Trump Wuz Robbed

The Politico Magazine ^ | April 14, 2016 | Rich Lowry

[2ndDivisionVet]

Give Donald Trump credit for planning ahead. He is preparing to be a sore loser.

Trump’s complaints that he is being undone by a rigged system crafted by a corrupt Republican Party is the dress rehearsal for his campaign’s closing argument should it come up short in Cleveland. Trump will, in his telling, have been stabbed in the back by insiders and be fully justified in wreaking a terrible revenge on the party that he briefly sought to lead.

Facts and logic don’t particularly matter to Trump or his mouthpieces, yet the “rigged” charge is absurd even by the standards of his standard-less campaign.

Colorado occasioned the latest Trump fusillade. Listening to him, you would think that the state is run by a cross of the Pendergast Machine and Tammany Hall (which voted more people than existed in the voting population of New York City in one period of the 19th century). Colorado’s offense against fairness and decency was Ted Cruz winning all of its delegates in the same caucus system it has used for years.

The only change in the state, implemented back in August, before many people took Trump seriously, was canceling its presidential preference poll, which didn’t have any role in binding delegates anyway.

The Colorado system — precinct caucuses electing delegates to district and state assemblies, where they are selected for the national convention — isn’t undemocratic. But it rewards a different, more demanding and engaged sort of participation than a primary.

An accent on grass-roots organizing is not, by the way, a hallmark of establishment politics. In fact, it is the opposite. The classic conservative insurgent excels at organizing as a means to bypass the party’s gatekeepers and to make up for a lack of resources and media attention. Although the Cruz campaign is well-funded, it has the grass-roots DNA of this kind of insurgency, which it began as, and, in significant respects, still is.

Its success at the delegate-selection game is a testament to its ability to connect with and organize the party’s activists, rather than to any unfair advantages lent it by the establishment. If the Republican race had developed along more conventional lines as a razor-tight Cruz-Jeb Bush fight, surely Cruz would be trying to pick Bush’s delegate pocket, and with some success, just the way he is picking Trump’s now.

For understandable reasons, Trump would prefer that every contest be an open primary. The Republican calendar has plenty of those. But it has other varieties of contests as well, reflecting the different histories and characteristics of the state parties. The diverse, patchwork system forces a candidate to demonstrate strength all over the geographical map and in myriad ways.

If Trump is a master at message and free media — both driven by his outsize personality — the delegate game has exposed his campaign’s rank inferiority to Cruz’s. The Cruz team built for the long haul and learned the rules. Whereas Trump’s campaign is in the midst of messy retooling, turning to a longtime Washington fixer to right the ship, Cruz’s campaign hasn’t had a whisper of dissension, let alone had to go to bat for a staffer arrested for battery of a female reporter.

For all of Trump’s complaints, the nomination system was set up to favor the front-runner and get him over the top as soon as possible. It is a symptom of Trump’s weakness that, even as he romped through the first couple of months of the race and accumulated delegates out of proportion to his popular vote (about 45 percent of the delegates on 37 percent of the vote), he still might fall short of 1,237.

Still, the whining serves several Trump purposes. It feeds his psychological compulsion to never admit he’s been beaten or outmaneuvered; it creates something for the media to chew on until he runs away with the New York primary next week; and it sets the predicate for his argument at a convention (it’d be “unfair” if he didn’t get the nomination), and, more importantly, for ditching the party if he loses.

It is hard to think of a major presidential candidate, let alone a front-runner, who has ever had so little regard for the unity or interests of his own party or is so clearly preparing to bring it down, like Samson at the temple of Dagon, if it doesn’t bend to his will. Trump is in open conflict with RNC chairman Reince Priebus and doing all he can to delegitimize the GOP in the eyes of his voters.

Trump portrays himself as a perpetual winner yet also cultivates a sense of aggrieved victimhood that is clearly part of his appeal to his supporters. Most unsuccessful candidates seek to avoid the appearance of being a sore loser, no matter what their true feelings. In another departure from the rules of politics, Trump would embrace the role with gusto. His signature line would go from Make America Great Again to We Wuz Robbed.

[21twelve]

“I’m at the point where I say give the whiny blovinator the nomination...”

Me too. Except even with me voting for Trump (and I will if it comes to that), he may still not win.

[nathanbedford]

[Trump has] so little regard for the unity or interests of his own party or is so clearly preparing to bring it down, like Samson at the temple of Dagon, if it doesn’t bend to his will.

Trump and his supporters will win the nomination and get slaughtered in the general election or they will lose the nomination and break the party apart. Either way, Trump will put Hillary in the White House. We will lose the Supreme Court, the Senate, perhaps even the House, and down ticket state offices without number.

Thus the Republican Party, the conservative movement, The Tea Party, ultimately our liberty and prosperity will all be sacrificed on the altar of Donald Trump's ego.

If the inconceivable happens, if Trump is actually elected president of the United States, we will shear away from any tether which remains to the Constitution and embark on a populist excursion into Donald Trump's ego. We will likely be cast into a severe economic recession or even depression as Trump mangles trade negotiations just as he has utterly mismanaged his campaign on the ground. Our vast federal bureaucracy will spin entirely out of control as Trump focuses ad hoc on small parts of it which strike his fancy and mismanages the rest. God knows what sort of Supreme Court Justices we will get, because Trump's midnight conversions on this and virtually every other important issue, is absolutely suspect and without plausible explanation. He will enrich one sector of the economy while he impoverishes another, all with detached connection to the Constitution and to representative government, but entirely at the whim of Donald Trump.

There is no need for any of us to sacrifice our self-respect for Donald Trump.

[Hoodat]

If the inconceivable happens, if Trump is actually elected president of the United States, we will shear away from any tether which remains to the Constitution and embark on a populist excursion into Donald Trump's ego. We will likely be cast into a severe economic recession or even depression as Trump mangles trade negotiations just as he has utterly mismanaged his campaign on the ground.

But when things go south, he'll just declare bankruptcy.

[McGruff]

[dynoman]

[dynoman]

[Thumper1960]

I find it very hard to take serious the predictions of a poster who lionizes a slaver, klansman and traitor who took up arms against the Constitution and was diametrically opposed to the tenets of a party he now claims to align himself with.

Spare me the rhetoric of states rights and battlefield tactician. It is not germane to the issue of whether Trump can succeed at what he claims he wishes to accomplish.

[dynoman]

[Old Retired Army Guy]

Poor Lowry. Wonder where he will go to cry when Trump is nominated?

[Old Retired Army Guy]

With his slick backed black hair and hook nose, he reminds me of a younger version of Grandpa in the Munsters.

[Velvet_Jones]

Why bother? You just post the same Cruznadians propaganda over and over again. Why waste time reading when we know what it says?

No matter. Creepy Ted will be mathematically eliminated on Tuesday, so you’ll really have no pretense after that other than “Stop Trump”

[nathanbedford]

I commend you to my about page where you can be disabused of your prejudgments of me and of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

In any event, it is once again necessary to remind a Trump supporter that it is not about me and it certainly is not about Nathan Bedford Forrest, it is about the glaring deficiencies in your man.

[LurkLongley]

The same as what?

Has everyone become completely unhinged?

A lifelong, truly conservative person is running and he’d be more of the same? We spent years looking for a candidate like Cruz, and a foul, loudmouth with a lifelong liberal political affiliations says a few things, and we’re ready to turn the country over to him?

Go ahead and burn it all down. I hope Il Duce will allow FR to continue so I can say, some of us knew, and we told you.

[mylife]

Well said.

[ripnbang]

No

[USS Alaska]

... Cruz’s campaign hasn’t had a whisper of dissension, let alone had to go to bat for a staffer arrested for battery of a female reporter.

Rick Tyler fired by Cruz for getting caught in a lie. If he hadn't been caught, it would have been OK.

Rich Lowry, the pencil neck geek would be slapped silly on the street and THE RULES ARE RIGGED.

Colorado changed their rules in August of 2015 when they saw Trump leading the pack and didn't want to give the voters a say in the outcome.

That charade they called "voting" for delegates was pure BS.

Each candidate got 10 seconds to speak, ya think that wasn't pre-planned?

[LurkLongley]

Thanks. Sanity is sorely lacking around these parts lately.

[ripnbang]

A lifelong, truly conservative person is running and he’d be more of the same? We spent years looking for a candidate like Cruz...

And apparently the majority of the voters, thus far, didn't like or trust what they saw and heard.

[conservative_crusader]

The circumstances that Trump had to win the south affect quite a lot. When Trump won those states, there were 16 more candidates in the running, and Donald just so happened to be the dog on top of the pile. It’s a lot different now that there are just three left in the running. Trump may yet win, but don’t act like if the primaries were all held again with just the 3 candidates left that the results would be the same.

[conservative_crusader]

So? Should we vote for a candidate that Donald Trump owns? That seems like your going for Hillary.