It is a reflection of the desperation that has taken hold of the right’s anti-Trump forces that a new nonaggression pact between Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich initially moved some to irrational exuberance. As our Jonathan Tobin observed, the deal between the two campaigns is much more circumspect than early reports suggested. What’s more, it’s not at all clear that the deal’s signatories will abide by its terms or that it’s not already too late to prevent Donald Trump from winning the party’s nomination outright. The least compelling argument against the Cruz-Kasich alliance, though, is the notion that it would somehow be affirming the conspiratorial inclinations of the Trumpian fringe. To that concern, the response should be: so what?
Ahead of the critical March 15 primaries, it was Marco Rubio’s team that demonstrated what true collusion aimed at blocking Donald Trump looked like when they explicitly advised their supporters to back Kasich in Ohio over their own candidate. The Kasich campaign declined to return the favor. “We were going to win in OH without his help, just as he’s going to lose in Florida without ours,” wrote Kasich campaign spokesman Rob Nichols. “At the end of the day, how do you tell your people that are for you to go vote for somebody else?” Governor Kasich added. “I’m not into a stop-Trump as much as I am be-for-Kasich movement.” This leopard’s spots remain frustratingly static.
Asked if his pact, in which Kasich agreed to cede the state of Indiana in exchange for a free hand in New Mexico and Oregon, extends to advising his supporters to back Cruz, Kasich essentially said it did not. “I’ve never told them not to vote for me,” the Ohio governor said. “They ought to vote for me.” It’s one thing to withhold campaign advertising or to signal to supportive outside groups that they should do the same, but these efforts don’t matter much if the candidates are still indicating to their supporters that nothing should change.
The terms of this confused and loose alliance are clearly still being worked out. It would, therefore, serve the public if the political press declined to make too much out of this early and tentative coordination. But to display this kind of circumspection would rob Donald Trump of a preferred narrative – one that he has been employing for weeks and which holds unique appeal to his supporters, in particular. That is the notion that he, and they, have been robbed.
It is the central conceit of the Trump campaign’s pitch to his supporters. He contends that their woeful lots in life are not of their own making. They have been sold out by selfish politicians in Washington, displaced economically by unfair competition from China and cheap labor from Mexico, and marginalized by a culture that values “political correctness” above “telling it like it is.” It only makes sense that Trump would ape the sense of victimization he encourages in his supporters.
Trump has signaled for weeks that the process of securing delegates at the convention is “rigged,” and that his imaginary delegate stores are being raided in places like Georgia, Louisiana, and Colorado. The truth is that the rules of the delegate selection process were written months ago, and all the campaigns agreed to them. Trump has simply been outmaneuvered. As metaphors go, this is an especially apt one. Even as Team Trump tries to correct for their early errors, they continue to behave in a self-defeating manner. Ahead of Delaware’s primary on Tuesday, the Trump campaign’s delegate outreach coordinator was apparently so threatening and heavy-handed that he created antipathy toward Trump among local GOP officials that did not previously exist.
Trump wasn’t a victim then, and he’s not a victim now. It remains to be determined whether or not the Cruz-Kasich pact will yield results for the Stop Trump movement, but the celebrity candidate isn’t waiting for results to feign great grievance. Those in the candidate’s core following who believe themselves to be persecuted would, of course, find this dubious narrative attractive. It is for that reason that some in political media see this maneuver as a fatal one for both Cruz and Kasich.
“‘Cruz and Kasich declare themselves establishment axis in an effort to confirm Trump conspiracy theories,’” observed the columnist Matt Bai. “Doesn’t seem brilliant to me.” “In the meantime, the new Cruz-Kasich-#NeverTrump united front gives Trump the opportunity not just to slam the system as rigged, but to offer the only positive message in the campaign at this moment,” observed the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. Here’s the thing: They were going to believe that with or without a Cruz-Kasich coordination effort.
Trump is right, in a way. The process is rigged; it’s rigged to favor the system’s winners. This is why it is Trump who controls 49 percent of the bound delegates so far despite winning just 38 percent of the popular vote. A movement that believes that 40 percent is a majority, or that they are being robbed out of their due because they don’t understand the process is – and there is no way to put this delicately — paranoid.
This process was designed to facilitate the ascension of a Mitt Romney-type candidate to the nomination in a manner that allowed the nominee to avoid a prolonged primary fight. If Trump had invested the time and capital necessary to create an organization aimed at securing the nomination at the earliest stages of this process, that nomination would have already been his. Even without the architecture of a real campaign, Trump may only just narrowly be prevented from winning the delegates necessary to secure the nomination outright. For this set of circumstances, Donald Trump has only one person to blame. But he, like his supporters, have declined the opportunity to engage in some rather unforgiving introspection.
Only Donald Trump has a pathway to the nomination now prior to a second ballot on the floor of the Cleveland convention. Unless Cruz or Kasich intend to concede the nomination to Trump, they only have one way to force that outcome, and that is to coordinate their efforts. If that engenders in Trump supporters an even more aggravated sense of alienation and victimization, then so be it. Neither Trump nor his supporters are entitled to a particular outcome in this life – they must work for and earn their achievements. Conservatives used to understand that.
