RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump is not content to bully the residents of just one continent, it seems.

In the mid 1990s, there was Vera Coking, the septuagenarian widow whom Donald Trump tried to squeeze out of her Atlantic City apartment to make room for a limousine parking lot for his nearby casino. Ten years later, in Scotland, trying to foist a golf course and resort onto a stretch of Scottish coastline, Trump encountered a set of equally incorrigible homeowners — and did his best to run them out of their homes, too.

In March 2006, Trump visited Scotland and proposed to build a 36-hole golf course — “the greatest golf course anywhere in the world,” as he would reiterate time and again — along with a 450-room hotel with a conference center and spa, 950 time-share apartments, 36 golf villas, and 500 for-sale houses, and accommodations for hundreds of full-time employees, in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire. He billed it as an economic boon to the country and, in his usual theatrical fashion, as a “homecoming,” waxing poetic about his immigrant mother, who departed Scotland’s Western Isles for the U.S. as a young woman. In reality, it was a vanity project.

“I always wanted to do a golf course in Europe, and of the 211 sites we have looked at, we have seen some incredible places,” said Trump. “But this was something special.” Indeed — more than Trump understood. The Menie Links, north of Aberdeen, is home to the Foveran Links, a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). The Foveran Links – which is a dynamic dune system that moves several meters annually, giving rise to a unique collection of plants and wildlife — is unique in the United Kingdom.

In her desperate scramble to the top every Hillary victory is accompanied by a setback. The corrupt Democratic machine that has kept her going this far eked out a victory in Nevada, but took down her minority firewall.

In earlier primaries, Hillary had lost women and young voters. In Nevada, she lost Latinos.

The last and only element of the Obama coalition that she has retained are black voters. Black voters helped Hillary in Nevada. While Latinos defected to Sandernistan, black voters remained loyally behind on Hillary’s Happy Plantation. If the black voters, primarily women who powered the Obama campaign, wave goodbye to life on the Clinton Tara, then Hillary’s path to the White House ends with Sanders’ Socialist march to the Potomac.

Despite her victory in Nevada, the Clinton crisis is now real. Hillary Clinton has lost nearly every demographic of what was supposed to be her base. She has become a purely political machine candidate with no supporters, only staffers, no appeal, only strategy, and no way forward except increasingly grotesque forms of electoral fraud that risk alienating Democrats until she becomes unelectable in a general election as the voters who saw their efforts to vote for Bernie Sanders thwarted resentfully decide to stay home.

A similar stolen nomination in which Hillary Clinton was the victim led to a crisis in ’08 which was only resolved with a deal between Obama and Clintonworld that allowed her to use his administration as the platform for her own future presidential campaign. But Hillary may not be able to buy the elderly Bernie Sanders, who would be 82 in time for Hillary’s two terms to end, and his supporters off in the same way.

To listen to some of the commentary about yesterday’s primary in South Carolina, you would think that Donald Trump now had the nomination sewn up. Yesterday, the pundits crow, Trump won by a comfortable ten points, beating Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz 32.5 to 22.5 (22.3 for Cruz). Gosh. Slam dunk, what? Time for Mrs. Trump to start thinking about new curtains for the Oval Office or at least battling against whoever the Democratic nominee will be after Hillary Clinton drops out sometime (I predict) before the end of March.

But there are several things to note about yesterday’s primary that make this exercise in congratulation premature.

First of all, a scant week ago, the polls had Trump at 38, Cruz at 28.5, Rubio at 13.5. Clearly, this is one of those “plastic moments” of political fermentation that Karl Marx told us about. Things can change quickly.

Second, it is worth casting one’s mind way back to ancient times, to the winter of 2012, when Newt Gingrich won South Carolina with 40.4% of the vote. Mitt Romney took 27.8, Rick Santorum (remember him?) took 17%.

Gingrich lost no time announcing on some talk show that it was obvious that he was going to be the nominee.

It didn’t turn out that way, but he came in a respectable second in Florida and won decisively with 48.5% in the key southern state of Georgia.

How do you spell “Romney”?

I suppose it is possible that Donald Trump — the man who supports single-payer health care (Obamacare on steroids), who didn’t know about the nuclear triad until a few weeks ago, who once proposed a 14.25% wealth tax on “the rich,” and until 15 minutes ago was an enthusiastic proponent of abortion on demand, even that form of infanticide euphemistically described as “partial birth abortion” by its partisans — I suppose it is possible that Donald Trump will get the country to rally around him and hand him the Republican nomination.