Donald Trump suffered a decisive defeat Tuesday in the Wisconsin primary.
There are signs that this Islamaphobic bigot’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination may be running out of steam. It has been a bad week all round for the Trump campaign. Long-used to throwing unwelcome members of the media out of public meetings, this week his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski went too far and was arrested for manhandling a female journalist who was trying to ask Trump a question. Trump has also begun to flounder on a range of policy issues. As the possibility increased that he might win the nomination, it was inevitable that he would be quizzed more closely on his plans. In a series of interviews, Trump appeared unprepared, fluffed his lines and when he fell back on his customary bombast, made himself look a fool. It drove home the judgment of his former
communications manager who in a devastating critique after her resignation last week said that the only policy Donald Trump had was Donald Trump.
But the Trump campaign is far from over. He still leads in terms of delegates. And his only opponent, junior Texas Sen. Ted Cruz still comes with many doubts. The Republican party establishment has never liked him.
But faced with the awful option of Trump, it has held its nose and begun to swing the party machine behind him. It is also widely suspected that party bigwigs are preparing an ambush for Trump at the party’s July 18 convention. Various procedural measures could be invoked to cause delegates to change their allegiance. Dubious though these may be, the core warning that the party will give its faithful is that there is no way that it will win back the White House if Trump is its candidate.
Until now, there has been a sense that Trump was able to successfully overturn all the political givens. The general amazement, he stepped outside the political box. This indeed was his very appeal. In a country where voters on both sides of the political divide are in despair at Big Dollar politics, the paralyzing polarization in Congress and the self-serving rhetoric of the current crop of politicians, Hillary Clinton included, Trump’s message was original and full of hope.
But as the campaign has progressed, his originality has begun to wear thin. There must by now be many voters who backed him in earlier primaries, who are regretting their decision.
Meanwhile Hillary Clinton has once again been beaten by Bernie Sanders, the other political maverick seeking to upset the establishment’s applecart.
Sanders is still a very long way from the nomination. But Clinton’s tarnished reputation and increasingly frumpish response to her challenger are endearing her even less to the voters. If she loses some more states then Democrats may look more closely at a Sanders nomination. A Sanders-Trump battle for the White House in November would divide US voters in interesting ways. Republicans revolted by Trump could probably bring themselves to back Sanders, whereas Democrats opposed to Sanders would find it very hard to vote for Trump.
A Cruz-Clinton battle could go either way, unless the Republicans unleash devastating details on Hillary’s past. Her questionable behavior before the 2012 Benghazi assassination of Chris Stevens, Washington’s ambassador to Libya may still come back to haunt her.
