To the extent it's still standing after yesterday, the Stop Trump movement is comforting itself with the world's biggest lie: that John Kasich is the embodiment of the Republican Party, while Donald Trump is the bastard stepchild.
It's exactly the opposite.
It is no longer a question of what the party wants. The voters -- remember them? -- keep showering Trump and Cruz with Ceausescu-like percentages. The combined vote for Trump and Cruz is a ringing chorus of what this party wants: a wall, deportation, less immigration and no job-killing trade deals.
In other words, what the party wants is the diametric opposite of what the donor and consultant class wants. One would have to search the history books to find a party establishment so emphatically rejected by the voters as today's Republican Party has been.
Trump and Cruz don't agree on everything -- Cruz is more interventionist on foreign policy, and Trump is more aggressive on bringing manufacturing home. But there's not much daylight between them on the crucial issue of whether to dissolve America's borders. By now, they both say build a wall, reduce immigration and protect American jobs.
In other words, Trump and Cruz have totally rejected the Bush/Ryan/Rubio/Fox News/WSJ/RNC establishment position on immigration.
After Mitt Romney lost an election he should have won in 2012, the Republican National Committee convened a group of experts to determine what went wrong, producing what it called an "autopsy." It was an autopsy because, you see, the party was dead. And the people who did the autopsy were the ones who killed it.
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Have you ever heard of an autopsy being performed by the murderers?
The murderers' main recommendation was that Republicans "embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform" -- i.e., amnesty. "If we do not," the autopsy continued, "our party's appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only."
God forbid the party respond to its core constituencies! Instead, the report bristled with advice on winning the Hispanic vote. The GOP was supposed to run Hispanic candidates, hire Hispanic spokesmen, demand yet more Hispanic immigration and correct its "tone."
It looked like our report got mixed up with the Democratic National Committee's report in the copier room. At least it was printed in English.
They put all this in their computer and out spit the perfect solution: MARCO RUBIO! Like all ideas developed by focus groups ("New Coke"), how could it possibly fail?
"On issues like immigration," the report instructed, "the RNC needs to carefully craft a tone that takes into consideration the unique perspective of the Hispanic community." How'd they like the front-runner's announcement speech about Mexican rapists and drug dealers? Off-message?
But Trump immediately leapt to the top of the polls and never stopped soaring.
Only Ted Cruz was smart enough -- or hated the Republican establishment enough -- to adopt Trump's pro-American immigration policies. Now the only question for voters is, which one is more electable: a Holy Roller preacher, or a brash alpha male billionaire?
They've crushed the rest of the field -- winning large majorities of Hispanics along the way, incidentally. Between them, Trump and Cruz have won 77 percent of the delegates (1,067). The donor-approved, mass immigration advocates, John Kasich and the (late, lamented) Marco Rubio, have 23 percent (313).
Rubio was the apotheosis of the Republican leadership's proposal for national suicide -- or the "Growth and Opportunity Project," as the autopsy was officially titled. He was handpicked for the presidency six years ago.
He got to Washington and promptly set about pushing an amnesty bill faster than you could say, "My dad was a bartender." In the darkest days of the nation's history, Rubio's bill actually passed the U.S. Senate. (One of the many hints that voters don't want amnesty was that the bill was blocked in the House, not by any major media opposition -- despite media cheerleading, in fact -- but by the people, rising up in a blind rage.)
But still, Rubio was the golden boy among GOP consultants, donors and their hired help, elected Republicans. He had unlimited money, resources, establishment support, conservative media cheerleaders and his own cable news channel.
His presidential bid was supported by 14 Republican governors, 22 Republican senators and more than two dozen Republican representatives, Washington think tanks, lobbyists, the Chamber of Commerce, Chipotle and Taco Bell. Time magazine put him on its cover as "Republican Savior."
And on Tuesday, he lost his own state in a landslide. Rubio lost every single county in Florida to Trump but one. He went 1 for 66 in a state where he is not only a U.S. senator, but also a former house speaker. He outspent Trump by about 500 percent and still lost his home state by 20 points.
Never was there a more perfectly kicked field goal -- with Rubio as the pigskin. He was hiked and kicked right through the goalposts.
Gov. John Kasich is as awful on immigration as Rubio, but he's so boring, no one can ever remember anything he says. He opposes deporting illegal aliens because that's not "the kind of values that we believe in." ("We" being "the Democratic Party.") He bleats that illegals are "made in the image of the Lord," which would require America to admit everyone in the world -- provided they can pass the rigorous background check of being human.
On Tuesday night, Kasich barely won his own state, making him 1 for 29 in GOP primaries. The one and only primary he's won is in the state where he's the sitting governor. He was endorsed by his opponent, Marco Rubio. He's campaigned almost nowhere else.
And yet Kasich came in less than 10 points ahead of a New York real estate developer -- half of Trump's margin of victory over Rubio in Rubio's home state. Adjusting for the home state advantage, that's a humiliating defeat.
How many more GOP stars will die for mass immigration? So far, there's Eric Cantor, Nikki Haley, Trey Gowdy, Ben Sasse, Paul Ryan, Fox News -- 14 governors, 22 senators and two dozen representatives.
With increasing desperation, the media claim that 63 percent of voters don't want Trump based on votes cast for any other candidate in a 12-man race. What the delegate count shows is a resounding rejection of the immigration policies being pushed by the party leadership.
The establishment laughed at us. They wanted our votes, but then ignored us. They lied to us about opposing amnesty while repeatedly conspiring to pass it.
Now we're going into the presidential election with our 80 percent thunderous will of the people against immigration. I'm not sure someone who is more preacher than president is the most electable expression of that will, but whether Trump or Cruz, make no mistake about what the will is.
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