During the 2016 Republican primaries, the five stages of grief don’t necessarily run in their normal order. Anger has been evident all year long. So has depression.
Now the party seems split between denial and acceptance when it comes to coping with front-runner Donald Trump.
The most prominent sign of denial: the day after his sixth straight loss to Trump in a popular election, Ted Cruz named Carly Fiorina as his running mate.
To be clear: Trump could still lose the Republican presidential nomination. There is no guarantee he will win the 1,237 delegates he needs to prevail on the first ballot and he risks significant defections to Cruz and others on subsequent votes.
But Cruz is announcing his would-be vice president when he is 657 delegates short of a majority himself. The Texas senator is 425 delegates behind Trump, who needs only 250 more to win on the first ballot.
Trump has also received 3.2 million more votes overall than Cruz. That’s a larger lead than Newt Gingrich’s entire 2012 vote total. By the time the primaries come to an end, there could be more votes separating Trump and Cruz than John Kasich’s entire tally.
Cruz is calling Trump a creature of Manhattan, the site of the front-runner’s only significant loss in the last six primaries.
Nevertheless, Cruz has a running mate. She’s the candidate who finished seventh in the Iowa caucuses — ahead of Kasich, however — and then dropped out of the race months ago.
Who knows, it could work. Fiorina is effective at throwing verbal jabs on the campaign trail, a skill that comes in handy as the number-two person on the ticket. She also gets under Trump’s skin.
“If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him,” is Sun Tzu’s oft-quoted advice. “Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.”
Maybe Cruz has the Donald right where he wants him and Fiorina can elicit some gaffes from the temperamental billionaire, costing Trump Indiana right before more Cruz-friendly states vote in May. We’ll see.
On the other end of the spectrum, the biggest sign of Republican Trump acceptance could be found in the reaction to the major foreign policy address he delivered in Washington, D.C., Wednesday.
The speech certainly had its problems and contradictions. The most cogent parts dealt with the risks of regime change in the Middle East, with Trump arguing that the deterioration of Iraq is traceable to George W. Bush decision to invade more than Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw.
Many Americans agree with Trump and, as it happens, he would be running against Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war, rather than Obama. But it’s still not an especially popular opinion among Republicans, especially in Washington.
Nevertheless, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker praised Trump for giving a “very good foreign policy speech in which he laid out his vision for American engagement in the world.”
“I look forward to hearing more details, but in a year where angry rhetoric has defined the presidential race on both sides of the aisle, it is my hope that candidates in both parties will begin focusing not only on the problems we face but on solutions,” Corker continued in a statement. “I believe today’s speech could be an important step in that direction.”
Translation: Trump is the likely Republican nominee and when he decides to behave in a somewhat presidential fashion (apparently a point of contention within Trump’s own campaign), this important Washington Republican is going to meet him halfway and encourage presidential behavior.
“Trump is helping himself a lot with this speech,” tweeted former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. “It will resonate well with a lot of traditional peace through strength Republicans.”
Perhaps Fleischer is merely practicing what his old boss would have described as the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” But here too was a desire to view the Republican front-runner favorably rather than tear him down, on the possibility that #NeverTrump might never happen.
From Gingrich, who has been Trump-friendly for months, to a bipartisan MSNBC panel, the speech as greeted with signs of acceptance in some quarters and harsh criticism in others.
Congressional Republicans also vacillated between acceptance and denial Wednesday, as some expressed hope that the Cruz-Fiorina ticket could shake up the race and stop Trump while others merely hoped the billionaire would keep his campaign promises to conservatives.
If there’s a brokered convention, expect the bargaining phase to begin.
