A few quick thoughts on this: 1) good riddance to Ted Cruz, truly “Lucifer in the flesh” – nasty, bigoted, theocratic, crazy, dishonest, oily, extreme, etc. – as John Boehner said the other day; 2) the fact that the 2016 GOP nomination came down to a crazy, neo-fascistic, narcissistic conspiracy theorist (Trump) and the aforementioned “Lucifer” tells you all you need to know about today’s Republican Party (Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and many other past Republicans are thrashing around in their graves right about now); 3) so much for almost every single political pundit who said for months that there was NO WAY Donald Trump would ever get the GOP nomination; 4) Donald Trump is not an aberration, he is a creation of Republicans’ decades of demonizing government, playing on people’s fears and prejudices, and appealing to the absolutely worst “angels” of human nature; 5) now, as Matthew Yglesias writes at Vox, only a Democrat can stop this lunatic:
The fact is that Trump has triumphed in Republican Party primaries because the Republican Party is incapable of mounting effective resistance to him, not because effective resistance is impossible. Their strategies have failed because highlighting his real weaknesses cuts against too much of what the GOP base believes.
The plain, obvious truth is that Trump is running a racist campaign based on an unimpressive record in business and bad public policy ideas. The Republican Party can’t mount this argument in an effective way because to do so involves stepping over too many GOP taboos.
That’s why to stop Trump, his opponent is going to have to be a Democrat — realistically, Hillary Clinton though in principle Bernie Sanders or someone else would work. A Democrat will happily hammer Trump over his weaknesses and bury a candidate who’s already held in very low regard by the mass public.
Fortunately, as Chris Cillizza points out, Democrats start with a huge Electoral College advantage, and that’s not even taking into account how intensely dislike Trump is by so many Americans.
And with that, here’s video of Lucifer…er, the Zodiac Killer…er, Ted Cruz announcing the end of his campaign-from-hell.
P.S. Ben Tribbett puts it well: “Donald J. Trump, Republican Nominee for President of the United States. Got to say, after spending the last eight years fanning the fires of crazy people, the GOP richly deserved this one.”
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