It's April 20, 4-20. It's Pot Day to a lot of people. It's also a day with a grim history: the anniversary of the collapse of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Columbine High School massacre, the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and Hitler's birthday. This is a week that has been fraught with danger in not-so-distant history: the Boston Marathon bombing anniversary was April 15; the Virginia Tech shooting anniversary was April 16; the Oklahoma City bombing anniversary was April 19. Maybe T.S. Eliot was right; maybe April really is the cruelest month. The Road Ahead for Trump Might Be Almost as Friendly as New York No point in disputing it; Trump needed a big win in New York yesterday and he got it. Yes, there will be some chuckling that he lost the GOP primary in Manhattan to a guy who eats pizza with a fork, But he needed as many of those delegates as he could possibly get, and he won 90 out of 95. The New York Times treats him like Alexander the Great, fresh from a sweeping conquest: If Mr. Trump's opponents hoped for even scattered signs of voters recoiling from his candidacy, there were none to be seen. He won voters of every age, race and income level, and he prevailed with two groups -- college-educated voters and women -- who have often rejected him. That adds up to a considerable show of strength for a candidate who still faces a narrow path to clinching the Republican nomination, even after a sweep or near sweep of his home state's 95 delegates. Let's also keep in mind that twice as many Democrats voted in the New York primary than Republicans. If Bernie Sanders voters had voted in the GOP primary, the Vermont senator would have won by 230,000 votes. For what it's worth, John Kasich knocked 214,000 votes off his 500,000 vote margin behind Marco Rubio. Henry Olsen argues that Trump's win is a matter of demographics . . . Trump's massive strength should also come as no surprise. He has always been doing better in states with large numbers of non-religious and Catholic voters, and New York's GOP electorate have large shares of both. He also does much better with moderates and somewhat conservatives than with very conservative Republicans, and New York's Republicans are decidedly to the left of the national party. Simple demographic analysis would always have suggested he would win with well over 40 percent of the vote; add in the home state advantage and you get the landslide margins that are about to unfold. But this means a week from now, Trump might be having an even better night, winning big in a bunch of demographically similar states where rivals won't be able to hand-wave it away as a reflection of a home-state advantage. In Connecticut, it's easy to see him winning 20something out of the 28 delegates. In Maryland, maybe Kasich competes well in the D.C. suburbs, maybe not. It certainly doesn't seem like natural Cruz territory. But give Trump another 20something out of 32. There's no polling in Delaware, which is winner-take-all; let's assume Trump wins that and takes all 16. In Rhode Island, the rules are particularly complicated because the state's delegates are "proportionally bound" to the finishes in the congressional districts (the state only has two) and statewide. Unless someone wins big (more than two-thirds of the vote) or abysmal (less than 10 percent) the three delegates that are apportioned to finish in each congressional district are going to split 1-1-1. Out of the 19, let's say Trump gets 15 at most, maybe fewer. Pennsylvania is complicated with a whole bunch of unbound delegates, three from each congressional district; but the clearer portion is that 17 delegates are bound on the first ballot to the statewide winner. You have to figure this is the state that Cruz and Kasich will see as the most-friendly territory, and put the most time and effort into winning. Even if you throw out Pennsylvania, Trump will probably wake up April 27 with another 80some delegates. America Needs a Big Step to the Right, and Trump Is Likely to Hinder That (Good news, Trump fans. There's kind-of, sort-of a compliment to your guy, deep in here, if you read far enough.) What ails America? Take your pick. Crime is coming back. In response to the incessant accusations of racism and the heightened hostility in the streets that has followed the Michael Brown shooting, officers have pulled back from making investigatory stops and enforcing low-level offenses in many urban areas. As a result, violent crime in cities with large black populations has shot up—homicides in the largest 50 cities rose nearly 17 percent in 2015. And the Left is once again denouncing the police—this time for not doing enough policing. [Shawn] King now accuses police in Chicago of not "doing their job," as a result of which "people are dying." Stops in Chicago are down nearly 90 percent this year through the end of March, compared with the same period in 2015; shootings were up 78 percent and homicides up 62 percent through April 10. Over 100 people were shot in the first ten days of 2016. King scoffs at the suggestion that a new 70-question street-stop form imposed on the CPD by the ACLU is partly responsible for the drop-off in engagement. If American police "refuse to do their jobs [i.e., make stops] when more paperwork is required," he retorts, "it's symptomatic of an entirely broken system in need of an overhaul." This is the same King who as recently as October fumed that "nothing happening in this country appears to be slowing [the police] down." Some corners of our government take border security and immigration law very seriously; others don't and refuse to enforce the law: "124 illegal immigrant criminals released from jail by the Obama administration since 2010 have been subsequently charged with murder . . . In 2014, ICE released 30,558 criminal aliens who had been convicted of 92,347 crimes. Only 3 percent have been deported." The world's most dangerous and hostile regimes are getting more aggressive: Russian President Vladimir Putin has already learned -- in the flexible era of the Obama "reset" -- that the U.S. is no serious obstacle to such stunts as Russia swiping the entire territory of Crimea from Ukraine, moving back into the Middle East, propping up Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and offering fugitive Edward Snowden a home after the grand hack of the National Security Agency. -- China, while brushing off U.S. protests, keeps pushing its power plays and territorial grabs in East Asia -- and has just landed a military jet on an island it has built, complete with runway, in the South China Sea. -- Iran, having pocketed the Obama-legacy rotten nuclear deal, has continued testing ballistic missiles, with Iran's Fars News Agency advertising that two of the missiles launched just last month were emblazoned in Hebrew with the phrase "Israel must be wiped out." Presumably these missiles are being developed just in case Iran feels a need to propel toward a target some highly unpeaceful products of its "exclusively peaceful" nuclear program? Meantime, Iran is wielding the nuclear agreement itself as a threat. Just this past week, we had the head of Iran's Central Bank in Washington threatening that Iran will walk away from Obama's cherished nuclear deal unless the Obama administration provides yet more concessions -- in this instance, a U.S. welcome mat for Iran's banking transactions, so Iran, the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, can avail itself of easy access to dollars. -- Saudi authorities have been threatening that if Congress passes a bill allowing the Saudi government to be held responsible for any part in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they will dump hundreds of billions worth of U.S. assets. (What's most arresting here is less the prospect of a self-defeating Saudi fire sale on U.S. assets than the reality that the Saudis -- beset by everything from relatively low oil prices to regional tumult, including an aggressively expansionist Iran -- feel free to try to bully the U.S.). -- And oh, by the way, North Korea, has been visibly preparing for a fifth nuclear test. If they carry it out during the grand window of opportunity provided by Obama's final nine months in office, this would be the fourth North Korean nuclear test on Obama's watch. That's not a good trend, especially given North Korea's history of marketing its weapons and nuclear know-how to places such as the Middle East. That's before we even get to the carnage and refugee flows spilling out of such places as Syria and Libya; such terrorist outfits and networks as ISIS, the Taliban, Hezbollah, al Qaeda . . . Higher education has become an expensive joke, failing to prepare young people for careers and, it seems in many cases, facilitating an inability to cope with the routine challenges of adult life: There's been much talk on the campaign trail about helping students pay for college and not enough about exactly what they're buying. It's ludicrous that student debt has passed $1 trillion and that nearly 20 percent of the undergraduates who borrowed for college are in default on their student loans. Where is the money going? It's going to multimillion-dollar pay packages for college presidents, country-club campus amenities and, increasingly, an expanding army of administrators tasked with micromanaging the drinking habits, sex lives and sensitivities of people who in any other American context would be considered adults. In these cases, the conservative movement, the Republican party, and most of the American people have a ballpark sense of what the solution is. -Cops need to be able to do their jobs and get violent criminals off the streets, without fear that their actions will be misinterpreted and twisted by demagogues to start a riot. -Those crossing the U.S. border illegally need to be caught, prosecuted, and deported -- particularly those involved in non-immigration crimes. -The U.S. military needs to be larger, stronger, and more technologically advanced, our allies need to be reassured, and our hostile rivals need a bit of a brush-back pitch to remind them of the consequences of provoking the United States or threatening our people. -Universities and colleges need to stop thinking that their job is to fundamentally transform American society and its values and get back to the basic job of preparing young people to work for a living. (Maybe every college student should study abroad, somewhere in the Third World, to ensure they return with a newfound appreciation for America's blessings.) Law and order, a return to a strong, confident approach to threats, a complete dismissal of the dictates of political correctness -- the good news is these are all elements of the Trump campaign. If he wasn't an incoherent populist authoritarian demagogue, it would be a lot easier to jump on the bandwagon. The problem is that Trump is such a crass, deliberately-obnoxious, incendiary, policy-detail-ignorant, thin-skinned, women-repellent misogynist that he's going to taint these positions by associating himself with them. ADDENDA: Ryan Ellis looks further at Bernie Sanders's tax return and asks questions about Sanders paying the 85 percent tax rate on his Social Security and his deduction of $8,946 in business meals. Neither of these are direct contradictions to Sanders's proposed tax policies, as I pointed out with his mortgage deductions, but Ellis does raise a good potential question for Sanders: Should someone making more than $200,000 be allowed to deduct $9,000 in meals as a business expense? Sanders might say "yes," but there's a chance he would say "no" and start shouting about the "millionayuhs and billionayuhs" not paying their fair share.  | 
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