RUTHFULLY YOURS

A divisive battle is brewing in the Republican Party over the potential nomination of Donald Trump, as some party leaders warn they won’t back him and could support third-party or write-in candidates.Most party leaders still say they will back the party’s nominee, and until recent days even Mr. Trump’s loudest critics maintained they would back him in the general election if he wins the nomination.

That is beginning to change—even as Mr. Trump is poised to win a string of Super Tuesday contests, and likely take the lion’s share of the 595 delegates up for grabs.“I would not vote for Trump, clearly” said Mel Martinez, a former Republican National Committee chairman who served one term in the Senate from Florida. “If there is any, any, any other choice, a living, breathing person with a pulse, I would be there.”Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse has said he would seek a third-party or alternate conservative candidate. The party’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, said Mr. Trump’s hesitation to disavow support from David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, in a CNN interview was a “disqualifying” response. And former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman has said she would vote for Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton if Mr. Trump is the GOP nominee.

In contrast, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have recently endorsed Mr. Trump. And the vast majority of senior Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), have said they’ll back the GOP nominee.

Former RNC Chairman Jim Nicholson, who had backed Jeb Bush’s candidacy, said even with his flaws, Mr. Trump would be superior to Mrs. Clinton and her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders.

“If he is successful in winning the nomination, I think it’s going to be very important that people coalesce around him because many of the things he’s talking about are very important to our country,” Mr. Nicholson said. “I think the country has a much better chance of healing itself under him that it does under the Democrats.”

Mr. Trump, whose path to the nomination could be unstoppable after Tuesday, has made no secret of his disdain for the party’s past leaders, and has broken with GOP orthodoxy on crucial issues such as trade. His campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Many of the party’s core conservatives believe he isn’t one of them, and the conservative Club for Growth has begun an advertising campaign to try to discredit him. CONTINUE AT SITE

Donald Trump has run a nasty, vicious, and loathsome campaign. His views, ideas, and policies are, for the most part, the complete antithesis of what small-c conservatism represents, or should represent, in a modern democratic society.

There’s no denying, however, that he has been incredibly successful.

Trump’s personal appeal, tough stances, and populist positions have clearly resonated with voters. He’s won three states (New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada) and finished second in Iowa. If current poll numbers are accurate, he’s easily going to win most of the states on Super Tuesday.

Unless Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz get together before, say, March 1 — and bring John Kasich and Ben Carson along for the ride — this contest could almost be mathematically over within a few weeks’ time. (Just a thought, gentlemen.)

Win or lose, the brash billionaire businessman has certainly had a huge impact on modern-day American politics. In fact, his tactics could ultimately be emulated by like-minded political candidates down the road. Here’s something I firmly believe will survive well past Trump’s candidacy.

RELATED: Stop Defending Trump’s Poisonous ‘Middle-Finger Politics’

Trump has thrown out the traditional political playbook so many times on the campaign trail, it could make your head spin. At the same time, he has used ideas, concepts, and lines (both written and speaking) that are completely foreign to most political strategists, communicators, and speechwriters.

Here’s a small sampling of Trumpisms that we’ve had to endure the past few months:

There’s a case against the argument that the media has helped Donald Trump dominate the GOP presidential race up to now with relatively little scrutiny. Bob Schieffer, the former host of CBS’s Face the Nation, told Fox News last May (just before the Rise of Trump) that it’s the role of opponents to “make the campaign” and question the records of candidate. “As journalists, basically what we do is watch the campaign and report what the two sides are doing.”

But that’s not what has happened this campaign season.

Until recently, Trump averaged about 75 percent of the cable-news coverage of the GOP race. Take last Thursday’s GOP debate. Two minutes after the debate ended, CNN gave Trump a softball eight-minute post-game interview and then another ten-minute interview a mere half hour later. “Nice of CNN to throw Trump an after party like that,” tweeted David Folkenflik of NPR.

“Basically the debates are the opening acts for Trump to then go on cable TV and do interviews where he frames what happened,” Jon Ralston, a veteran Nevada journalist, tweeted. “It’s Trump’s world. We’re all just enabling it.”

RELATED: ’Trump Blocked the Sun’

If Barack Obama benefited in 2008 from the media’s fascination with him, Trump benefits today from the media’s enthrallment with his antics. “Trump isn’t the first rich guy to run for office,” Matt Taibbi wrote last week in Rolling Stone. “But he is the first to realize the weakness in the system, which is that the watchdogs in the political media can’t resist a car wreck. . . . Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”

And because all eyes are turned on Trump, he doesn’t have to spend anything close to what his rivals do. His mix of outrage, bluster, and insults has brought him 6.5 million Twitter followers, and he is a master of social media. He has effectively drafted broadcast news to amplify his campaign. Carrying Trump’s 40-minute news conference live on February 15 was the equivalent of $2.8 million in cable-news coverage, according to the data analytics firm Optimus, which does some work with the Marco Rubio campaign.

Then there are his logistical advantages. Presidential candidates aren’t normally allowed to phone in their interviews with news shows, but Trump’s ratings power have induced anchors to make an exception for him. Betsy Fischer Martin, a former executive producer of Meet the Press, told the Huffington Post last year that call-ins are normally used for breaking news or overseas reports where a guest can’t appear on camera. With the advent of Skype, even those exceptions are becoming rarer.

In his 1644 work Areopagitica, John Milton proclaimed, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

Indeed, there is no greater cause of liberty than the sanctity of a free mind and the faculty to act according to it. In fact, without free thinking, no other rights matter or make sense.

Our conscience exalts us over, as the Bible puts its, “the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” (That’s from the Book of Genesis, found in the Old Testament, Mr. Trump). Nothing makes us more human than the ability to reason according to our ethics and our experiences.

When we lose our right to think freely, we lose our very humanity. Look no further than the Soviet Union and North Korea, just two of the most recent examples of regimes crushing their people so brutally that they no longer could safeguard their natural right to autonomy. These regimes’ victims could not defend themselves against the state. They could not provide for themselves. They could not advocate for themselves. They could not protect their basic human dignity. And they certainly couldn’t pursue happiness as they saw it.

America’s Founders understood quite clearly that only free minds could secure a free society. President James Madison, who authored the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, insisted, “Conscience is the most sacred of all property.”

John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, agreed. “Security under our constitution is given to the rights of conscience and private judgment,” he explained. “They are by nature subject to no control but that of Deity, and in that free situation they are now left.”

President Thomas Jefferson reaffirmed this principle, arguing, “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprise of the civil authority.”

For 21st-century Americans, there is no greater threat to this innate human right than Donald Trump. Time and time again, he has sought to silence those who dare disagree with him. He has meted out swift retribution to those who have acted in opposition to his aims or desires. And he promises to continue in this vein as president.

What would William F. Buckley do?

Conservative icon William Buckley promulgated what has become known as the Buckley rule: “Nominate the most conservative candidate who is electable.” Among the current candidates the only one who passes that test is Marco Rubio.

Donald Trump and some in the media have tried to characterize Marco Rubio as the “establishment” candidate. How does that square with reality?

Recall that the election of Rubio was hailed as a Tea Party hero when he knocked off the serial party-shifter and establishment candidate Charlie Crist. Has he retained his conservative credentials since being elected?

As Jim Geraghty wrote in late December, Marco Rubio is “plenty conservative” and has an indisputably conservative record as a senator :

This is a man who has a lifetime ACU rating of 98 out of 100. A man who has a perfect rating from the NRA in the U.S. Senate. A man who earned scores of 100 in 2014, 100 in 2013, 71 in 2012, and 100 in 2011 from the Family Research Council. A “Taxpayer Super Hero” with a lifetime rating of 95 from Citizens Against Government Waste. A man Club for Growth president David McIntosh called “a complete pro-growth, free-market, limited-government conservative.”

Across the board, Rubio’s stances, policy proposals, and rhetoric fall squarely within the bounds of traditional conservatism.

Rubio’s the guy who earned a 100 from National Right to Life in two straight cycles, and a zero rating from NARAL. He supports an abortion ban after 20 weeks, opposes exceptions for rape and incest (although he’s voted for legislation that includes those exceptions), and opposes embryonic stem-cell research. In the first Republican debate he declared, “Future generations will look back at this history of our country and call us barbarians for murdering millions of babies who we never gave them a chance to live.”

Rubio opposes gay marriage and has said that “we are at the water’s edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech. Today we’ve reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage you are labeled a homophobe and a hater.” He recorded robo-calls for the National Organization for Marriage.

Since 2010, Rubio has proposed freezing government spending for everything but defense and veterans’ care at 2008 levels. He supports a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution and the line-item veto. He voted against funding for the Export-Import Bank, even though Florida receives the second-largest amount of money from the bank.

His initial tax-reform plan, co-authored with Utah senator Mike Lee, cuts the corporate tax rate to 25 percent and would reduce the current seven brackets to two: a 15 percent rate for individuals and a 35 percent rate for families. (Rubio later adjusted it to create a 25 percent tax bracket for couples making between $150,000 and $300,000.) It creates a new $2,500-per-child tax credit. Conservatives disagree about the best way to simplify the tax code and reduce the tax burden on Americans, but it’s hard to dispute that changes such as these would move the system in the right direction.

Mr. Sanders could muster a mere 26% of South Carolina Democrats. The exit polls say Mrs. Clinton won an almost unbelievable 86% of the black vote, suggesting that she will also sweep the other southern states with heavy African-American populations on Tuesday. Mr. Sanders will presumably win in Vermont, and maybe another state or two, but that won’t be nearly enough to stop Mrs. Clinton from cruising to the nomination.

The Democratic contest thus returns to the normalcy of recent decades, which is that a progressive insurgency invariably fails against the establishment favorite. Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, Howard Dean and Mr. Sanders were all favorites of the white gentry left. They lost because they couldn’t defeat the government unions or persuade enough African-Americans. Barack Obama was the exception because he could compete for the black vote.

Mrs. Clinton continued to underperform among younger voters, and underlying economic anxiety should concern Democrats going into November. Some 84% of Democrats in South Carolina said they are either very or somewhat worried about the U.S. economy. But the Clinton juggernaut shows that, unlike the GOP, there really is a Democratic establishment composed of powerful interest groups that determine the nominee. Those forces are rallying to defeat Mr. Sanders, whom they view as unelectable. READ MORE AT SITE

David McIntosh has been fighting for economic freedom for 30 years, and he is convinced the battle has reached a hinge moment. “The stakes really are that high,” says the president of the Club for Growth. “If we don’t do this, it’s all at risk. This is the moment.”

By “this” he means denying Donald Trump the Republican presidential nomination. The club is one of America’s most effective free-enterprise advocacy groups, and for months it has tried to alert voters, often without much other support, to the risks of a Trump nomination.

With the primary race now at a decisive moment, Mr. McIntosh is trying to rally support for a sustained anti-Trump push leading up to the winner-take-all primaries on March 15. With Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz finally confronting the front-runner, Mr. McIntosh is convinced that the billionaire can still be defeated with the help of a sustained TV and social-media assault.

“We’ve got people on our side still saying, ‘Let’s wait and see.’ Or ‘maybe we can fix this in a brokered convention,’ ” says Mr. McIntosh. “My message is that’s too late. It’s got to be now.”

When Mr. McIntosh took over the Club for Growth presidency more than a year ago, the former Indiana congressman had no idea his first real fight would be trying to stop a TV celebrity from hijacking the Republican Party. The club usually plays in House and Senate campaigns, and it is backing no presidential candidate. “We’re neutral on the other candidates. We’ve said that both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are gold standards—either would be great on economic issues. This is about stopping Trump.” READ MORE AT SITE