Differences between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump go beyond their personalities and opinions. One sprang up when Cruz last week named Carly Fiorina his vice presidential running mate, should he win the Republican presidential nomination. He couldn’t wait until the California primary in June, though Fiorina became a favorite of Republicans when she ran an impressive though unsuccessful race for the Senate in California in 2010. Cruz is desperate.
Trump, having trounced Cruz in five primaries last week, brushed off a reporter’s question about picking a vice president. He said the time for that hasn’t come. He doesn’t have the delegates yet. “He’s a logical progression kind of guy,” his friend Newt Gingrich explains. Trump is confident.
Another difference is the status of the GOP race. Trump says “it’s over” and he’s the presumptive nominee. He seems to believe that. Cruz says the fight goes on. It’s the Republican establishment and Washington lobbyists who favor Trump and want to impose him as the winner, Cruz says. He surely doesn’t believe that.
Despite what he says, Trump is not acting like the nomination is in the bag. He’s not ignoring the remaining primary states—far from it. The day after his five victories, he appeared at a rally in Indiana, where he is spending lavishly (by his standards) on his campaign.
The warm-up speaker for Trump was Bobby Knight, the ex-basketball coach at Indiana University. Knight was an enemy of political correctness years before Trump took the plunge. As you might expect, he and Trump are pals.
Earlier that day in Washington, Trump gave the first of a series of policy addresses, delivered from a prepared text and read from a teleprompter. The subject was foreign policy. Yes, Trump has one. Gingrich described the speech as “presidential level” and it was indeed serious. His aides said it was Trump’s “vision” of America’s role in the world.
He talked up his hardy perennials—the border wall, the evils of trade treaties—but went beyond them. Trump is not an isolationist. He wants to make friends with Russia. He’s ready to lean on the Chinese to force them to clamp down on North Korea. He claims he would wipe out ISIS “very, very quickly.”
But his foreign policy is not that of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. It’s not what Republicans have identified with for the past half-century. Trump wants to “rebuild” the military but use it sparingly. He’s against nation-building and trying to spread democracy. He said “America first” would be his “major and overriding theme.” Trump strikes me as a noninterventionist at heart, which puts him closer to Dwight Eisenhower. If Trump is aware of the Eisenhower parallel, he didn’t mention it.
He got mixed reviews. The glaring contradictions he embraced were widely cited. But John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, says the speech “puts Trump in the broad mainstream of Republican foreign policy.” As such, he “advanced his position,” Bolton says.
As for Barack Obama, Trump had nothing nice to say. He attacked the president for courting America’s adversaries while alienating longtime allies. That’s GOP dogma.
One speech on a weighty topic won’t elevate Trump’s stature or ease the concerns of his critics, particularly conservatives. His next speech is likely to be on the judiciary. He has enlisted the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society to come up with a list of potential conservative nominees to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in January. Presumably he’ll divulge the names.
In the days before the California primary on June 7, Trump won’t be able to resist a tour of the border with Mexico, giving him a venue for a speech on immigration. A supporter, Duncan Hunter, represents the congressional district along the border and would be a willing tour guide. Infrastructure is another likely topic. “It fits his whole background,” Gingrich says.
Policy speeches aren’t Trump’s strength. But they are necessary for a candidate whose credibility on serious issues is in doubt. They don’t represent a pivot to the general election. Trump is merely catching up. He ought to have given these speeches months ago.
For Trump, Cruz’s selection of Fiorina as his running mate isn’t much of a threat. As a ploy, it didn’t work for Reagan in 1976 and won’t work for Cruz now. It could haunt him later. “He might have wanted to create some kind of unity ticket with Kasich, but that possibility is now foreclosed,” James Hohmann of the Washington Post wrote.
The real issue Fiorina points to is women. Courting their votes is Trump’s biggest problem. And he continues to make it worse. In his speech after sweeping the five primaries, Trump turned his attention to Hillary Clinton, his all-but-certain Democratic opponent.
He accused her of playing the “woman’s card.” If she were a man, Trump said, “I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote.” This is a classic putdown of women. It says they’re unqualified and get ahead only because of their gender.
Trump prides himself on his political instincts. He’s been ingenious in exploiting issues and undermining opponents. Changing how millions of female voters regard him will be a supreme test of his skill. “We’ll see how clever he is,” Gingrich says.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
