Claire Berlinski contemplates Donald Trump’s recent Foreign Policy speech and finds that he is really preaching the same doctrine of American withdrawal from world leadership and decline that Barack Obama was.

Trump’s speech made him seem to me Obama’s natural successor, and made me decide that neither are the aberrations I thought they were. Both reflect an external reality: the relative loss of American power. Both envision a limited role for America in the world. Trump’s wrapping Obama’s view of the world in the American flag, and making it palatable to people who weren’t willing to hear it from Obama, but it’s the same message. We’re no longer able to be a benevolent global hegemon. Indeed, we never were a benevolent hegemon. The world will be fine, and so will we, without our efforts to lead it. If we’re an exceptional country at all, our destiny is to lead by example, not force. “America First” is not an accidental slogan. Trump certainly knows where it comes from, and I suspect most Americans at least intuit it.

Trump in many ways echoes the themes of Obama’s first presidential campaign:

We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed. Civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of Americans and just killed be lives, lives, lives wasted. Horribly wasted. Many trillions of dollars were lost as a result. The vacuum was created that ISIS would fill. Iran, too, would rush in and fill that void much to their really unjust enrichment.

They have benefited so much, so sadly, for us. Our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster.

Here’s Obama in 2008:

… we have lost thousands of American lives, spent nearly a trillion dollars, alienated allies and neglected emerging threats – all in the cause of fighting a war for well over five years in a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

And with just a few changes in tone,

I am running for President because it’s time to turn the page on a failed ideology and a fundamentally flawed political strategy, so that we can be intelligent about keeping our country safe. I stood up and opposed the Iraq war from the start, and said that we needed to fight al Qaeda.

Hillary Clinton says she’s passed a “Commander in Chief test” – not because of the decisions she’s made, but because of all the years she’s spent in Washington. But here is the truth, folks, believe me: there is a gap in this country – a gap between people who claim to be tough on national security, and how unsafe we are because of their stupid, disastrous decisions. Our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster.

The war in Iraq enriched Iran, continuing its nuclear program and threatening our ally, Israel. Instead of the new Middle East we were promised, we got nothing. The war in Iraq has enriched North Korea, which built new nuclear weapons and even tested one.

The above passage is Obama in 2008, with a few words changed so that the voice sounds more like Trump’s, although the meaning is intact.

A world — including me — that’s been looking at Obama for eight years and wondering if the American century is over is now watching the Trump campaign and realizing that it’s long since past. Come 2016, Trump or Hillary Clinton will be in the White House. Clinton is explicitly running on “more of Obama’s foreign policy.” Trump is implicitly running on the same promise, and proposing to get there at warp speed.

Politico thought it would be good if everyone actually understood the reality of Donald Trump, so they convened some experts on Trump’s career and biography, five Trumpologists who covered him professionally: Wayne Barrett, a longtime Village Voice reporter; Gwenda Blair, a bestselling author; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael D’Antonio; Harry Hurt III, an author and videographer; and Timothy L. O’Brien, a writer and editor at Bloomberg.

Three Excerpts:

1:

Michael Kruse: I’d like to start talking about Donald by talking about Fred Sr. and going back to the very beginning, to Jamaica Estates [the Queens neighborhood where Donald grew up]. What do people need to know? What should we know about Donald because of his father, because of that relationship?

Harry Hurt III: I ran into Fred at Coney Island, with his secretary-mistress, one day, and he usually went to a place called Gargiulo’s down in that area. But that was closed that day, and so I was with my researcher and we tailed them over to the original Nathan’s hot dog stand. Donald was flying somewhere at the time, and we overheard Fred wipe some mustard off his lip, like this here, and he said, “I hope his plane crashes.” And I looked at my researcher, and I said, “Did you hear what I just heard?” He said, “Yes, I did.” I said, “Well, that’s my man. That’s Fred. The apple don’t fall far from the tree.”

2:

Barrett: Well, you know, with all this Tea Party anger that he’s appealing to now, he was the original bailout. I mean, the banks could have put him under any day. They took tremendous losses in those negotiations and deals. So they saved him. He was too big to fail.

Hurt: He was the original “too big to fail.”

Barrett: He’s the consummate example of what his voters rail against.

O’Brien: I remember Trump’s finance chief Steve Bollenbach, who worked through the debt for him, said he had this conversation one day where they were going to take the yacht. And they didn’t want to take the yacht. And the light suddenly went on in their heads: The banks actually don’t want to control all these assets. They want him to operate out of it, and they both thought, “Wow.” That was the moment when they realized they had leverage.

You know, everything he does now, he doesn’t need loans to do any of it. The golf courses are owned by the members. They pay fees that finance it. He gets a salary from NBC from The Apprentice, and he gets licensing fees for everything else. I mean, there’s some projects, like the Chicago hotel—he got bank debt for that. Deutsche Bank loaned into that one.

Barrett: But he’s gone from the 18th floor to the 18th hole.

[Laughter.]

Blair: It was branding. It was the early branding that kicked in for him. He spent the ’80s getting that brand going. So he buys the shuttle, he buys the yacht, he buys the Plaza Hotel, everything—

O’Brien: The Generals.

Blair: The New Jersey Generals, which gets him onto the sports pages, which gets him up to a national level. So the branding he had in place, so by the time the first bankruptcy comes up, the brand is the thing they don’t want to let go of. They don’t want to foreclose and not have the name, which is so counterintuitive that the mind boggles. Like, wait a minute. This guy is in corporate bankruptcy, but his name—but that’s how it was. He could get the over-the-barrel piece for the banks, and he’s been doing it ever since. It’s the over-the-barrel piece which he did with the Republican Party now. How do you get them so they can’t get rid of you, they can’t let you go? And he’s really good at that.

Barrett: Well, the thing was that the banks wouldn’t complain, either. When they cut the deal with him, if they didn’t go on to a prosecutor—I mean, all of the financials that he gave the banks were totally false.

Hurt: And they’re liable for that, for not doing their due diligence.

Barrett: Yes. They were so embarrassed that they never went to a prosecutor. Clearly, there could have been a case made.

3:

O’Brien: The other thing, too, that I think the media has to hold his feet to the fire on is he’s gotten away with this notion that he’s a superior deal-maker, and a very successful businessman. I thought about it after he went after the Iran deal. He said, “Obama negotiated this horrible deal with Iran. It’s a bad deal, and when I get to Washington, there won’t be bad deals anymore. I’m a great deal-maker.” And then the reality, the objective reality, is that he’s been a horrible deal-maker. His career is littered with bad deals. And yet, he’s essentially now a human shingle. He’s not someone who’s a particularly adept deal-maker, if you look at his whole career.

Kruse: A human shingle, because there were the bad deals that brought him down in the early to mid-’90s, right?

O’Brien: What he was left with was licensing his name. So he licenses his name on mattresses and underwear and vodka and buildings, among other products.

Kruse: He made this transition from being an actual businessman, a person who does deals, some of which were good, to a grand promoter of his own name.

O’Brien: And the reality TV version of a successful businessman.

Barrett: This is the ultimate promotion of his own name. This is the ultimate brand.

Kruse: But the fact is that there is a middle ground. There is, basically, 1990-ish to 1995 where he is a failure.

O’Brien: He’s in desperate straits. He almost had to go personally bankrupt.

Kruse: The success is that he didn’t die a business death. The success was survival.

O’Brien: And he was a survivor, to his credit. He survived.

Kruse: Why, though, wasn’t that failure?

O’Brien: Because of The Apprentice. I think singularly because of The Apprentice. But he was a joke in between 1993 and 2003.

Blair: You know that family legacy, that family culture of “never give up.” He never said he was a failure. Everybody else said, “This guy is going down. He’s filed for bankruptcy. This is terrible,” but he didn’t say that. He continued to say he was the best of the best, the biggest of the biggest, and he went on. I think that’s a huge piece of that.

Barrett: I tell the tale towards the end of the book about after the settlement with Ivana, he goes to meet with John Scanlon, who was a New York publicist of some skill, and tries to hire Ivana’s publicist to now represent him, and tells John, who is now dead, “I’m going to make a giant comeback, and I want to be on the cover of Time again, and I want you to handle it.”

So he’s already thinking that way, in that very down moment of his life, but he knew he had bilked the banks. The banks put him back up on the pedestal. They didn’t have to, but it took a while to climb up that ladder.

D’Antonio: What about the fact that Fred died and that money became available?

O’Brien: Which totally insulated him from a lot of problems, that inheritance that he got from Fred. At one point, he needed his siblings to extend him a loan. I think it was the hard reality of family money.

D’Antonio: The first thing I think that you credit him with is this creation of himself, which is very American, this idea that I’m going to imagine what I’m going to be, I’m going to tell the world that I’m it before I am it, and then the world is going to help me become it. And he did it.

O’Brien: Think about the genesis of The Apprentice. The show got launched because Mark Burnett [the producer of The Apprentice], as an immigrant to the United States, is selling blue jeans in Venice, California, barely making it. He doesn’t have any faith in himself and reads this book called The Art of the Deal, and he thinks, “Wow, this is the bible of how you make it in America.” And then whatever it is, 25, 30 years later, he does Survivor. That’s a huge hit. He becomes a force in the TV industry, and he thinks, “I’m going to go back to the godfather of my success, Donald Trump, and I’m going to create a TV show that embodies the inspiration I felt from The Art of the Deal.” And that’s how The Apprentice gets launched, because The Art of the Deal, as Wayne knows, didn’t comport with reality, and The Apprentice is just a TV version of The Art of the Deal. It’s a total distortion of reality.

Glasser: So it’s a TV show about a book about a guy who was an invented character.

O’Brien: Yes.

Glasser: That’s now led to a campaign based on the TV show based on the book.

O’Brien: About a man who’s saying he’s a politician, who could probably never really deliver on everything he’s saying.

D’Antonio: So it’s all about this autobiography, which isn’t auto, and it isn’t a biography—which is, you know, only in America.

Read the whole thing.

The Mirror: Donald Trump denies rape of teenage girl at ‘sex party’ with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein

The real question is: How many more of these little stinkbombs has Hillary got stashed away waiting for the Fall? and Can any of the bimbos’ stories be proven true? Chances are…

Robert Zubrin, at Ricochet, talks Foreign Policy (and Ethics) with the great man.

[D]id you hear the latest news? North Korea now says it has nuclear missiles that could hit the United States. What should we do about it?”

Trump shrugged. “Just let me handle things.”

This took me aback. “What? How?”

The billionaire looked me in the eyes and pointed his finger at my nose. “Listen, kid. Success in life is about knowing people. If you want to be the top guy, you got to know the top people. I know the top guy over there. So everybody should just stop acting like a bunch of [expletive, plural] and relax. I got it covered.”

Now I was really amazed. “You know the top guy in North Korea?” I stammered. “You know Kim Jong-un?”

“Yeah, sure, I know Kim.” Trump smiled. “I built him a grand casino and strip joint in Pyongyang. He’s a swell guy, top drawer. Whenever we had a problem, he’d take care of it, so quick, you wouldn’t believe it. A bunch of squatters wouldn’t get out of their lousy little shacks so we could build a parking lot; bang, squash, pave, and in 24 hours flat, you’ve got the most beautiful parking lot you ever saw. When I’m President, that’s how we are going to do things here. No more of this go-to-court crap.”

I hadn’t realized that there was a Trump grand casino and strip club in Pyongyang, and wanted to know more. “What’s the casino like?”

“It’s wonderful, it’s magnificent, it’s yuge!” said Trump, spreading his arms expansively.“The carpets are all panda skins, the furniture is all made of ivory, the walls are solid gold, the dining room silverware is platinum, and the glasses are made from diamonds, freshly dug from the most exclusive mines in Africa. The menu is unmatched: Crimean caviar, Bolivian cocaine, Siberian tiger hearts, Pacific bottlenose dolphin liver pate, elephant balls. And the broads they got, wow. Top of the line, kid, top of the line. Not just a bunch of cute little oriental chicks like you might find in a lot of places out there, but top drawer Russian blonde bombshells chosen for us by Putin himself. And, let me tell you, my friend, Vlad really knows how to choose them.”

I nodded. “Yes, you mentioned in one of the debates that you and Putin are good friends.”

“Sure,” said Trump, smiling wickedly. “If you are looking for a good time in Moscow, he’s definitely the man to see.”

“Yet,” I said, “Putin is also the guy whose bombs are stampeding our way all those Muslim refugees that you are making such a fuss about. Doesn’t that bother you?”

Trump did a double take, looked at me like I had just revealed myself to be a born-yesterday idiot, then grinned knowingly. “You’re kidding, right? Anyway, he’s got this Olympic gymnast himself, and man, she is hot. The things she can do, you wouldn’t believe it. In all my travels, I have never known anyone like her.”

The Donald closed his eyes, as if recalling a blissful memory, but my head was spinning. “I beg your pardon. Are you saying…?”

Trump opened his eyes and held up his hand like a policeman telling a car to stop. “Sorry, I misspoke,” he said. “I didn’t mean to insult anyone. I should not have said I have never known anyone like her. I should have said ‘rarely.’ Not ‘never,’ but ‘rarely.’ There was also this nice piece of work who was married to the French president for a while, and maybe several others, whose names escape me at the moment. I love women, you know, and I’m really looking forward to meeting more of the world’s top broads once I’m President.” Trump suddenly looked puzzled. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with Merkel, though. I mean really, you call that a face? What do the krauts see in her? I just don’t get it.” He shook his head.

I decided to change the subject. “Returning to your friendship with Kim…”

“Yes, great guy,” Trump nodded appreciatively. “I love his hairstyle. We use the same hairdresser, you know.” He playfully fluffed his hair up with his right hand.

“I see,” said I. “But aren’t you at all concerned about his ethics?”

Trump frowned. “Ethics? What’s that?” Again he turned to me closely and pointed his finger in my face for emphasis. “Listen kid, in this world, there’s no such thing as right and wrong; there is just winning and losing. Kim’s a winner. I like that. He’s a real boss who knows what he is doing. You don’t see any North Korean companies leaving to set up their factories in Mexico, do you?”

Read the whole thing.

Brent Bozell implores his fellow Movement Conservatives to think seriously about what they are doing, and to dissociate themselves from Donald Trump’s candidacy before it is too late.

Even those of us who oppose Trump understand that he’s tapping into something that has exploded onto the national scene: disenchantment, even white-hot rage among the Republican base with the party’s establishment and the Washington status quo. You and I understand this because we were taking on the weak-kneed GOP leadership many, many years ago, back when Donald Trump was donating to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Is Donald Trump the answer? That question’s on everyone’s mind. But there needs to be another question answered first: Does Donald Trump mean a word he says? Are conservative leaders supporting Trump prepared to live with the consequences if he doesn’t?

Many critics have outlined the innumerable left-wing positions and candidates Trump championed before he got in this race. It’s worth recalling some of them now: Trump not only supported but bankrolled amnesty. He supported taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. He supported not just abortion but partial-birth abortion. He was open to gay marriage. He supported government-funded universal healthcare.

He supported eminent domain for (his) private gain. He supported the Wall Street bailout. He supported “assault weapons” bans. He applauded President Obama for doing a “great job.” He congratulated Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for doing a “good job.” He financially helped the Democrats pass Obamacare. Trump was a registered Democrat when that party was being led by the likes of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), donating heavily during President Obama’s tenure. He’s bankrolled Democrats like Jimmy Carter, Rahm Emmanuel, Anthony Weiner, Terry McAuliffe, Chuck Schumer, Charlie Rangel, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, to name a few.

But Trump said he’s changed. On everything. Overnight. Just in time for the GOP nomination fight.

Really?

Let’s look at Mr. Trump’s record during this campaign. He’s declared his support for single-payer healthcare. That puts him to the left of Obamacare. He’s re-declared his support for Planned Parenthood. He’s re-supporting tax increases. He’s supported crony capitalism. He’s endorsed “touchback” amnesty. He wants the U.S. to break the Geneva Convention. He’s “neutral” on Israel and Palestine. He wants South Korea and Japan to have nuclear arsenals.

Paul Krugman loves Trump’s big government economic plan for the simple reason that big government will remain under President Trump.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Trump took the left’s side in the North Carolina transgender bathroom controversy.

Last week Mr. Trump announced—guess what?—he’s not just pro-abortion, he wants the pro-life plank in the GOP platform removed, thus divorcing the Republican Party from the pro-life movement. Sarah, Ben, Mike, Phyllis: How can you still support this man? He has now thrown you under the bus, embracing an agenda you’ve spent your entire career opposing. Can you accept that betrayal?

What will you tell your supporters when the man you endorsed enacts an agenda that horrifies them?

As the Republican primaries draw to some sort of conclusion, right now Trump is surrounding himself with GOP establishment types, trying to assure them he doesn’t really mean many of the things he’s said, claiming that much of his campaign is just posturing.

Posturing to whom?

Top Trump aide Paul Manafort is telling GOP establishment bosses behind closed doors that his boss is “a real different guy.” His campaign openly touts his chameleon-like character as some sort of general election advantage.

Is someone with no discernible principles the candidate you want leading the Republican Party and taking on the Democrats in 2016?

Is someone who consistently lies about principles and positions he doesn’t hold worthy of your support?

If Trump becomes the nominee, and enacts the policies he’s now championing, will conservatives who chose to aid and abet Mr. Trump be able to live with their decision?

When it comes time to nominate a new Supreme Court Justice, and President Trump names his radically pro-abortion sister, as he’s suggested he would, or some other radically pro-abortion pro- Planned Parenthood jurist, as we know he will, will you accept that you helped him do that?

Asli Aydintasbas, a Turkish journalist, tells us that he is rooting for Trump, because he thinks we deserve him.

[W]hen my American friends ask what I think of Donald Trump, I tell them outright: “I sure hope he gets to be the president.” They tend to look at me with horror, and search my face for signs that I’m joking. “So you get a little taste of what we have all been going through in the rest of the world,” I add by way of explanation.

I really cannot wait to see the first bilateral meeting between Vladimir Putin and Trump, the initial handshake with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or the sunny photo with Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. The meeting with South Africa’s Jacob Zuma will be fun and the White House visit with Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev will undoubtedly be overshadowed by a next-door meeting of the glamorous first ladies.

Politics — and American politics particularly — has long been too scripted, too sanitized. Isn’t it time to inject some life into the boring song and dance of international diplomacy?

The majority of people on this planet live under corrupt and authoritarian regimes, some of which are close allies of Washington. So now you are getting yours too — what’s the big deal! I tell my panicked U.S. friends.

Besides, think of the upsides to a Trump presidency. What a breath of fresh air it would be to have an undiplomatic, swaggering U.S. president who could, for example, comment about Angela Merkel’s hair, joke about the robe of the Saudi king, or finally ask the French president Hollande about his love life. Politics — and American politics particularly — has long been too scripted, too sanitized. Isn’t it time to inject some life into the boring song and dance of international diplomacy?

But, of course, if the experiences of Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela and the rest of the world are anything to go by, the fun doesn’t end with diplomatic eccentricity — there will be laws to change, judges to appoint, newspapers to reckon with, elites to sacrifice at the altar, and businesses to shape up. At each and every turn, you would be surprised how many gather to watch the heads roll.

Read the whole thing.

The Daily Wire finds very interesting the story that the Trump Campaign is now offering to voters.

Stage One of Donald Trump’s long con is almost over.

According to the Associated Press, Trump’s lackeys told Republican leaders on Thursday that Trump’s entire persona has been manufactured from wholecloth: he’s now about to turn into Winston Churchill, but more eloquent. They said that Trump has been “projecting an image” and that “the part he’s been playing is now evolving.” Paul Manafort, Trump’s new brain after the demise of Trump’s old brain, Corey Lewandowski, said that there are, in fact, two Donald Trumps. “When he’s out on stage,” said Manafort, “when he’s talking about the kinds of things he’s talking about on the stump, he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose…You’ll start to see more depth of the person, the real person. You’ll see a real different guy.”

Manafort continued:

He gets it. The part that he’s been playing is evolving into the part that now you’ve been expecting, but he wasn’t ready for, because he had first to complete the first phase. The negatives will come down. The image is going to change.

Ben Carson reiterated the same message: “He’s trying to moderate. He’s getting better.”

This, of course, means that Trump has been lying.

Or it means that Trump is lying now in order to consolidate mainstream support.

Either way, he’s a liar.

Don’t like the vulgar, bullying, childish Donald Trump? Don’t worry! He’s now going to give you the sober, presidential Donald Trump. You don’t have to care that neither of them is evidently real.

Rush Limbaugh yesterday:

CALLER: Yes. The question is, Rush, you’ve been analyzing the Trump phenomenon for months — you know, giving it real full thought — and just to close the circle, I have a question here. Assuming Trump becomes the nominee and he wins the general election and things don’t go so well on trade or other things he promised, are his supporters gonna keep on cheering him on or are they gonna start bitching and saying, “You know, he’s not doing what he said he was gonna do”? …

RUSH: Trump gets elected, and everything he stands for, many of the things bomb, nothing happens on trade, no changes. What will his supporters do then?

CALLER: Start blaming the ChiComs. That’s why we voted him in, that’s why these people voted him in, to seal the deal. This is what he is.

RUSH: No, wait a minute now, you’re kind of jumping the gun. If the trade deals don’t happen, if his people blame the ChiComs, they’ll eventually be saying that the ChiComs outsmarted Trump and Trump was gonna be the one to outsmart them. … Let’s take something Trump has said that is going to happen, that he’s gonna do, and let’s assume it doesn’t happen, and you want to know what his crowd’s gonna do. Let’s take the iPhone. Trump has said on at least two different occasions that I’ve heard that he’s gonna, quote, make Apple make their phones in America. I’m gonna make Apple make their phones and their computers in America. And audiences cheered wildly.

Now, I can tell you here, Levin, it’s impossible. The iPhone cannot be made in America. Not as it is currently assembled. You would not believe, people would not believe what all is involved in manufacturing, assembling, designing the iPhone. Just the final assembly takes place in factories where three to five hundred thousand people work. But the supply chain, the parts that go into an iPhone, or any other smartphone, is impossible to even know, it is so extensive, it’s so detailed, it’s so deep.

All the different parts in that phone come from everywhere on this planet. And a system has been developed of transportation and distribution where all those parts happen to be available in China or Japan, just a day away, should something be needed. To move all of that, not just the assembly, but all of that to the United States is not possible, and specifically if you want to keep the iPhone priced as it is. Okay. So let’s just take that as an example. He has said he’s gonna make Apple bring the iPhone home. Apple will not do that. Question, what do Trump supporters think when it doesn’t happen?

CALLER: Oh, he was just saying as a negotiating thing to bring pressure on China or —

RUSH: No, your question is specifically what are Trump supporters gonna do. That may be too complicated, but I’m just telling you, iPhone is not gonna be made in America.

CALLER: No.

RUSH: It can’t be. Unless you want to pay a couple thousand dollars for one. And wait. We just don’t have the infrastructure here to do it. It’s not a cut on the country, it’s not a criticism of the country. Let’s take the wall. Let’s say the wall doesn’t get built, Levin.

CALLER: That’s a good example.

RUSH: What if the wall doesn’t get built? What happens? I mean, that’s a signature deal, right?

CALLER: Hm-hm.

RUSH: If that wall doesn’t get built and the Mexicans obviously don’t pay for it, then what will Trump fans — that’s what your question is, right — what are they gonna do?

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: Well, the correct answer is at that point, it doesn’t matter what they do, because Trump’s already elected.

CALLER: Well, he wants to get elected again.

RUSH: Maybe. Would assume so. But it still might —

CALLER: For Trump, the winner to be a one-term president? I mean, that’s almost worse than not winning the presidency at all.

RUSH: No, it’s not. No, no, no. No, no, no, no. …

CALLER: Hm-hm.

RUSH: That’s not true. Being president for four years — Jimmy Carter wouldn’t trade — he was the worst ever, he wouldn’t trade it, he’d do it again. If everything was exactly the same, he’d do it again. Even having to go to the Nixon funeral and listen to people praise Nixon, that was the worst day of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Don’t doubt me out there.

Canadian Cincinnatus, at Ricochet, quotes Marion Evans:

One way to deal with gadflies, rogues and bullies is to give them exactly what they want on the theory that they will eventually do themselves in. Since his Colorado debacle, Donald Trump has been arguing that the delegate attribution should reflect the percentage earned by each candidate in each primary/caucus. But under these new “Trump rules,” his total delegate count today would be 564 (table below), well below his official current total of 755.”

…

[and he observes himself:]

The simple truth is that Trump is in over his head. He lost Colorado because his team failed to show up. Tens of thousands of people showed up and voted in the caucuses … just not for him because his campaign was AWOL. In contrast, Cruz has set up dedicated campaign teams in every state, in some cases, for years, and continues to operate them after the primaries are over in order to snag the actual delegates. This is called playing by the rules.

Until recently, this part of the game eluded Trump’s attention because nobody else was paying attention to it either. There hasn’t been a brokered convention in decades. But Cruz paid attention, and began working on this before anybody thought a brokered convention was likely That says a lot about Cruz’s perspicacity and thoroughness… as well, as Trump’s. These qualities are supremely relevant to the job of president.

I think Trump entered the presidential race on a self-promotional lark and — to his great surprise — found himself winning, mostly because he accidentally tapped into underlying issues such as political correctness and immigration. When he first adopted them, I don’t think he had any clue about their potency.

He is like the dog that caught the car he was chasing; he doesn’t know what to do next.