Cruz drops out after crushing Indiana loss
Clears way for Trump to grab GOP nomination
WASHINGTON— Donald Trump, Republican nominee.
There will be no contested convention, no white knight.
The billionaire demagogue effectively clinched the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday night, knocking his top rival Ted Cruz out of the race with a landslide victory in the Indiana primary.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich remains a candidate, for now, but the astonishing outcome is clear: a general election between Hillary Clinton and a billionaire demagogue widely viewed as a political laughingstock just last year.
Cruz, a Texas senator campaigning on a message of Christian piety and conservative orthodoxy, had enjoyed relative success in the south. But his difficult personality and hard-line politics proved toxic almost everywhere else.
“With a heavy heart but with a boundless optimism for the longterm future of our nation, we are suspending our campaign,” he said in Indianapolis.
When he was finished speaking, Cruz hugged his wife and father, who were part of a group of family and friends who joined him on stage.
Trump’s dispatching of Cruz completes his wildly implausible journey from celebrity curiosity to shocking front-runner to polarizing victor to majority choice. He vanquished 16 competitors, most of them prominent current or former elected officials, to become the first major-party nominee since Dwight Eisenhower without experience in office.
His triumph amounts to a hostile takeover.
Gleefully attacking Republican sacred cows from Fox News to George W. Bush, Trump managed to become the party’s standard-bearer with little support from party power-brokers and only marginal commitment to traditional conservative positions.
He is the single most unpopular nominee in the modern history of polling. A plurality of Republican voters didn’t care. Furious with the polished figures of the political establishment, eager for simpler times and receptive to Trump’s anti-Muslim, anti-illegal-immigration, antifree-trade message, they had chosen the insult-spewing businessman in almost every part of the country.
The Republican banner will now be carried by a man described Tuesday by the Republican runner-up, Cruz, as a “pathological liar” and “serial philanderer” for whom “morality does not exist.”
“We’re going after Hillary Clinton. She will not be a great president. She will not be a good president. She will be a poor president. She doesn’t understand trade,” Trump said at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
Trump himself did not appear to comprehend that he was the winner, at one point telling the audience he would have to ask them where the race stood.
“I don’t want to congratulate Hillary Clinton on winning the presidency tonight, but she just did,” Erick Erickson, one of the leaders of the failed “Never Trump,” movement, wrote on Twitter.
Other analysts, though, believe Trump might prove an unexpectedly formidable competitor. Clinton is herself highly unpopular and Trump’s populist appeals on trade and political dysfunction may resonate in key states in the Rust Belt.
Still, he has a formidable task ahead. As he attempts to repair his image with Hispanics and other voter groups, he must also embark on an effort to unify a bitterly divided Republican Party. “The GOP is going to nominate for president a guy who reads the National Enquirer and thinks it’s on the level. I’m with her,” Mark Salter, a former longtime aide to Sen. John McCain, wrote on Twitter.
But there were signs everywhere that much of the party was now prepared to back Trump. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who ran in 2012 as a moderate, called this week for an end to “intraparty fighting.” Even Cruz refused to say he would not support Trump in the general election. And party chairman Reince Preibus sent an unmistakable getout-now message to Kasich.
Clinton lost Indiana’s Democratic primary to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, but the defeat did almost nothing to cut into her big lead. Sanders will now face intense pressure to drop out of the race so the party can unify behind Clinton and against Trump.