Tag Archives: Donald Trump

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Ted Cruz crosses the street and confronts Trump mob in Indiana

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Ted Cruz meets voters at a campaign event
Ted Cruz meets voters at a campaign event

Everything you need to understand about the 2016 election is in one video.

First, the back story from the New York Times: (H/T Mysterious H.)

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas had a date with a waiting car.

It was the second of five stops on Monday, the eve of Indiana’s critical primary, and the event at a restaurant here had been billed as little more than a meet-and-greet.

When he got back outside, a half-dozen protesters who supported Donald J. Trump were waiting across North Washington Street, some holding signs.

“Vote Trump!” one shouted.

“Say something really funny!” a Cruz supporter replied.

“Ted Cruz is going to win!” a Trump fan in dark sunglasses shot back.

Then Mr. Cruz did something unusual: He crossed the street.

Then the video:

Here is the rest of the New York Times article, which has additional material about the confrontation:

With a phalanx of aides and reporters trailing him, Mr. Cruz approached his critics with a question.

“What do you like about Donald Trump?” he asked.

“Everything,” said the man in the sunglasses, who later refused to give his name.

When the protester mentioned the Second Amendment, Mr. Cruz said he had defended gun rights in front of the Supreme Court. The man appeared unimpressed.

When he mentioned immigration, Mr. Cruz was ready with a bit of opposition research.

“May I ask you something?” the Texas senator said. “Out of all the candidates, name one who had a million-dollar judgment against them for hiring illegal immigrants. Name one. Donald Trump.”

“Self-funding,” the man replied.

“O.K.,” Mr. Cruz said, “so you like rich people who buy politicians?”

The man asked Mr. Cruz where his “Goldman Sachs jacket” was, alluding to the employer of Mr. Cruz’s wife, Heidi, who took a leave from her job for the campaign.

Mr. Cruz responded that he had attracted more than a million campaign contributions, with an average of $60. He was interrupted sporadically by shouts of “Lyin’ Ted” from the protester’s peers.

“Sir, with all respect,” Mr. Cruz said, “Donald Trump is deceiving you. He is playing you for a chump.”

Mr. Cruz conjectured that Mr. Trump would not have walked over to meet the protesters.

“If I were Donald Trump, I wouldn’t have come over and talked to you,” he said. “You know what I would have done? I would have told the folks over there, ‘Go over and punch those guys in the face.’ That’s what Donald does to protesters.”

The catcalls of “Lyin’ Ted!” returned.

“O.K., stop,” Mr. Cruz said. “What word did I say was a lie?”

“About Donald telling people to punch people,” the man said.

“O.K., let me ask you, sir,” Mr. Cruz responded. “Just go home and Google ‘Donald-punched-in-the-face-protester.’ This is on national television.”

The man ignored him to make a conjecture of his own: “You’ll find out tomorrow. Indiana don’t want you.”

Mr. Cruz turned toward the cameras, as if making a closing argument in court.

“A question that everyone here should ask,” he began.

“Are you Canadian?” the man interjected.

“Do you want your kids,” Mr. Cruz continued, “repeating the words of Donald Trump?”

Mr. Cruz said he respected the man and believed in the people of Indiana to show good judgment. He started walking to his car.

A television reporter asked why he had bothered to engage.

“Because I believe in the democratic process,” he said.

[…]Moments later, when the cameras cleared out, the man strolled east, crossing railroad tracks with his peers in tow. He reached for a cigarette.

Mr. Cruz’s nerve had surprised him, he allowed, but failed to impress him.

“Anything that Donald Trump talks about,” he said, “that’s what I’m about.”

What you see in the video is a microcosm of this entire election.

Ted Cruz is a Princeton and Harvard educated Tea Party conservative who has a record of conservative achievements that runs all the way back to his days in high school, when he traveled around giving lectures on the Constitution and fiscal conservatism to different groups in his community. Ted Cruz has a 100% conservative record from Heritage Action and he has been endorsed by the National Right to Life because of his record of pro-life actions.  He defended the second amendment and religious liberty at the Supreme Court and won. And there are many, many more conservative achievements. Ted Cruz is a man who is confident in his views, and he believes that he can win over the average American voter if he is able to dialog with them, and compare arguments and evidence. He respects the American voter.

The Trump supporters know absolutely nothing about Senator Cruz’s career, and his record of going against the Republican establishment. And everything they know about Donald Trump’s record was what they saw when they watched him clowning around on reality TV shows and beauty pageants. In short, they know literally nothing about his past positions and past actions. They like him because he talked about his penis size in a national debate. They think that is “telling it like it is” and “not being politically correct”. They don’t know that he has always been a Democrat, and that he has always donated to Democrat causes. To them, entertaining words have more value than the patterns of past actions.

Trump supporters have done literally no homework at all in trying to look into the past actions and achievements of the candidates. The only thing they know how to do when confronted with Trump’s liberal record, and Cruz’s conservative record, is to try to drown out the truth with slogans that they obtained from the liberal media, or from their idol Trump himself. The reason why they support an airhead leftist con man like Donald Trump is because they are just not willing to invest the time to know what the candidates have done. They want to figure out who to vote for by watching television, not by researching or reading.

Trump supporters like Trump because they want to blame others for their own failure to grow up and achieve the American dream. America is a country where penniless first-generation immigrants who could not even speak English were able to come here and raise children who would later run for President, e.g. – Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Unfortunately, America is a country where too many who are born here think that they are entitled to such success without having to do any work to earn it. But I suspect that this failure has more to do with an attitude that disrespects knowledge and dismisses hard work.

By the way, this isn’t a one-off video… this happens all the time. One previous example occurred in Iowa, where Cruz took time to talk with an angry Iowa farmer about why he opposed ethanol subsidies:

Donald Trump not only supports ethanol subsidies, he pandered to Iowans and offered to raise them – passing the costs of this vote buying on to other taxpayers.

If Ted Cruz loses this election, it will be because too many natural-born Americans abandoned learning about their own history and heritage. To learn those things, they would have to turn off the TV and do their own research. One thing is for certain – if you meet a Trump supporter, you can absolutely assume about that person that he knows literally knows nothing about the Constitution, economics, American history, foreign policy, or anything else that matters.

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Organized Cruz wins 14 delegates in Wyoming, delegate rules in place since 2004

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Donald Trump with some of his supporters
Donald Trump with some of the “very best people” who are running his campaign

Trump’s “very good brain” fails him again. So frustrating when tweeting abuse doesn’t substitute for a ground game in all 50 states.

The leftist Washington Post explains:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) continued his romp through the Republican Party’s state conventions Saturday, winning 14 delegates in Wyoming to complete a near-sweep of the state. At the same time, in conventions in Virginia, Georgia and South Carolina, Cruz-friendly activists won delegate slots in congressional districts that had voted for someone else in the primaries.

The events capped off three remarkable weeks for Cruz in the sort of cloistered party meetings where grass-roots organizers can dominate. Cruz, the only Republican candidate to campaign in Wyoming, told delegates here that their votes could help him win “a battle in Cleveland,” where the party may host its first contested convention in 40 years.

“If you don’t want the convention in Cleveland to hand the election to Hillary Clinton — which is what a Donald Trump nomination does — I ask you to support this slate,” Cruz said.

These conventions came after Trump had spent much of the week panning Colorado for using a similar system to award 34 total delegates. As in Wyoming, activists had gathered at little-hyped local conventions, won places at the state convention, then voted for the national delegates — all while giving Cruz nine of the Wyoming delegates available in the March 1 county caucuses.

The GOP front-runner complained that the contest had been “rigged” against him, a charge that Colorado Republican leaders strongly denied, noting that they’d been using the same system since the 2004 presidential election.

[…]In Wyoming, Trump’s local operation was clearly outmatched, even though a number of attendees said they supported him. 

[…]Trump’s campaign was late to recognize the importance of the state conventions, much less the local contests that determined who could vote at those state conventions. In Wyoming, that effectively meant that Trump’s supporters were arriving at a marathon where Cruz had already run the first 25 miles.

Trump doesn’t think that TWELVE YEARS of no rule changes is enough time for him to understand how things work. His “very good brain” cannot understand state-specific rules, and he isn’t allowing his “very best people” to make any decisions. Cruz’s campaign has been on the ground in Wyoming for months. Trump cannot even find Wyoming on a map of the United States. And since he insists on controlling everything himself, rather than hiring people who know about these things, and letting them work on it, he keeps losing. He’s too full of himself to delegate to experts who aren’t clowns.

Trump vs Clinton: General election match-up polls
Trump vs Clinton: General election match-up polls

How is he supposed to beat Hillary Clinton when all he can do is clown around in front of crowds of people who are more impressed with his charisma than detailed policy proposals? If you’re hiring someone for a job, they have to do more than entertain you with talk. They have to know the rules in the different states, and be organized enough to win them. Trump HAS no organization , and that’s another reason to think that he can’t win against Hillary, as if his 70% disapproval rate and 11-point deficit in the head-to-head polls against Clinton were not enough of an indicator.

I do expect Trump to do well in the near-term in Democrat states, and that’s because he is a Democrat, and Democrats vote for him. They are supportive of his “very pro-choice” views, his promises of “forward motion” on gay rights, his support for tariffs, and his intent to appoint liberal judges like his sister.

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Will there be a contested convention in Cleveland? Will Ted Cruz win it?

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and Heidi Cruz
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and Heidi Cruz

A lot of people are asking me what Cruz chances are to defeat Trump and win the nomination. I’m going to look at three columns, one from radically leftist CNN, one from the radically leftist Washington Post, and one from National Review. I found both of these stories at the Conservatives 4 Ted Cruz news aggregator, by the way. I check that site at least twice a day, and so should you.

The first one is from David Gergen at CNN. David Gergen is a senior political analyst for CNN and has been a White House adviser to four presidents. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he is a professor of public service and co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.

His headline is “Ted Cruz: Now the odds-on favorite”:

With his decisive victory in Wisconsin, Sen. Ted Cruz has not only shaken up the Republican presidential race, but heading into the homestretch, he has suddenly become the odds-on favorite to win the nomination in Ohio.

With 16 primaries and caucuses remaining, Donald Trump has to win 70% of the delegates to secure the 1,237 needed to win a first ballot at the Republican convention. Several states are coming up that are more favorable territory for Trump than Cruz, especially New York and Pennsylvania where Trump still has significant leads.

Even so, winning more than two thirds of the remaining delegates is a daunting challenge for him. In the 36 primaries and caucuses leading up to Wisconsin, Trump won only 46% of the delegates. And now he heads down a tough homestretch with Cruz seizing the momentum.

In a year crammed with surprises, no one can say for sure what will unfold in Cleveland, Ohio. But there are two likely outcomes: First, Cruz and Trump have each vowed to vote against a change in the GOP’s Rule 40. That’s an obscure provision that requires any candidate to win at least eight primaries and caucuses before he or she can be nominated.

Trump and Cruz will be the only two people in Cleveland with that distinction. They should also have enough delegate strength between them to block a rewrite of Rule 40. In other words, potential candidates like John Kasich, Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney won’t be eligible even if many delegates think them likely to fare better against Hillary Clinton — the race could narrow to Trump vs. Cruz.

If Trump then falls short on the first ballot, there will be a donnybrook. But it is now becoming apparent that Cruz is much better prepared to win that fight. Trump has run a campaign long on the outside game of televised rallies but short on the inside game of quietly piling up delegates.

By contrast, Cruz has been superlative playing to the inside. Just look at how craftily he captured delegates away from Trump a few days ago in North Dakota. (The capacity of the Obama team to play the inside game so well helped to propel them past Hillary Clinton in 2008.)

In a first ballot, delegates must vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged but thereafter, of course, may vote for someone else. Signs increasingly point to the fact that Republican party regulars pledged to Trump are ready to bolt on a second or third ballot. With Cruz the only other man in the race, that almost certainly means they will drift — rush? –toward the Texan, and he will take the crown.

That’s an accurate analysis. The most likely scenario now is that Cruz capitalizes on his momentum to deny Trump the delegates he needs to get to 1,237 before the convention, then wins the nomination on round 2 or later, when the GOP delegates from each state become “unbound”. And Cruz is already reaching out to the delegates to make sure that they choose him in round 2 and later rounds, as they free up.

Can Cruz win a contested convention?

 

Now, I’m going to balance that with something hilarious from moderate conservative Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist George Will, writing in National Review.

Will’s column is entitled “Ted Cruz Is Surging by Design”:

People here at Ted Cruz’s campaign headquarters are meticulously preparing to win a contested convention, if there is one. Because Donald Trump is a low-energy fellow, Cruz will be positioned to trounce him in Cleveland, where Trump’s slide toward earned oblivion would accelerate during a second ballot.

[…]For months Cruz’s national operation has been courting all convention delegates, including Trump’s. Cruz aims to make a third ballot decisive, or unnecessary.

On the eve of Wisconsin’s primary, the analytics people here knew how many undecided voters were choosing between Cruz and Trump (32,000) and how many between Cruz and John Kasich (72,000), and where they lived. Walls here are covered with notes outlining every step of each state’s multistage delegate-selection process. (Cruz’s campaign was active in Michigan when the process of selecting persons eligible to be delegates began in August 2014.) Cruz’s campaign is nurturing relationships with delegates now committed to Trump and others. In Louisiana’s primary, 58.6 percent of voters favored someone other than Trump; Cruz’s campaign knows which issues are particularly important to which Trump delegates, and Cruz people with similar values are talking to them.

[…]Usually, more than 40 percent of delegates to Republican conventions are seasoned activists who have attended prior conventions. A large majority of all delegates are officeholders — county commissioners, city council members, sheriffs, etc. — and state party officials. They tend to favor presidential aspirants who have been Republicans for longer than since last Friday.

Trump is a world-class complainer (he is never being treated “fairly”) but a bush-league preparer. A nomination contest poses policy and process tests, and he is flunking both.

Regarding policy, he is flummoxed by predictable abortion questions because he has been pro-life for only 15 minutes, and because he has lived almost seven decades without giving a scintilla of thought to any serious policy question. Regarding process, Trump, who recently took a week-long vacation from campaigning, has surfed a wave of free media to the mistaken conclusion that winning a nomination involves no more forethought than he gives to policy. He thinks he can fly in, stroke a crowd’s ideological erogenous zones, then fly away. He knows nothing about the art of the political deal.

The nomination process, says Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, “is a multilevel Rubik’s Cube. Trump thought it was a golf ball — you just had to whack it.” Roe says the Cruz campaign’s engagement with the granular details of delegate maintenance is producing a situation where “the guy who is trying to hijack the party runs into a guy with a machine gun.”

Cruz graduated at the top of his classes at Princeton and Harvard Law. He clerked for Court of Appeals Justice J. Michael Luttig and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Insofar as this primary election is a contest based on hard work and preparation, Cruz will win it. And then he’s going to beat Hillary.