Narrow victories in the Kentucky caucuses and the Louisiana primary, the largest
states decided on Saturday, have moved Donald Trump one step nearer to the nomination.
Primaries in Michigan, Mississippi and Idaho on March 8, and in Florida, Ohio,
Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina on March 15, may prove decisive. If Marco
Rubio does not win his home state of Florida, he is cooked, as is Gov. John
Kasich if he does not win Ohio.
Ted Cruz already looks to be the last man between Trump and a GOP nomination
that has gone, in the last seven elections, to George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole,
George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.
All five of those nominees since 1988 seem appalled by Trump’s triumphs, and
only slightly less so by the Cruz alternative.
Not in memory has the leadership of a party been so out of touch. The Republican
rank and file are in revolt, not only against the failures of their fathers
but the policies of their present rulers.
Some among the GOP elites, who have waited patiently through the Obama era
to recapture control of U.S. foreign policy, are now beside themselves with
despair over Trump’s success.
Fully 116 members of the GOP’s national security community, many of them veterans
of Bush administrations, have signed an open letter threatening that, if Trump
is nominated, they will all desert, and some will defect – to Hillary Clinton!
“Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin,” says Eliot Cohen
of the Bush II State Department. According to Politico’s Michael Crowley, Cohen
helped line up neocons to sign the “Dump-Trump” manifesto.
Another signer, Robert Kagan, wailed in The Washington Post, “The
only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.”
Are they serious?