clinton was supposed to waltz to her nomination, every lane having been cleared for her. Instead, she’s likely to arrive at the Democratic convention black and blue, thanks to Bernie Sanders — a curmudgeonly socialist who managed to tie Clinton in Iowa and beat her in New Hampshire. There’s reason to believe that, if Sanders partisans can’t vote against Hillary, they’ll likely stay home. And in a national contest, low turnout helps Republicans.

This is all on top of Hillary’s baked-in problems. She’s unlikeable. She’s a lousy campaigner. The stench of her ambition is detectable miles downwind. Combining various polls, the Huffington Post finds that 54 percent of voters view her unfavorably (only 40 percent view her favorably), and Quinnipiac found in February that seven in ten voters believe her dishonest and untrustworthy. No wonder: She’s the subject of three federal investigations, and it’s not impossible that the FBI will recommend an indictment to the Justice Department sometime before November. Meanwhile, RealClearPolitics’ polling averages show that, in head-to-head matchups, Marco Rubio leads Hillary Clinton by five points, and Ted Cruz leads her by a point and a half.

The Republican party is poised to take the presidency and to hold both houses of Congress — and Republican voters are about to squander that opportunity on Donald J. Trump.

Trump supporters love polls, so perhaps they should note that polls show Trump with a higher unfavorable rating (58 percent) and lower favorable rating (37 percent) than Clinton. Neither Ted Cruz nor Marco Rubio has such lopsided numbers.

Super Tuesday was defined by change. The Democrats have had enough change. Solid majorities in key states said that they did not want a more liberal candidate than Obama. The one major exception was Vermont which went for Bernie Sanders. Sanders also won Oklahoma where around a third backed a turn even further left than Obama. But beyond them, there was no great appetite for outsiders.

“This campaign is not just about electing a president; it is about transforming America,” Bernie Sanders bleated back in Vermont. But the Democrats may be suffering from transformation fatigue.

Most Democrats have made it clear that they want another two terms of Obama. Exit polls from Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia showed solid support for a continuation of Obama’s policies. The Sanders change agenda plays well with younger voters, particularly with white voters, but fails with a Democratic Party whose base is in thrall to Obama despite his legacy of economic misery and failure.

Hillary Clinton had initially hoped to run as a historic candidate while touting her own experience, but was instead forced to run as a proxy for Obama in order to preserve her minority firewall which saved her in South Carolina and other states with large black Democratic constituencies. It’s a humiliating comedown for Hillary to have to run as Obama’s shadow. But she’s willing to do that and abandon the dream of creating her own legacy beyond Obama for the opportunity to make it to the White House.

On the Republican side there was a great appetite for outsiders and for change. The two big winners, Trump and Ted Cruz, both ran as outsider candidates on platforms of change. In an extraordinary turn of events, Rubio, the establishment candidate, had the poorest performance of the top three candidates.

Democrats may no longer be interested in transforming America, but Republicans are. Hope and Change has lost its luster for the party that inflicted two terms of Obama on the country. But Change is running strong among Republicans, even if Hope has not always come along for the long ride of the primaries.

While the establishment lane prevailed for the Democrats, the anti-establishment lane dominated among Republicans. These two different snapshots of Super Tuesday from both parties also help explain the dramatic difference in voter turnout. Republican voter turnout quadrupled in Virginia and increased by hundreds of thousands in Tennessee, Texas, Georgia and Massachusetts. Democratic voter turnout was underwhelming. Voting for the safe establishment choice does not really rally primary voters.

‘……….They wonder whether they can accept as president a man who threatens a free press with libel laws redolent of the 1798 Sedition Act (which nearly destroyed the American republic in its infancy), openly advocates war crimes as an instrument of state policy, approvingly tweets a quotation from Benito Mussolini, and embraces Kremlin thug Vladimir Putin as a kindred spirit.

There is abundant evidence that Mr. Trump is, as Sen. Marco Rubio pungently puts it, a con man. But suppose we give Mr. Trump more credit than he deserves and take him at his word. It is abundantly clear that no Mexican leader or government would ever agree to pay for his border wall. What then? He would lack the legal authority to impose tariffs on countries such as China and Mexico that run persistent trade surpluses with the U.S. What then? He has proposed a massive tax cut and other programs that, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, would add between $11.7 trillion and $15.1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. This plan, which would be ruinous if enacted, would not be adopted, and candidate Trump has no other economic agenda. What then?

Tom Coburn, a conservative Republican who retired from the Senate last year, said in a statement Monday supporting Sen. Rubio’s candidacy for the Republican nomination that Mr. Trump is “perpetuating a fraud on the American people. His empty promises, bullying and bloviating rhetoric will only deepen the frustration and disillusionment that gave rise to his campaign. He simply lacks the character, skills and policy knowledge to turn his grandiose promises into reality.”

If you think the American people are angry and mistrustful now, imagine how they will feel after three months of (God forbid) a Trump presidency.

Then there is the way Mr. Trump has chosen to conduct his campaign, which has degraded democratic discourse and made the U.S. a global laughingstock. CONTINUE AT SITE

It’s still a horse race, but only just: Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday victories in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas and Massachusetts outweigh the Ted Cruz victory in his home state of Texas and neighboring Oklahoma. The Republican Establishment will not close ranks around Cruz as the last candidate capable of beating Trump. Marco Rubio’s consolation price was the Minnesota caucuses with 37% of the vote.

For the past six months my Republican friends and I have Donald Trump’s ascendancy and asked ourselves whether the voters had gone crazy. The voters aren’t crazy. We in the Republican elite were crazy: we thought we could allow the American economy to remain a rigged game indefinitely. The voters think otherwise. That’s why Trump is winning. That’s also why Bernie Sanders, the least likely presidential candidate in living memory, gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money. If you don’t give people capitalism, the late Jude Wanniski used to say, they’ll take socialism.

Americans are shrewd. You can’t spit on them and tell them it’s raining. They know the game is rigged against them. They know it’s rigged the same way that they know a lottery is rigged: There aren’t any winners. They know that they are downwardly mobile because they aren’t upwardly mobile. Americans don’t mind playing against bad odds–they play the lottery all the time–but they think that they are playing against zero odds. Ordinary Americans had an outside chance to get rich until 2008. Now they have no chance at all.

Upward mobility is America’s gauge of well-being. It’s not the decline of median family income that gets under Americans’ skin, but the perception that the elites have pulled the ladder up behind them. During the quarter-century after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, it was only a slight exaggeration to say that someone in every family got rich. They bought a cable television franchise, started a website, got some stock in a high-flying tech company, flipped real estate, or ran a small business that became a big business. Inequality didn’t bother Americans as long as they had a chance at a winning ticket–not necessarily a fair chance, but at least the kind of chance that paid off occasionally for ordinary people. As long they could see that people like them were becoming rich, they kept playing the game.