After Indiana Win, Trump Is The GOP Presidential Nominee

Donal Trump won the Indiana primary easily, and Ted Cruz ended his campaign, seeing no path forward, and not wanting to play the contested convention route, saying it would be bad for the party. So, what now? Here’s Josh Barro

Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president, and this alarms ideological conservatives for several reasons:

1. They think he will lose badly to Hillary Clinton, perhaps so badly that Republicans lose control of both houses of Congress.

2. They are afraid that he will damage the brand of the Republican Party, making it harder to win future elections.

3. They believe that he lacks the temperament and character to serve as president.

These are all good reasons to be alarmed, but there is also a fourth reason for alarm that is perhaps the most alarming of all for conservatives: His nomination could signal the death of orthodox conservatism as one of the two main forces in American public policy, since he is running away with the nomination despite being exposed as a nonconservative.

It’s not just that he is a non-conservative: he is moderate Republican at best, one who holds many Democratic Party positions, and many of those are the ones held by Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Elizabeth Warren.

Trump has somehow found a way to throw away the ideologically extreme ideas that orthodox conservatives cared about while actually making the party less popular. His nomination is a recipe for conservatives to sell out and lose anyway.

I’ve asked a simple question numerous times: when does Trump talk about the Constitution? What is his position on the Constitution? You really do not find him discussing it much. One of his biggest comments on it had him saying that it was “set in stone“, then explaining how to work deals around it.

Trump has his good points, and he has his bad points. Who will Donald J. Trump be going forward? Will he be the guy who made a name for himself and took charge of the primary season by refusing to back down, and attacking back twice as hard? Or, will he moderate and go soft? The general election starts for Trump today. John Kasich is a non-factor. Which Trump will we see?

Will he attempt to reach out to the Cruz supporters, and supporters of the other primary season candidates? Will he attempt to heal the wounds of a nasty primary season? Will he attempt to offer an olive branch to the #NeverTrump folks? Or will he continue to attack Republicans, the people he pro-ports to represent? Will he have his supporters work to heal the wounds?

Victor Davis Hanson makes an interesting observation regarding the Trump supporters (via Maggie’s Farm)

Trump supporters are tired of hearing that black lives matter, while no one mentions that all lives matter. They are sick of seeing protestors wave the flag of the country they do not wish illegal aliens to be sent back to and trash the country they under no circumstances want them to leave. They don’t like getting a letter from an IRS that employs Lois Lerner — a letter that would be ignored with impunity by those who are here illegally, or who run the Clinton Foundation. They are tired of wealthy minorities claiming they are perpetual victims of ill-treatment at the hands of people who are less well off than they. They don’t like hearing from elites that huge trade deficits have little to do with loss of jobs or that cheating by our trade partners is just a passing glitch in free trade. They cannot stand lectures from those who make more money in an hour than they do in a year about their own bad habits or slothfulness.

They don’t know what the on-screen savants mean by a leg-tingle or a perfectly pressed pant leg or a first-class temperament or a president as god — and they don’t care to find out. They do not hate political correctness so much as one-sided political correctness, which gives a pass to some to say things that would get others fired or ruined. They don’t want to be lectured that their own plight is part of a larger, healthy creative destruction or a leaner, meaner competitiveness or an overdue restructuring — by those who are never destroyed, rendered noncompetitive, or restructured. And they don’t like to be talked down to by the experts who ran up $10 trillion in debt, ruined the health-care system, dismantled the military, and screwed up the Secret Service, the IRS, NASA, and the VA. Trump is their megaphone, not their solution. The Trump supporters have seen plenty of politicians with important agendas, but few with the zeal to push them through; at this late date, they would apparently prefer zeal without agendas to agendas without zeal.

Can a megaphone win? Can he lead? If Trump wins, and does the Leftist things we Conservatives said he would, who will take responsibility for this?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

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