Donald Trump: prepare for a nasty and bruising contest

And so it begins. It is not Donald Trump’s overwhelming victory in Indiana last night that changes everything.  It’s the decision by Ted Cruz to bow out of the race for the Republican nomination.

Now there is no-one (barring a comparatively impotent John Kasich) to keep Trump from securing the number of delegates he needs to win the nomination, ahead of the convention in Cleveland in July.

Campaigners had called the Indiana primary the Alamo for anti-Trump forces.  But in the end this was no battle to the death.  It was a surrender – a capitulation by the candidate most likely, who was never really the candidate the party wanted.  Now it must live with the candidate it never imagined would be the nominee.

Could Trump defeat HRC?  Only one poll (from Rasmussen released yesterday and quoted by Trump in his victory speech) shows the Republican defeating his Democratic rival.  Some Republicans are so convinced by the likelihood of Trump’s defeat by Clinton that they reacted to Cruz’s withdrawal by tweeting “Madame President”.

But what is clear is that it will likely be a nasty and bruising contest.  On the day of the Indiana vote, Trump repeated suggestions, published in supermarket aisle favourite, the National Inquirer, that Cruz’s father was an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated JFK.  By the end of the night, Trump was heaping praise on his former opponent, as someone with a brilliant future ahead.

Forget everything you’ve ever heard or read about the American Presidential race.  Trump is not a traditional candidate.  He’s a populist who indulges in bigotry and misogyny, who critiques globalisation, and the political establishment, including his own party, who exploits his own glossy celebrity to gain unprecedented exposure.

He understands the American people feel let down, by international trade, and wars in the Middle East, and feel marginalized in their own communities; and so the real estate billionaire is transformed into working-class hero.

Immediately after the Indiana results were known, Democrats were reaching for their Twitter accounts to challenge Bernie supporters to back Hillary in order to defeat their common enemy, Trump.

Hillary Clinton, who lost Indiana to Senator Sanders, will have to find a way to persuade her doubters that she can best serve their interests; at the same time as beginning a battle against a no-holds-barred Republican opponent even his own party failed to take seriously.

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