The moment of truth is at hand for the Republicans. Though they had their moments and are delightful men personally, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton were not great leaders, and the American public regards the era where they have presided as a failure, a terrible fall from the summit achieved with the satisfactory end of the Cold War.
Clinton’s tawdry dalliances and the Bushes’ mangled syntax could be tolerated, but there have been three Middle Eastern wars, causing scores of thousands of casualties and trillions of dollars, and although the U.S. military has performed with distinction, the Western Alliance has withered, and almost nothing useful has been accomplished strategically except the eviction of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and of al-Qaida from Afghanistan.
The ostensible beneficiary of much of this effort, Iraq, has been largely delivered to Iranian control, America’s self-proclaimed mortal adversary, to whom Obama has given a green light to become a nuclear military power within ten years (or sooner if it wishes).
The American middle class has stood still in buying power for 15 years, 60 percent of American families don’t have $1,000, scores of millions of low-wage jobs have gone while about 12 million unskilled peasants have entered the country illegally, tacitly tolerated by both parties under a lot of pious insipidities about “comprehensive immigration reform” (which is still awaited).
Donald Trump has entered a vortex and made it wider and deeper.
It is clear from voting patterns that his assault on political correctness and his specific attacks on illegal immigration and trade deals that seem to have resulted in the exportation of unemployment to the U.S. — and on a feeble foreign policy that has effectively invited America’s traditional friends and adversaries to change places — have pulled in very large numbers of Democrats and independents who had often not bothered to vote, so disgusted are they with current politics.
It is unlikely that any other Republican could keep this harvest of voters, often called Reagan Democrats and essentially the working-class Democrats who, for varying reasons, crossed over to Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan.
So shattered is the Bush hold that Jeb Bush was reduced to endorsing Ted Cruz, who is even more of an outsider than Trump. Cruz has a strong but not unlimited base among evangelicals.
He is proud of being a nasty former prosecutor, and is the master of dirty tricks and false allegations; there is some truth to Trump’s frequent references to him as “Lyin’ Ted.”
He is not a companionable figure, unlike Donald Trump, and his constituency cannot win a Republican convention or a general election.
John Kasich could be a go-to candidate if Trump stalls before the 1,237-delegate total needed to nominate.
The Bushies and their allies of convenience in the anti-Trump coalition are rewriting internecine delegation rules to set up as many obstacles as possible to a Trump majority, and if he falls short, his totals will quickly disintegrate.
Kasich could come up in such a scenario, especially if he wins Pennsylvania and some other states to show that he is viable. But his disarming folksiness is almost as unpresidential as Trump’s non-sentence formulations and Cruz’s acoustically irritating misstatements.
Kasich is a good meat-and-potatoes governor, but will walk off the Republican cliff with his policy of admitting any immigrant who shows up (even if Republicans can get past Kasich’s exhortations to hug strangers in shopping malls and take a widow to dinner).
In a hung convention, the list of potentially acceptable dark horses is a mystery —doubtless there are capable possibilities, but it is hard to identify one in these circumstances. Such a person could arise with astounding suddenness.
If Trump, who seems likely to lose Wisconsin, can progress to a point where he does not react like a fighting bull to every goad from Cruz, and speaks cogently, and is receptive to that part of the rank and file who are not as angry as he is, he will win.
But his ruminations to The New York Times on foreign policy gave his followers pause.
The underlying sentiments were acceptable, and there were no self-destructive policy wounds, but he said “you know” more often than Caroline Kennedy in the interview that sank her candidacy for the U.S. Senate, and there were more non-sentences than sentences.
If Donald is cheated of the nomination, the Republicans will lose badly in November.
If he makes no gestures of civility and does nothing to refine his message to the strata of the electorate who like a little more nuance and syntactical orthodoxy than Archie Bunker provides, it will be an unnecessarily disturbing election.
If he follows the advice of his wife, Karl Rove, and many others (including this columnist), and banishes the contention that he is a crude and nasty know-nothing, he will win.
The country wants to turn the page on the Bushes and the Clintons, but the voters have to have a believable and reasonably attractive sequel. It isn’t Sanders or Cruz, but it still could be Trump.
Conrad Black is a financier, author and columnist. He was the publisher of the London (UK) Telegraph newspapers and Spectator from 1987 to 2004, and has authored biographies on Maurice Duplessis, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard M. Nixon. He is honorary chairman of Conrad Black Capital Corporation and has been a member of the British House of Lords since 2001, and is a Knight of the Holy See. His most recent book is "Rise to Greatness, the History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present." For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
This article originally appeared in the National Review.
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