Because this is a conservative forum, I can say that he is not the man to lead a conservative movement. He is not a conservative he is intellectually and philosophically incoherent and has been all over the lot on every side of every issue for decades. His history belies the kind of stability we want in either a conservative or a president-which of course is one in the same. It is the richest of ironies that Trump rises to the top with the support of the conservative movement by pointing out the absence of true conservatism among the Republican elite and by adopting an anti-immigration stance when he himself has no historic claim on any of these issues.
I do not believe that Trump has a better chance of getting elected than Cruz. There are just too many people viscerally opposed to Trump. While I concede that Cruz has earned his share of negatives (earned is clearly the appropriate word, Cruz has drawn his negatives by his actions not by gratuitous flippery). I think he is possessed of the intellect (clearly superior to Trump's), a sense of history (clearly distorted in Trump), the forensic ability (he never puts a foot down wrong, unlike Trump), and the integrity (do we need to catalog Trump's divorces and corporate bankruptcies?) to overcome those negatives. In other words, Trump has probably hit his ceiling but Cruz can go all the way.
But even assuming you are right and I am wrong, Cruz cannot get elected and Trump can, what we will have in the White House is not a conservative but a man whose body is but a life-support system for his ego. You will not have a conservative, you will have a man lurching from issue to issue on an ad hoc basis, committing gaffe after gaffe, disgracing the party and caricaturing the nation before the world.
I see no conservative victory in that picture.
