Trump Swept, But It’s Not in the Bag. The Left Just Wants You to Think It Is.
Donald Trump has swept the “Acela Primary,” winning large margins in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland. His delegate haul (which is still uncertain) brings him closer to the magic number needed to clinch the nomination on a first ballot. He’s not yet inevitable, however, though you’ll hear much to that effect from the mainstream media, who desperately want Trump to win the nomination because he polls so badly against the Democrats. If Cruz takes Indiana, a state likely to be much friendlier to him, and if Trump struggles in California, then he probably won’t reach a majority of delegates, triggering an open convention where all sorts of things become possible.
As for Trump’s sweep Tuesday, it was impressive but not surprising, given the location and nature of the states. It was Trump’s backyard, and those states have a number of important things in common.
Borders, Blue States and the Manufacturing Blues
In all of the states in Tuesday’s east coast primary slate, Democrats have dominated for at least a decade, and the rump Republican parties that survive in each state are increasingly like the Republican party I remember from New York City: beaten down by defeat, compromised on the core social issues that really decide society’s future, reduced to pimping itself as a more competent manager of inexorable decline.
Those states are also major destinations for immigrants, which means that each year they turn an even deeper blue, and will continue to do so as long as the U.S. admits many hundreds of thousands of mostly low-skill and low income immigrants every year, immigrants who (being only human) will find the party of big government benefits more attractive than the GOP’s message of tough love and liberty.
So the one issue on which Republicans in such states are likely to agree (in the deep, dark privacy of the voting booth) is the need to control America’s borders. While Donald Trump’s actual policies on that issue are unreliable, shifting and partly a secret, immigration is the issue Trump has used to brand himself, and he has successfully branded himself as the border hawk.
That, and his attacks on trade. It’s no accident that each of the states Trump won Tuesday has seen a decline in its manufacturing base, with such jobs replaced (if at all) by service industry gigs that pay less than factory slots once did, but require college degrees.
To get such a degree, one must slog through one of the increasingly suffocating, politically correct sausage grinders that liven our headlines every week with a new outrage against free speech, Western Civ, American patriotism, Christianity or common decency: fetus cookies, Jesus dartboards, “microaggressions,” whee! That is one more reason why some vote for Trump — as a way of extending a middle finger at the leftists who seem to be running everything.
Hillary’s Trump Card
However, by nominating Trump, we’d be handing those same leftists the next election in a 40-plus-state landslide — unless the RealClear Politics national polling average on this point is wildly off the mark, with polling companies with divergent polling techniques and biases all somehow complicit in the wrongness, and complicit for several months of polling averages. If you wish to cling to hope for a Trump administration, that there is your slender thread.
But really, in cold hard fact, a primary vote for Trump is a vote for Hillary, and two to four new radical feminist socialist multiculturalists on the United States Supreme Court. Those justices are the people who are really running your life, and they couldn’t be happier about the Republican primaries if they were secretly scripting them. If we work hard enough on down ballot races (as we absolutely should), we just might keep the House. Probably not the Senate, though, so Hillary’s confirmations will go down smoothly.
A President Hillary Clinton will seek out other members of her sect, and appoint the likes of California’s Kamala Harris to important federal judgeships — the kind of prosecutors who kick down journalists’ doors to steal their evidence against Planned Parenthood. Academics who think like Melissa Click will take over the Department of Education, and call in the “muscle” to punish functioning suburban school districts and scattered, defenseless homeschoolers. And so on, all through the government, from the IRS to the Marine Corps.
No Time to Despair
Donald Trump is an index of our decay. The worse life is for middle-class people in a given place, the higher his share of the primary vote. He lacks the patience or respect for politics to bother offering detailed responses on how he would counter our downward slide — just as he lacks the follow-through to keep the most basic campaign commitments. Remember the $6 million he promised veterans? They’re still waiting for it. Remember that list of conservative judges he promised to get from the Heritage Foundation to reassure us about his court picks? Trump forgot about it, and is pretty sure you forgot, too.
But then Trump is a candidate who’s perfectly capable of answering a journalist’s serious question with a shrug and a smile, all but admitting, I lied, okay? And some of us find that … charming.
There is still a chance that the people of principle in the Republican party will pull together behind Cruz or Kasich, enough of them to stop Trump winning the party bid on the first ballot, at which point most of the delegates would be free to coalesce around a consensus candidate with a demonstrated commitment to conservative principles and a fighting chance of beating the Democrat in the general election.
This is no time to despair, though that time might come soon enough. If Trump collects enough delegates and gains the nomination, the 2016 general election may be all but over.