There Will Be No Republican Unity in 2016
The Alliance wins the Battle of Serenity Valley. Agent Cooper gets trapped in the Black Lodge. Kylo Ren kills Han Solo. Buffy's mother dies. Jon Snow gets stabbed in the back. Dan Conner suffers a heart attack. Jack can't save Teri Bauer. Chinatown remains Chinatown. Bambi's mom gets shot. And Marco Rubio loses Florida to Donald Trump. This year should tell us that nothing in politics is certain, but right now, there's just no way for the Republican party to leave the convention in Cleveland unified. You can't square this circle. A certain percentage of Trump voters won't support anyone but their man as the nominee. On the flip side, 37 percent of Republican voters yesterday said they would "seriously consider" voting for a third party or other candidate if Trump is the nominee. Barring a sudden Ted Cruz surge in the final 20 contests, the Trump folks will argue their guy won the most votes, the most states, and has the most delegates. We know how quick Trump is to hurl accusations he's being cheated -- even when they're baseless. Nothing we've seen in Trump's behavior going back years indicates he's capable of graciously conceding defeat and pledging to do his part to help elect the Republican nominee. Nothing we've seen from his supporters suggests they're amenable to voting for Cruz or some other Republican. On the flip side, the #NeverTrump crowd believes that voting for Trump is selling their souls, reducing themselves to the humiliating subservience of Chris Christie. They've seen religious leaders compare Trump to King David, Senator Jeff Sessions endorse the guy who hired illegal immigrants for construction jobs and off-the-cuff endorsed expanding the H-1B visa program, journalistic institutions turn themselves into propaganda outlets for him, and the media turn themselves into an all-Trump, all-the-time frenzy of alternating adulation and denunciation. ("Nothing too hard, Mika.") The allegedly conservative party is now ready to sign on to the guy who defends Planned Parenthood, opposes entitlement reform, speaks warmly of Vladimir Putin, boasts he'll be able to get the military to violate the law, won't rip up the Iranian nuclear deal, mocks Carly Fiorina's appearance, and lies constantly, obviously, and shamelessly. Trump corrupts everything he touches, and one plurality in the party can't believe the other plurality is eager to give him the powers of the presidency and authority over the FBI, Department of Justice, and IRS. And despite the overwhelming hype, he's won 37 percent of the cast votes so far. All the polling indicates Rubio would have crushed Hillary Clinton in a general election. Cruz looks like he's got a shot -- not a great shot, but a shot. Donald Trump's general-election numbers are sinking like a stone. (If you can stand him, John Kasich matches up quite well.) Trump's fans walk around with great confidence about his general election strengths for which there is no real evidence. They're convinced he will win over traditional blue-collar Democrats. So far, he doesn't. They're convinced he will win over African Americans. Polling in February puts his support among African Americans between 4 and 10 percent. (Romney won 6 percent.) They're convinced he'll win a lot more Latinos than everyone thinks. (He's currently at less than half Mitt Romney's level of support.) They're convinced he'll win Democratic states like New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. (He trails by 18 to 23 points in those states in the most recent polls.) Trump fans gleefully point to his 7.5 million votes in the primary so far, and forget that the universe of voters in the general election will be on a completely different scale -- probably 130 million voters. (Mitt Romney won 10 million primary votes.) When you mention Trump's awful head-to-head polling with Hillary Clinton, you hear a lot of references to Ronald Reagan's trailing Jimmy Carter in March 1980. Ronald Reagan never had the unfavorable numbers Trump has now. When everybody says, "Oh, the pundits and the elected officials and the other campaigns didn't see the GOP grassroots embrace of Trump coming . . ." well, yeah; the pundits and the elected officials and the other campaigns thought better of the GOP grassroots. No, America Does Not Need a More 'Authoritarian' Leader Last night, Marco Rubio began his concession speech: I haven't had a chance to speak to him yet but I want to congratulate Donald Trump on his victory, big victory in Florida. We live in a republic and our voters make these decisions and we respect that very much and it was a big win. We "respect" the decisions in the sense that we don't contest them, but we don't have to respect the judgment of the voters in the sense of concurring they made the right choice. Barack Obama was not the right choice in the 2012 general election, and he wasn't the right choice in 2008, either. Last night, Bill O'Reilly offered an odd defense of the GOP front-runner: "The reason I think Trump won in Florida is because he comes across as more authoritarian. Not authoritative, authoritarian." Let's take a look at the Merriam-Webster definition of authoritarian: 1. of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority <had authoritarian parents> 2: of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people <an authoritarian regime> There is nothing less American than authoritarianism. This nation was not founded on blind submission to authority. If we wanted a "concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people" we would have remained a colony of the British crown. The people do not get to elect an authoritarian who will ignore the Constitution. An authoritarian is never the right solution. And if you think "authoritarian" is too harsh a term for the Trump philosophy, last night his spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, contended the campaign had the right to ban reporters he doesn't like or who write pieces that Trump doesn't like from his events: If you have a reporter that is not really reporting, just doing constant hit pieces for no reason, then that's something we need to look at. We have a lot of reporters who essentially have just been glorified bloggers who aren't really interested in covering the campaign or the race for that matter, they're just out there trying to start trouble. Does this continue into the White House? Our Eliana Johnson reminded us that the Obama White House tried this approach: When President Obama's Treasury Department moved to exclude Fox News from the White House press pool in an October 2009 interview with the man serving as "pay czar," Kenneth Feinberg, Fox's competitors spoke up in its defense. Jake Tapper, then at ABC News -- the same Jake Tapper who passed up the opportunity to ask Trump about the Fields incident -- confronted Robert Gibbs, then the White House press secretary, about the administration's treatment of "one of our sister organizations." The White House relented. A good chunk of the Republican base didn't want to reverse Obama's style of management. They just wanted one of their guys to do the same. A Rubio Man Makes the Case for Cruz Avik Roy, formerly of the Perry and Rubio campaigns and a contributor to NRO, makes the case for why Rubio fans should shift to Cruz now: The simple fact is that in a three-man GOP race -- Trump, Kasich, and Cruz -- Ted Cruz is the only conservative. I've disagreed with Cruz in the past, particularly his wrongheaded (I could use stronger words) attempt to shut down the government over Obamacare in 2013. Of the three remaining candidates, Cruz's political profile is the most challenging in a general election. More generally, I'm deeply concerned that Cruz's explicit strategy is to double down on conservatism's existing constituencies, instead of finding ways to attracting younger and more diverse voters to the cause. But if Ted Cruz is the GOP nominee, the worst-case scenario is that Hillary Clinton is President. If Donald Trump is the GOP nominee, the worst-case scenario is the disintegration of the Republican Party and the conservative movement -- and Hillary Clinton as President. Cruz would nominate constitutionalists to the Supreme Court -- an especially important issue after the death of Antonin Scalia. Furthermore, a President Ted Cruz would push Congress to pass transformative legislation in a number of critical areas, like tax and entitlement reform. It remains an electoral own goal that Republicans kicked their strongest general election candidate, Marco Rubio, to the curb. But the time to talk about that is later. The time to unite around Ted Cruz is now. Like they yell at Washington Nationals games, "Run, Teddy, run!" 
ADDENDA: Amen, David French. Even the one, small bright spot -- John Kasich denying Donald Trump Ohio's delegates -- may end up presenting the conservative movement with a classic case of winning a battle but losing the war. Kasich is going to soldier on, doing his dead-level-best to sail into the convention as some sort of kingmaker/power-broker. In the meantime, however, he'll split the anti-Trump vote even further, allowing Trump to continue to win contest after contest with a plurality of voters. It's self-serving, it's vain, and it's Kasich.  | 
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