Yes. I agree. Trump right now seems like a train going 70 or 80 miles per hour towards a city with no conductor or engineer on board. There's bound to be fireworks. And that city is Cleveland, Ohio.
Begin quote from:
G.O.P. Fears Donald Trump as Zombie Candidate: Damaged but Unstoppable
Donald J. Trump,
who in recent days has mocked a political opponent’s wife, defended a
campaign aide arrested on a charge of battery and suggested punishing
women who terminate pregnancies, may have surrendered any remaining
chance to rally Republicans strongly around him before the party’s July
convention in Cleveland.
At
a moment when a more traditional front-runner might have sought to
smooth over divisions within his party and turn his attention to the
general election, Mr. Trump has only intensified his slash-and-burn,
no-apologies approach to the campaign.
“He
should have started uniting the party in March,” said Henry Barbour, a
Republican National Committee member from Mississippi who previously
supported Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, “and he is making it harder on
himself.”
Republicans
who once worried that Mr. Trump might gain overwhelming momentum in the
primaries are now becoming preoccupied with a different grim prospect:
that Mr. Trump might become a kind of zombie candidate — damaged beyond
the point of repair, but too late for any of his rivals to stop him.
Should
Mr. Trump lurch into the convention so fatally compromised with general
election voters and a sizable faction of Republicans, it could make it
easier for the party to wrest the nomination away from him. But it would
also make the consequences of failing to defeat him all the more
ruinous if the specter of choosing a seemingly unelectable nominee does
not deter Mr. Trump’s supporters.
Graphic
How Votes For Trump Could Become Delegates for Someone Else
The rules for how Republican delegates are selected
could end up turning votes for one candidate into delegates who will
support another candidate at the convention.
Newt
Gingrich, the former House speaker who has frequently praised Mr.
Trump’s insurgent campaign, said the front-runner had made a series of
bewildering and irrational mistakes. Mr. Trump’s campaign, he said, had
failed to evolve beyond the “personal gunslinger, random-behavior model”
characterized by the candidate.
“None
of the mistakes have been forced, and nobody forced him to react
negatively,” Mr. Gingrich said. “It’s almost as though he is so full of
himself that he can’t slow down and recognize that being president of
the United States is a team sport that requires a stable personality,
that allows other people to help him.”
Continue reading the main story
Polls show that Mr. Trump has struggled to attract a majority coalition even within the Republican Party,
and that the distress of mainstream Republicans has grown as Mr.
Trump’s general election numbers have crumbled. In next week’s crucial
Wisconsin primary, Mr. Trump now trails Senator Ted Cruz of Texas by nearly 10 points, according to a poll published Wednesday by Marquette University.
In
Wisconsin and elsewhere, the strongest Republican opposition to Mr.
Trump comes in suburban areas and among college-educated voters and
women. His conduct over the past week is unlikely to win over those
groups.
In
the past few days, Mr. Trump has declined to apologize for circulating
on social media an unflattering photo of Mr. Cruz’s wife, Heidi, and
bitterly criticized a female reporter who accused his campaign manager,
Corey Lewandowski, of manhandling her.
Mr.
Trump has said he believes Mr. Lewandowski is innocent, and that his
mockery of Mrs. Cruz was a response to lewd criticism of his own wife
from a group that opposes his campaign.
Graphic: 2016 Delegate Count and Primary Results
On
Wednesday, he said that if abortion were illegal, it would be
appropriate to punish women who seek out the procedure — before issuing a
statement reversing himself, saying that only doctors performing
abortions should be “held legally responsible” under those
circumstances.
Asked
to address Republican critics who said Mr. Trump’s style was fracturing
the party, Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, said he was “a
counterpuncher” who viewed himself as standing up for the people closest
to him. “This is what he will do for the country,” she said.
In the past, Mr. Trump’s political missteps have done little to hinder his progress in the campaign.
He
has built a powerful delegate lead in the race for the Republican
nomination, with about three-fifths of the 1,237 delegates he needs. Mr.
Cruz, his nearest competitor, is about 270 behind.
And
while Mr. Trump has not yet won over a majority of Republican primary
voters, he still polls well ahead of Mr. Cruz and a third candidate,
Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.
A
New York Times/CBS News poll released last week showed Mr. Trump with
support from 46 percent of Republicans nationally, compared with 26
percent for Mr. Cruz and 20 percent for Mr. Kasich.
Graphic: How the Rest of the Delegate Race Could Unfold
After
Wisconsin, the primary battle moves onto decidedly favorable turf for
Mr. Trump: his native New York, on April 19, followed by a series of
Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, including Pennsylvania and
Delaware, where he is expected to run strong.
Still,
Mr. Trump has been unable to consolidate support the way a conventional
front-runner would. His share of the vote in the primaries has remained
relatively steady — in the high 30- to low 40-percent range — even as
his opponents have dwindled to just two.
An
analysis circulated in mid-March by the Republican strategist Alex Gage
showed Mr. Trump’s average support in primaries to be nearly flat over
the past two months, compared with a rapid climb Mitt Romney experienced
in his campaign over the same period in 2012.
Thomas
M. Reynolds, a former Republican congressman from New York, said he
expected Mr. Trump to do well in the delegate-rich state despite his
evident limitations as a candidate.
But
Mr. Reynolds said the Trump method of “kind of ad-libbing” his way
through the race had left him as the master of a strong plurality of
Republican voters — and still short of a coalition that would make him a
commanding winner.
“He
has successfully been able to say whatever he wants without
retribution,” Mr. Reynolds said, “but I am not seeing him grow in the
Republican base at this point.”
First Draft Newsletter
Subscribe for updates on the 2016 presidential race, the White House and Congress, delivered to your inbox Monday - Friday.
Jim
McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who has worked with Mr. Trump in the
past, said Mr. Trump had plainly not yet convinced a majority of primary
voters that he is prepared to hold the country’s highest office. Mr.
Trump, he said, “hasn’t figured out a closing message.”
And
his political position is slipping nationally, Mr. McLaughlin said: In a
poll taken in late March by Mr. McLaughlin’s firm, about two-thirds of
general election voters said they now had an unfavorable view of Mr.
Trump, including seven in 10 women. (An
ABC News/Washington Post survey in early March had similar findings.)
“He
needs to start acting more like the commander in chief,” Mr. McLaughlin
said. “At some point folks ask themselves, ‘Am I comfortable in terms
of wanting to give this person the nuclear codes?’ ”
Mr. Trump has periodically seemed determined to reassure voters on that front.
Starting
on the night of the “Super Tuesday” primaries on March 1, he has held a
string of news conferences in ornate settings, wrapping himself in
presidential pomp even as he continued to engage in mockery of his
rivals.
He
has given two lengthy interviews focused on foreign policy, and after
facing questions about the sophistication of his campaign operation, he
announced the hiring of a longtime Republican strategist, Paul J.
Manafort, to lead his delegate-wrangling efforts.
It
may still be enough, Republicans say, for Mr. Trump to win the barest
of delegate majorities before the Cleveland convention. But had he taken
a more deliberate and less divisive approach in the past two weeks, Mr.
Trump’s nomination might be inevitable, and he might be less wounded as
a candidate in November.
“He
would be miles ahead of this kind of junk,” Mr. Gingrich said,
referring to Mr. Trump’s feuding over Mr. Lewandowski and Mrs. Cruz. “I
don’t understand it. I don’t think it works.”
As it is, Mr. Gingrich said, “I think he has a real possibility of, having surged amazingly, to miss the golden ring.”
Correction: April 1, 2016
An earlier version of this article misstated the charge filed against Corey Lewandowski, Donald J. Trump’s campaign manager. It was a battery charge, not assault.
An earlier version of this article misstated the charge filed against Corey Lewandowski, Donald J. Trump’s campaign manager. It was a battery charge, not assault.
No comments:
Post a Comment