RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump is not content to bully the residents of just one continent, it seems.

In the mid 1990s, there was Vera Coking, the septuagenarian widow whom Donald Trump tried to squeeze out of her Atlantic City apartment to make room for a limousine parking lot for his nearby casino. Ten years later, in Scotland, trying to foist a golf course and resort onto a stretch of Scottish coastline, Trump encountered a set of equally incorrigible homeowners — and did his best to run them out of their homes, too.

In March 2006, Trump visited Scotland and proposed to build a 36-hole golf course — “the greatest golf course anywhere in the world,” as he would reiterate time and again — along with a 450-room hotel with a conference center and spa, 950 time-share apartments, 36 golf villas, and 500 for-sale houses, and accommodations for hundreds of full-time employees, in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire. He billed it as an economic boon to the country and, in his usual theatrical fashion, as a “homecoming,” waxing poetic about his immigrant mother, who departed Scotland’s Western Isles for the U.S. as a young woman. In reality, it was a vanity project.

“I always wanted to do a golf course in Europe, and of the 211 sites we have looked at, we have seen some incredible places,” said Trump. “But this was something special.” Indeed — more than Trump understood. The Menie Links, north of Aberdeen, is home to the Foveran Links, a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). The Foveran Links – which is a dynamic dune system that moves several meters annually, giving rise to a unique collection of plants and wildlife — is unique in the United Kingdom.

In her desperate scramble to the top every Hillary victory is accompanied by a setback. The corrupt Democratic machine that has kept her going this far eked out a victory in Nevada, but took down her minority firewall.

In earlier primaries, Hillary had lost women and young voters. In Nevada, she lost Latinos.

The last and only element of the Obama coalition that she has retained are black voters. Black voters helped Hillary in Nevada. While Latinos defected to Sandernistan, black voters remained loyally behind on Hillary’s Happy Plantation. If the black voters, primarily women who powered the Obama campaign, wave goodbye to life on the Clinton Tara, then Hillary’s path to the White House ends with Sanders’ Socialist march to the Potomac.

Despite her victory in Nevada, the Clinton crisis is now real. Hillary Clinton has lost nearly every demographic of what was supposed to be her base. She has become a purely political machine candidate with no supporters, only staffers, no appeal, only strategy, and no way forward except increasingly grotesque forms of electoral fraud that risk alienating Democrats until she becomes unelectable in a general election as the voters who saw their efforts to vote for Bernie Sanders thwarted resentfully decide to stay home.

A similar stolen nomination in which Hillary Clinton was the victim led to a crisis in ’08 which was only resolved with a deal between Obama and Clintonworld that allowed her to use his administration as the platform for her own future presidential campaign. But Hillary may not be able to buy the elderly Bernie Sanders, who would be 82 in time for Hillary’s two terms to end, and his supporters off in the same way.

To listen to some of the commentary about yesterday’s primary in South Carolina, you would think that Donald Trump now had the nomination sewn up. Yesterday, the pundits crow, Trump won by a comfortable ten points, beating Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz 32.5 to 22.5 (22.3 for Cruz). Gosh. Slam dunk, what? Time for Mrs. Trump to start thinking about new curtains for the Oval Office or at least battling against whoever the Democratic nominee will be after Hillary Clinton drops out sometime (I predict) before the end of March.

But there are several things to note about yesterday’s primary that make this exercise in congratulation premature.

First of all, a scant week ago, the polls had Trump at 38, Cruz at 28.5, Rubio at 13.5. Clearly, this is one of those “plastic moments” of political fermentation that Karl Marx told us about. Things can change quickly.

Second, it is worth casting one’s mind way back to ancient times, to the winter of 2012, when Newt Gingrich won South Carolina with 40.4% of the vote. Mitt Romney took 27.8, Rick Santorum (remember him?) took 17%.

Gingrich lost no time announcing on some talk show that it was obvious that he was going to be the nominee.

It didn’t turn out that way, but he came in a respectable second in Florida and won decisively with 48.5% in the key southern state of Georgia.

How do you spell “Romney”?

I suppose it is possible that Donald Trump — the man who supports single-payer health care (Obamacare on steroids), who didn’t know about the nuclear triad until a few weeks ago, who once proposed a 14.25% wealth tax on “the rich,” and until 15 minutes ago was an enthusiastic proponent of abortion on demand, even that form of infanticide euphemistically described as “partial birth abortion” by its partisans — I suppose it is possible that Donald Trump will get the country to rally around him and hand him the Republican nomination.

Norm Coleman is free Thursday after all. The former Republican senator from Minnesota was supposed to co-host a fundraiser for Jeb Bush, but the former Florida governor on Saturday gave up his bid for the GOP nomination after a limp finish in the South Carolina primary. Now Mr. Coleman – who originally backed South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham before he quit the race in December — is throwing his support to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

Virginia Republican fundraiser Bobbie Kilberg, who joined Mr. Bush’s camp last week, said nine donors reached out Sunday morning to say that if she backed Mr. Rubio, they would, too.
“That’s a lot of people to call you at 10 in the morning on a Sunday,” said Mrs. Kilberg, who originally backed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s now-defunct presidential campaign. “I really believe (Mr. Rubio) is the only candidate around which mainstream Republicans can coalesce in order to win this nomination and win the general election.”

It’s the presidential version of musical chairs, as one candidate after another no longer sees a path to the nomination, goes home and leaves rivals jockeying for their cushion, so to speak.

Mr. Coleman and Mrs. Kilberg are among the first wave of major donors, elected officials and party leaders who are gravitating to Mr. Rubio after Mr. Bush’s exit. Despite his resistance to being lumped with the Republican “establishment,” Mr. Rubio is emerging as that wing of the party’s top choice. READ MORE AT SITE

http://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-moment-of-trump-1456076806

Donald Trump’s convincing victory in South Carolina Saturday marks a moment of truth in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. The businessman is now the clear favorite for the Republican nomination, yet he is also the candidate most disliked by GOP voters and according to the polls the least likely to win in November. Are Republicans really going to jump off the cliff into the great Trump unknown?

Perhaps so. About a third of GOP voters seem to be confirmed cliff-divers, as Mr. Trump won handily by rolling up a similar share of the vote he won in New Hampshire. He won again across most demographic and ideological groups, especially with those most fed up with Washington and GOP leaders. Mr. Trump should also send a thank-you note to the pope for attacking him, since he won 34% of evangelical Protestant voters who may have resented the Catholic pontiff’s ill-conceived intervention.

Mr. Trump now heads into Nevada and the March 1 southern primaries with momentum that would typically carry him to the nomination. The difference is that Mr. Trump engenders passionate support and also passionate opposition. His unfavorable ratings are the highest in the GOP field, with a net negative in the most recent WSJ/NBC poll of minus-31. Hillary Clinton is only minus-13.

The blustery businessman also doesn’t seem all that eager to expand his support. In his victory speech Saturday night, he offered a passing grace note to Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz for doing well but he was mostly self-referential and didn’t mention Jeb Bush, who had earlier announced he is leaving the race. Mr. Trump declared that he is leading “a movement,” but for that to be true he will have to unify the Republican Party. It still isn’t clear what his movement represents other than Mr. Trump’s blunt persona, his family and ultimatums to various countries. READ MORE AT SITE

Senator Marco Rubio’s performance in CNN’s GOP town hall Wednesday was a 45-minute lesson on how to articulate conservative Republican ideas.

Some conservative voters might prefer, for example, Senator Ted Cruz’s approach to Syria policy or his push to abolish the IRS. But in terms of being able to attractively and convincingly communicate the value of conservative ideas to everyone, regardless of race or class, Rubio may be unmatched among the Republican candidates. His rhetorical ability and political talent alone make him an asset to the Republican party.

Representative Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), who has endorsed Rubio, cut an ad Tuesday in South Carolina that concluded, “Democrats fear Marco the most.” A New York Times headline from May declared that “A Hillary Clinton Match-Up With Marco Rubio Is a Scary Thought for Democrats” — as it should be if polling indicates anything. Rubio is the only Republican candidate since August who has consistently beaten Clinton in head-to-head poll matchups, such as those conducted by NBC/WSJ, Quinnipiac, and USA Today/Suffolk University.

The roots of his appeal are manifold. His relatability and charm contrast starkly with Mitt Romney’s wealth, John McCain’s woodenness, and Donald Trump’s loud-mouthed egotism (to say nothing of Hillary Clinton, overall). Rubio had student loans; he postdated checks; and he smiles about the future while others yell and warn of America’s demise. His humor is self-deprecating without being pathetic — he has joked about his colorblindness, his high-heeled boots, and about having a football-addled head.

A president like Rubio could help transform the perception of how Republicans handle race and class issues. During the CNN town hall, he demonstrated sincerity and empathy by employing personal narrative when asked how, in light of such events as the Charleston church shooting of nine African Americans, he would address racism without being divisive.

With his response, Rubio appeared to take seriously the lived experiences of minorities, recounting that an African-American friend of his, who is a police officer, was pulled over about eight times over several years for no reason. He had earlier recounted the story on Fox News, when discussing legitimate reasons for the anger of Black Lives Matter. Criminal-justice reform might be a truly bipartisan concern, and Rubio has been the most prominent Republican candidate to spotlight it.

It has been said that Rubio’s Cuban heritage will not be enough to win more minority votes for the Republican party. And it shouldn’t be. Republicans should not exploit a candidate’s minority status as a tool to gain power, as Democrats often do. Rather, Republicans can reach minority voters by offering alternative ideas and policies to the Democratic ones that have failed them, as in Baltimore and Detroit. Nonetheless, Rubio’s life story has been an undeniable rhetorical advantage.

He speaks to the unique problems facing minorities, including those he faced, while stressing that his parents didn’t raise him to feel like a victim. This is how conservative Republicans should discuss issues of race: They can and should acknowledge minorities’ setbacks while emphasizing the role of family and personal virtue in overcoming them. At the town hall, Rubio described a childhood experience when kids taunted him and his immigrant family, telling them to return to Cuba. He said he “saw it as a reflection on those kids, not a reflection on America.” Again he recognizes the reality of prejudice, but he condemns the individuals who are to blame, rather than condemning all of America as profoundly racist.