Trump's Runaway Train Continues to Pick Up Speed
This cannot be the result Ted Cruz was hoping to see in Nevada . . . or that Marco Rubio wanted to see. Our Alexis Levinson: On Tuesday night, the real-estate mogul broke 40 percent, winning his third nominating contest in a row and trouncing his two most serious competitors by almost 20 points. Instead of further clarifying who would be best able to take on Trump, the Nevada caucus raised doubts as to whether anyone could take him on at all. Jeremy Carl: I know this will come as a shock to many NRO readers, but a state built on glitz and legalized casino gambling, a state where prostitution is legal in several counties and one where one of the candidates who exemplifies the aforementioned characteristics has his name on the tallest residential building, isn't necessarily the state that is likely to be an electoral stronghold for family-values Republicans or traditional conservatives—or frankly anyone not named Donald J. Trump . . . Trump's opponents can't dismiss this sort of dominant performance. Trump has a devoted core of rabid fans and will be very, very difficult to beat for the nomination if his opponents and the GOP as whole don't commit to taking him on in a frontal assault—and it remains to be seen if they have a real interest in doing so. Trump took advantage of voter anger—the vast majority said they were looking for an outsider and Trump won these voters overwhelmingly– to romp to an overwhelming victory. . . . Rubio's showing should be terrifying to clear-eyed members of the establishment. If they think a hundred additional congressional endorsements will put Rubio over the top, given current trends, Nevada was Exhibit A that they are fooling themselves. Our Elaina Plott shows a ballot collector at last night's caucus wearing Trump gear:  Way to go, Nevada Republicans. Way to go. Are We Starting to See a Pattern Here? Things that make you say "hmmm" . . . "Hmmm," part one: Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, isn't happy that a member of the prominent Ricketts family has bankrolled an effort to thwart his campaign. And he took to Twitter on Monday to warn the Chicago Cubs owners to "be careful." The family is "secretly spending $'s against me," Trump wrote. "They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!" As we've seen during the Obama years, the Internal Revenue Service can be particularly diligent in reviewing and auditing the tax and financial paperwork of critics of the president. "Hmmm," part two: GOP strategist Liz Mair, whose anti-Trump Make America Awesome super PAC has raised all of $10,000 since it was created in December, said major donors are shying away from her group partly because they are scared of incurring Trump's wrath. He has already threatened legal action against conservative groups that have advertised against him, including the Club for Growth (which, he alleged in a Tuesday tweet "came to my office seeking $1 million dollars. I told them no and now they are doing negative ads), and has called out conservative billionaires who he unsuccessfully courted (including the Koch brothers, Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and New York hedge fund titan Paul Singer). "We would totally donate to you if we could do it anonymously; we're worried about Trump taking reprisals against us for donating to this," Mair said, parroting reactions she's heard from donors. "Suffice to say, there are a lot of people out there who want to stop Trump and are willing to donate to do it," she said. "They're just the rank and file of the base, not the establishment donors." If you think Trump would be a president who would use the apparatus of the state to target and punish his critics, I would think you would want to pull out all the stops to prevent him from reaching the Oval Office, not keep your head down and hope for the best. "Hmmm," part three: "I'd like to punch him in the face," Trump said, remarking that a man disrupting his rally was escorted out with a smile on his face. "He's smiling, having a good time." Trump claimed the protester was "nasty as hell" and accused the man of trying to punch the security officers forcing him out of the rally, though the man did not appear to be fighting off those officers. "In the old days," Trump added, protesters would be "carried out on stretchers." "We're not allowed to push back anymore," Trump said. At this point, in a Twitter poll I set up, 14 percent of the 800 respondents say they would trust President Trump with unilateral authority to deport American citizens where he chooses. "Jim, that doesn't even make sense. The president -- heck, the federal government -- doesn't have the authority to deport American citizens to other countries!" That's my point. The Fall of Moscow Station and the Rise of Thinking Thrillers My friend Mark Henshaw's third novel, The Fall of Moscow Station, is now hitting store shelves, and it's terrific. If you're looking for a smart, unpredictable, realistic thriller, grab a copy. With a title like The Fall of Moscow Station, you're probably picturing something like the film Olympus Has Fallen, envisioning bad-guys raiding and overrunning a secret CIA base. While Mark's book has plenty of action, it's much more of a strategic thinking battle between the Central Intelligence Agency and Russian intelligence. There are a lot of thrillers out there, but Mark's works stand out, in large part because he's a decorated CIA analyst with 15 years of service. When he writes about CIA analysts digesting and dissecting a problem, it feels realistic because it's what he does. He's won eighteen Exceptional Performance Awards and the Director of National Intelligence's 2007 Galileo Award for innovation in intelligence analysis. This is the third book in Mark's series -- the preceding ones were Red Cell and Cold Shot -- and what makes this one feel really impressive is that he takes one of his two main protagonists -- the irritable, brilliant analyst Jonathan Burke, the Doctor House of the intelligence community -- and leaves him offstage for a really long stretch. His other protagonist, Burke's protégé Kyra, spends several stretches having imaginary conversations with him, and it's surprisingly effective. At some point you begin to wonder how much of what we're reading him "say" to her in her head is her imagining what she would say and how much has become a hallucination or psychological reaction to the tense crisis. Mark's heroes screw up, make mistakes, move too slow, and then learn from what they're experiencing along the way. A good novelist needs a good villain, and one of the challenges for a storyteller is defining your villain early in that sweet spot of compelling evil. You want your readers to root against him without making him so horrifically bloodthirsty that the reader doesn't want to continue. If I introduce a bad guy by showing him burning down an animal shelter and killing lots of puppies, readers will hate him, but some people will find the evil act too abhorrent to keep reading. Early on The Fall of Moscow Station gives our ruthless Russian villain an almost as repugnant American villain to demonstrate his sheer mercilessness and brutality. Finally, I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but Mark offers one of the better versions of the "villain has a point" trope in a long time. A lot of us look around at our country and see things going terribly wrong, wondering if we've lost part of what makes us special, asking if we've somehow gone soft, disengaged, distracted, lazy. The villain's vision is, in its own peculiar way, a more stable, less dangerous world, with a more . ADDENDA: A beautiful essay to a whiner: After reading your article detailing the absolute struggle you dealt with while working for a Bay Area based corporation (see here), I felt it imperative to address your concerns and above all, your obvious need for financial assistance. It sounds like you've hit some real post-Haitian-earthquake style hard times, so maybe some advice will help while you drink the incredibly expensive bourbon you posted on your Instagram account and eat that bag of rice, which was the only other thing you could afford!  | 
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