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March 29th, 2024

Insight

To stop Trump, GOP establishment must rally around Cruz

John Kass

By John Kass

Published March 11, 2016

For grass-roots conservative Republicans -- mocked by the Beltway's imperial punditry and lied to again and again by the GOP establishment -- what could be sweeter than this?

They can watch the GOP elite tremble in fear and panic over the prospect of Donald Trump as their presidential candidate.

Or they can wait for those same Republican establishment lords to drop to their knees and begin that slow crawl, over the broken political corpse of Marco Rubio, to kiss the feet of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the constitutional conservative whom they hate.

Ahhh.

At times like this, I just want to enjoy a fine cigar, think of revenge as a dish best served cold and consider a great line from antiquity such as this one:

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.

The GOP establishment boys are hopping mad now, mad as hatters, frantic for answers, even ridiculous answers. And the most ridiculous is the dream of propping up Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich until Mitt Romney can ride his milquetoast-colored steed and rescue them at their convention.

But Romney is no Ragnar Lodbrok, king of the Vikings. And he's no Sir Lancelot. Romney is the wimp who lost to President Obama. And even a horse named Milquetoast would buck Mitt off, then kick him.

If the establishment tries a convention power grab here's what would happen: Angry Trump voters and angry Cruz conservatives would grab their pitchforks, staves and torches and walk out, but only after burning the GOP to the ground.

So if the GOP really wants to stop Trump, they have only one alternative: Cruz.

New polls show Trump whomping Rubio in Marco's native Florida and leading Kasich in Ohio. Their only recourse is to make this a two-man race.

Either they help clear the field for Cruz or open their arms and embrace The Donald.

All that Kasich was doing in this campaign was running for vice president and whining. And Rubio? Calling yourself a conservative and foreign policy expert in TV commercials doesn't make it so.

Rubio's wild talk of enforcing a no-fly zone in Syria shows he's no foreign policy genius. And threatening a shooting war with Russia makes him look like a little kid in daddy's big chair, tiny feet dangling.

Rubio has political talent, he's got a great immigrant story. He's quick-witted. But he listened to the establishment siren song. And he tried to fight an alley fighter over the size of a man's hands.

Now Rubio is what's left after the toast is gone: dry crumbs waiting to be swept away.

GOP insiders despise Cruz, hate him for his unrepentant conservatism, hate him for calling them out as liars on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and hate him for lumping them all into what I call the Combine and what Cruz calls the corrupt "Washington cartel."

"To me it's clear that Ted has made the best case thus far that he can be the alternative to Trump," Cruz hater Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, was quoted as saying the other day.

"The best thing I think could happen is for the party to unite before Ohio and Florida and make sure that we not only beat him, Trump, in Ohio and Florida, that we have a candidate that can beat him thereafter and right now it seems that Ted Cruz has the best case to be made," Graham said.

Failed presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, said she was "horrified" by Trump as she endorsed Cruz on Wednesday.

After the 2016 election, as coalition pieces realign, conservatives might want to reconsider things. They might want to think less about "conservatism" as ideology and more about a return to what was once known as the conservative temperament. If they wish to conserve something, why not something concrete, such as the Constitution and its Bill of Rights?

But for this cycle, if Kasich and Rubio were gone, the anti-Trump vote would have a clear choice in Cruz. Some two-thirds of Republicans prefer a candidate other than Trump.

Would a rally around Cruz actually stop Trump now? Or is it too late? I don't know if anything can stop Trump now.

But waiting until the GOP convention for a chance at parlor tricks to hand the nomination to some bloodless, establishment-approved toady would be disastrous.

The common wisdom, which is so often wrong, says Cruz is not a good candidate. He's strident, doesn't have great hair and he lacks charisma. But charisma doesn't make a leader. Backbone makes a leader. Charisma doesn't make a good president, as the past eight years have shown.

And Trump? The Republican establishment has gone out of its way to make him toxic. They've played every card against him. They say he could never defeat Hillary Clinton. But never is a stupid word in politics.

Clinton is tired. And in this year of insurgency from left and right, she is the establishment's darling now. She's the most warlike. She's got Wall Street. She's in.

And yet she couldn't even beat Bernie Sanders in Michigan.

The issue here is Republican Party politics. Trump would deal with the GOP establishment. That's what he does. He's a deal maker.

And Cruz? He burned his bridges with the Combine bosses on purpose, publicly, loudly, so there was no hope of return.

It's decision time.

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John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.

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