Trump needs to make a deal with Cruz for a SCOTUS position to get him out of the race and backing Trump.
Although, knowing Cruzers, they will call Cruz a backstabber.
Trump needs to make a deal with Cruz for a SCOTUS position to get him out of the race and backing Trump.
It would take 6mos for the lawyers to write the draft of such a deal. But the deal has to be made before the two camps won’t vote for the other guy’s and we’re almost there if the campaign sniping continues.
The logical fusion ticket, that would bring together some 80% of all the primary voters in one tent, will be resisted furiously by the Republican back-stablishment, as well as the #NeverTrump and the #NeverCruz people.
Which is a pity, really, as the REAL enemy is Herself, a fact that is continuously lost sight of.
I do not believe there is any great personal animus between The Donald and Ted Cruz, and in fact, they probably agree on a great many policy questions in principle, if not necessarily in the execution.
JFK and LBJ despised each other in 1960, yet they somehow ended up on a “fusion” ticket that year, and Papa Joe Kennedy did not have to buy one damned vote more than he needed in Illinois, while LBJ narrowly carried Texas.
History is sometimes written in invisible ink.
But Trump/Cruz should be writ large. And in starkly contrasting colors.
“Trump needs to make a deal with Cruz for a SCOTUS position to get him out of the race and backing Trump. Although, knowing Cruzers, they will call Cruz a backstabber.”
Let’s have some realpolitik here. Trump has not closed the deal with conservatives. And he’s a long way from being there. And conservatives quite rightly want conservative things to happen over the next four years. If we didn’t, we’d be hypocrites. IMO, conservatives lose if Cruz makes a ANY deal with Trump OR with the GOP-E, unless the deal is policy concessions from Trump on key conservative issues.
Cruz should not accept the VP nomination—that would be Trump’s way of making conservatives irrelevant for the next four years by silencing on of our best advocates. If the funds are there, Cruz needs to stay in the race.
Trump will likely win either an outright majority or near majority of delegates regardless. So Trump should be the nominee, not some GOP-E brokered b.s. candidate. Here is how Trump and Cruz both win in that event.
At the convention, Cruz needs to endorse Trump and release his delegates to support Trump (assuming Trump is near a majority) without a deal and then campaign for Trump in the general election, without giving Trump his organization.
Trump is the almost certain nominee but, in my opinion, still cannot be trusted with all the power in the party from a Tea Party point of view—Trump might turn out great or terrible, there’s just no way to tell at this point. So Cruz’s organization, which is formidable, needs to remain intact and out of Trump’s control.
At that point, Cruz is setup to be Trump’s conservative conscience in the Senate should Trump win the general election. If Trump governs as a conservative, he will find a conservative movement eager to work with him. A powerful and no-longer-evil Republican party will emerge from that coalition. If he governs as a moderate or liberal, he will lose us and the R’s will probably go the way of the Whigs.
OTOH, if Trump does not win the general election, this approach makes Cruz the overwhelmingly likely nominee in 2020.
One other thing, Trump and Cruz together need to completely clean out the RNC immediately on Trump winning the nomination and take control of that pitiful wreck of an organization.
“knowing Cruzers, they will call Cruz a backstabber”
Doubt it. As a Cruz supporter I can live with him being VP or a Supreme Court justice. Didn’t mind the idea of him leaving the senate to be president either.