I may not be only person posting on this subject today, but I don't see any alternative. With Donald Trump's win in Indiana yesterday, he becomes the presumptive Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States. Technically, Trump has still not achieved the 1,237 delegate threshold needed for a statistical win, and may not do so until sometime in June, but the writing is already on the wall, especially given that first Ted Cruz decided to drop out of the race, and then John Kasich has also thrown in the towel. The unthinkable has become the undeniable. The tentative feeling in recent weeks - did I imagine it? - that perhaps Republicans were starting to rethink the wisdom of a Trump nomination all came to naught.
It has been a nasty, nasty campaign, like none before it. Even Trump's formulaic shout-out to Cruz ("he is one hell of a competitor, he is a tough, smart guy") cannot erase the memory of some of yesterday's more heartfelt insults, in which Cruz called Trump a "pathological liar", "completely amoral", a serial philanderer" and "a narcissist at a level I don't think this country has ever seen", and Trump responded by calling Cruz's father "disgraceful", and casting aspersions that he was linked in some way with Lee Harvey Oswald (President Kennedy's assassin).
Trump celebrated his Indiana victory with his usual, "We are going to make America great again" by-line, this time augmented by the wonderful, "We're going to start winning again, and we're going to win bigly". Whether Trump ultimately becomes President or not, America has already dealt itself a massive black mark in the eyes of the rest of the world, which remains aghast that the world's most powerful nation could even be considering such a buffoon as leader.
And how did all this happen? Well, I have analyzed this in more detail in a previous post, but essentially Trump has cynically tapped into working-class American disillusionment with low employment and stagnant wages, stemming from (as Trump would have us believe) the spread of globalization, immigration and free trade. As he gob-smacked the civilized world with one enormity after another during this campaign - Mexican rapists, a physical wall along the US's southern border, a ban on Muslims, "Lying Ted", Senator John McCain a fraud, and many more - his approval ratings just went up among a certain demographic.
But, while Trump has admittedly galvanized (for better or worse) a segment of the American electorate that traditionally just complains without voting, he has also alienated millions in a way never before seen, and reduced a whole political party to internal dissent and recriminations. There are many die-hard Republicans who still maintain that they will never vote for Trump, and some that say they will even vote for Clinton instead. They call him a "bigot", "racist", "misogynist", "bully", and describe him as "crass" or "rude".
Add to this the Democrats of the country, which still remain in the majority (at least according to political party identification statistics), and one might conclude that the final presidential race is a foregone conclusion. But Trump has been written off before, and a circumspect observer would do well to be wary. At this point, all bets are off. One thing that can safely be predicted: it's going to be a brutal and ugly fight.
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