March 26
It was another week when the adventures of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz made even John Kasich look like a responsible moderate. The one ray of hope was that, finally given a choice, most voters ticked the “Fed Up Already” box:
1. The latest New York Times/CBS poll reveals that six in 10 Republican primary voters are embarrassed by their party’s presidential campaign. But eight in 10 say they will support Donald Trump if he is their party’s nominee, though most say they would hold their nose with one hand while they pulled the lever with the other. Among all likely voters, half say they would be scared if Trump were elected. The same poll showed that Hillary Clinton would soundly thrash either Trump or Ted Cruz in the general election. Only John Kasich, who remains a distant third in the Republican race, would beat Clinton, the poll showed. (Many voters apparently haven’t yet discovered that Kasich is a veteran general in the war on women.)
2. Responding immediately to the poll, Responsible Republican Establishment graybeards Mitt Romney, Lindsay Graham and Jeb Bush threw their support behind – wait for it – Cruz. Cruz welcomed the all-important endorsement by the Failed Republican Presidential Candidates Club, who indicated to a man that their support was based primarily on two factors: They hate Cruz a little less than they hate Trump, and they can’t stand the idea that a candidate with decipherable policies who stands a chance of winning, like Kasich, should wind up as president when they couldn’t manage it.
3. Meanwhile, three states voted on Tuesday. Clinton and Trump won handily in the Arizona primary. But in the Utah and Idaho caucuses, Bernie Sanders beat Clinton two-to-one. That’s not a ratio; there are only three Democratic voters in each state. Cruz, meanwhile, brandishing Romney’s I-hate-him-less endorsement, won more than 50 percent of the vote in the Utah caucuses, the first Republican to tally more than half the vote in a contest so far. In what might have been Cruz’ best week yet, he also won the Sen. Joe McCarthy Lookalike Contest. Cruz used his Utah win to call once more for Kasich to quit the race. “The last thing we need in this campaign is an adult whom people admire,” Cruz almost said. “As long as people like that stay in, I can’t win.”
4. Responding to pressure to reveal the names of his foreign policy advising team, Trump traveled to Washington to unveil his choices. Veteran observers said the list read like a “Who’s That?” of the foreign policy intelligentsia. They include someone who graduated from college way back in 2009 and lists among his qualifications, honest to God, that he once participated in a Model United Nations, a scholastic extracurricular chestnut for political science majors.
5. Trump’s blue-ribbon group apparently got busy quickly in the wake of ISIS-linked suicide bombings in Brussels that claimed more than 30 lives and injured 300. Their man’s comprehensive strategy for combating terrorism consisted of using nuclear weapons against somebody and yet another call to reintroduce waterboarding of suspects. Cruz, meanwhile, called for increased police patrols of Muslim neighborhoods in the United States, underscoring why Bush, Graham and Romney think supporting him is such a cool idea.
6. In their spare time this week, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, an anti-Trump PAC posted some old photos of Trump’s wife in her birthday suit, Trump said mean things about Cruz’ wife, and Cruz got really, really mad.
7. President Obama visited Cuba, the first sitting U.S. president to do so since not long after the Maine was removed from Havana harbor. Provided with ample notice of Obama’s visit, the Cuban government managed to produce one leader who remains alive and reasonably sentient, Raul Castro, who in the 1950s ran the Kettle Korn concession while his brother Fidel managed the Revolution. Obama did not meet with Fidel Castro, who was said to be too busy decomposing. Obama also failed to secure the release of any political prisoners. But in an unexpected accord that was widely hailed as a diplomatic triumph, the president did come home with several cartons of parts for a 1958 Edsel and a shortstop for the Yankees who apparently hits .270 without the aid of performance-enhancing drugs. All Obama gave away in return were the Republican members of the U.S. Senate. “We told the Cubans they were a bunch of casino owners,” he chortled.
8. The Justice Department backed off its demand that Apple devise a program that will allow it to unlock the cell phone of one of the ISIS sympathizers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December. FBI Director James Comey announced that an intensive investigation by the department’s technology experts had revealed something called an “on-off button” that agents managed to activate, bypassing for the time being the need for a lengthy court fight over who gets to see everybody’s stuff.
9. And finally, the nation celebrated Drooling Inbreeders in State Government Week. Amid stiff competition, Arizona and North Carolina emerged as the finalists in the hotly contested Bonehead Retrograde Legislation competition. Freed to discriminate when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, Arizona officials cut the number of polling places by 70 percent in majority-minority Phoenix, leaving one precinct for every 108,000 residents. That had many voters standing in lines for hours on Tuesday. Some observers saw the result as a harbinger of the fallout to come in November from more restrictive voting requirements passed by 33 states. The laws are touted as protections against voter fraud, a problem that, in essence, doesn’t exist. For Republican legislators, there is another, more vexing problem that the laws do address: Their older, white demographic is shrinking, and growing numbers of young, poor and minority voters are threatening their hegemony. In North Carolina, meanwhile, Republican Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law a bill adopted hastily by the Republican-controlled state legislature in special session. The law prohibits local governments from passing ordinances that protect gay and transgender people, because in February, the city of Charlotte’s local government had adopted an ordinance that did exactly that. Like voting restrictions, the new law supposedly addresses a problem that doesn’t exist: transgender women accosting women and children in public restrooms. Lawmakers in the state House limited public debate on the bill to 30 minutes. Meanwhile, Republican luminaries nationwide continued to scratch their heads over how someone like Donald Trump could attract so much support from Republican voters when his message of hate and intolerance is so obviously antithetical to Republican principles.
