Sometimes, even the expected can be shocking. While Donald Trump has seemed like the presumptive Republican nominee for months, a heavy reality settled over the party on Tuesday night after Ted Cruz, the final legitimate hurdle for Trump, dropped out of the race.
Trump’s path to the nomination began here in New Hampshire on Feb. 9, when he collected 35.3 percent of the votes in a primary with a deep Republican slate. John Kasich finished a distant second with 15.8 percent, a difference of about 55,000 votes. The rest of the field, with the exception of Cruz, never fully recovered. While the most hopeful of the Never Trump-ers chalked it up to the state’s Republicans going their own way, as they often do, it turned out that the buzz Trump created in New Hampshire would only grow, carrying him to victory after stunning victory.
On Tuesday night, voters in Indiana made Trump’s ascent to the top of the party just about official. Barring another first in American politics, Trump will be the Republican candidate for president come November.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus did all he could to put a positive spin on Trump’s victory yesterday, telling CNN: “I think something different and something new is probably good for our party. Look, I don’t think anyone predicted what happened. So look, we’re here. We’re going to get behind the presumptive nominee.”
That’s hardly the kind of full-throated endorsement you expect to hear from a Republican leader heading into what should be an epic general election showdown, but it perfectly illustrates the inner struggle for the party establishment. And not everyone in the GOP will “get behind the presumptive nominee,” as Priebus suggests. Mark Salter, a former adviser to Sen. John McCain, said on Twitter what many longtime Republicans are probably thinking: “The GOP is going to nominate for president a guy who reads the National Enquirer and thinks it’s on the level.” What remains to be seen is how many of them subscribe to the second part of Salter’s tweet: “I’m with her.”
If Trump’s rise to “presumptive nominee” is the most shocking Republican storyline of the 2016 campaign, the fact that so many Republican leaders found themselves rooting for the much-despised Cruz is a close second. This is a man, after all, who former House speaker John Boehner said is “Lucifer in the flesh” and the Atlantic (among others) called “the most hated man in Washington.” The slow, grudging embrace of Cruz didn’t so much signal a softening of opinions as speak to the degree of discomfort the party has with Trump as its standard-bearer.
While the successes of Trump and Cruz represent the biggest oddities in the race, they are not the only factors that created the exceedingly bizarre atmosphere of the season. There were controversial and chaotic debates, childish discussions of penis size and death threats directed at Trump from Mexican drug lord El Chapo. There was even the emergence of notoriously prickly Kasich (who dropped out of the race on Wednesday) as a cuddly conservative. Volumes can and will be written about the race, with the campaigns of Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie – even Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson – warranting deeper examination. One can’t help but wonder what The Making of the President series author Theodore White would have made of it all.
With the race for the nomination now all but over, Sen. Kelly Ayotte and other Republicans seeking election or re-election must decide not only whether to support Trump but how much. While we imagine it’s a dizzying time for Republican strategists everywhere, they can bank on one thing for certain: Democrats will work hard to tie every last Republican to the new face of the party in hopes they all sink together. But betting against Trump can be dangerous. Just ask the GOP.