Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, pledged a major buildup of the military, the swift destruction of the Islamic State
.. Mr. Trump was scathing about the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya, lashing Mrs. Clinton to the policy, which he said had left a security vacuum to be filled by the Islamic State.
.. “Our friends and enemies must know that if I draw a line in the sand, I will enforce that line in the sand — believe me,” Mr. Trump said. “However, unlike other candidates for the presidency, foreign aggression will not be my first instinct.” He did not mention anyone by name, though his leading Republican opponent, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, has threatened to carpet-bomb the Islamic State until the desert sand glows.
ruz and Kasich (and the G.O.P.) Give Up on the Northeast
The pact ignored territory (Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island) where Trump will rack up delegates. In this way, the deal between the two anti-Trump campaigns reflected a persistent Republican Party blind spot: voters living between Boston and Washington.
For all the talk about Trump’s “New York values,” it was not a given, early in the campaign, that he would emerge as the favorite of Acela-corridor Republican voters. Trump’s blend of populist anger and sharp anti-immigrant talk looked like a bad fit for some of the country’s wealthiest and most cosmopolitan states. And many of the region’s most popular Republican politicians seem to detest Trump.
.. The Times reported that Kasich’s camp had originally tried to cut a deal with Cruz’s campaign a month ago, but that the Texan’s advisers had turned down the approach “in part because it would have meant ceding the spotlight in high-profile contests, such as New York, in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.” In this, Cruz echoed the essential perspective of his party: that these states, where he had no base, were a useful backdrop for campaigning, but not a place to seek Republican votes.
The 8 A.M. Call
Then there’s a potential oil crisis, very different from the ones we used to have: the problem now is a glut, not a shortage, with many producers having run up large debts they probably can’t repay. You could say that shale oil is the new subprime.
.. Yet things could be worse. The Donald doesn’t know much, but Ted Cruz knows a lot that isn’t so. In a world in which gold bugs have been wrong every step of the way, repeatedly predicting runaway inflation that fails to materialize, he demands a gold standard to produce a “sound dollar.” He chose, as his senior economic adviser, Phil Gramm — an architect of financial deregulation who helped set the stage for the 2008 crisis, then dismissed warnings of recession when that crisis came, calling America a “nation of whiners.”
Mr. Cruz is, in other words, a man of firm economic convictions — convictions that are utterly divorced from reality and impervious to evidence, to a degree that’s unusual even among Republicans.
Go Figure. Donald Trump Is Capable of Making a Change When Needed.
Not an easy task, but you probably have a better shot with the guy who worked, in one role or another, in every Republican nominee’s presidential campaign from 1976 to 2008. Sure, Manafort spent the last few years hanging around with deposed Ukrainian prime minister Viktor Yanukovich, but it’s worth seeing how things work with Manafort having a larger role — and whether the style of the Trump campaign can change, or whether it’s “baked in the cake” of the candidate’s personality.
.. Cruz’s campaign had defined such pools for each of his major opponents as part of what was known internally as the Oorlog Project, named by a Cruz data scientist who searched online for “war” translated into different languages and thought the Afrikaner word looked coolest.