Republican Party

Donald Trump may now be the presumed Republican candidate, but the party convention is not scheduled to close until July 21, and there will not be a nominee until then. Two and a half months is an eternity in this 24/7 media environment. There have been 22 contested party conventions since 1876, one lasting 103 ballots. The fat lady has not sung.

The GOP has survived Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover, Progressive Teddy, and George W. Bush—and it will survive Trump too.

By Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Ross Douthat says the results of this GOP primary process are “a defeat for True Conservatism™” — that is, the idea that all defeats of GOP candidates can be explained by their lack of ideological purity. Excerpt:

Reihan Salam has a bad idea about who should run an anti-Trump protest campaign:

After Indiana, American politics have entered a new period.

For eight months, Donald Trump’s electoral strength has astounded, shocked, and dismayed the political class and terrified the inner circles of the GOP. The outer-borough New Yorker, pushy WASP (Russell Baker’s phrase of some thirty years ago), developer and TV star with flamboyant personality, bold and bombastic, a militant centrist, an Eisenhower Republican with a Berlusconi temperament, has managed to carry out what amounts to a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, or at least its presidential process.