All Trump All the Time

What can you say?

The country is in a foul mood.

Sanders isn't going to get the Democratic nomination but he will be a thorn in Clinton's side probably throughout the nomination process.

Trump, if nothing changes, is headed for the Republican nomination. National Review sounded the alarm back in January 21, 2016. Perhaps it is already too late for the GOP to stop him.

The fact that these two figures are doing so well is an indication of the angry feeling among the voters disenchanted with the way things are working in Washington DC.

Here is a round up of three articles about Trump I came across today.

LA Times McManus acknowledges Trump's political acumen.

Excerpt:
He's turned out to be a disciplined candidate with a clear strategy. He's not the unguided missile he once appeared to be. His attacks on other candidates may have looked petulant, but it's now clear that they were calculated. For much of last year, Trump concentrated his fire on Jeb Bush, who was long considered a front-runner. When Bush faded, Trump moved his sights to Cruz, who was trying a little too obviously to steal Trump voters. There was nothing random about the choice of targets. “Ted is hanging around the top too long,” Trump told aides in January, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Time to take him down.” If the pattern holds, Trump's next punching bag will be Rubio, who's been unofficially anointed as the Great Establishment Hope. You can expect Trump to warn voters that Rubio is in the pocket of the big-money donors who are frantically pumping cash into his campaign. Besides, as Trump said last year (at a time when Rubio was surging): “Marco Rubio, he's like a kid.... He sweats more than any young person I've ever seen.”

Tucker Carlson over at Politico also acknowledges Trump's reading of the foul mood of the electorate.

Excerpt:

American presidential elections usually amount to a series of overcorrections: Clinton begat Bush, who produced Obama, whose lax border policies fueled the rise of Trump. In the case of Trump, though, the GOP shares the blame, and not just because his fellow Republicans misdirected their ad buys or waited so long to criticize him. Trump is in part a reaction to the intellectual corruption of the Republican Party. That ought to be obvious to his critics, yet somehow it isn’t. [......] On immigration policy, party elders were caught completely by surprise. Even canny operators like Ted Cruz didn’t appreciate the depth of voter anger on the subject. And why would they? If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it’s hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don’t go to public school. You don’t take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It’s all good. [......] When was the last time you stopped yourself from saying something you believed to be true for fear of being punished or criticized for saying it? If you live in America, it probably hasn’t been long. That’s not just a talking point about political correctness. It’s the central problem with our national conversation, the main reason our debates are so stilted and useless. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t have the words to describe it. You can’t even think about it clearly. 

On last piece to share from WaPo Danielle Allen, a Clinton supporter, recognizes that not only is Trump likely to get the GOP nomination, he has a possibility of actually becoming president.

Excerpt:
Trump is rising by taking advantage of a divided country. The truth is that the vast majority of voting Americans think that Trump is unacceptable as a presidential candidate, but we are split by strong partisan ideologies and cannot coordinate a solution to stop him. Similarly, a significant part of voting Republicans think that Trump is unacceptable, but they too, thus far, have been unable to coordinate a solution. Trump is exploiting the fact that we cannot unite across our ideological divides.[......]Republicans, you cannot count on the Democrats to stop Trump. I believe that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, and I intend to vote for her, but it is also the case that she is a candidate with significant weaknesses, as your party knows quite well. The result of a head-to-head contest between Clinton and Trump would be unpredictable. Trump has to be blocked in your primary.[......]We, the people, need to find somewhere, buried in the recesses of our fading memories, the capacity to make common cause against this formidable threat to our equally shared liberties. The time is now.

The reach of this blog is small but am going on the record that this pajama wearing blogger is not going to be supporting Trump.