Arab News
JAMAL DOUMANI
Will we ever hear the end of it — the end of Donald Trump haranguing Americans with his tirades against Muslims, fulminations against Mexicans, broadsides against women and rants against political correctness? Folks, fear not, for I bring glad tidings. The end may, just may, be nigh for the mogul showman, posing as a stalwart statesman. But we may need to wait till next July, when the Republican National Convention convenes in Cleveland to choose its presidential candidate.
As the media, let’s say, trumpeted everywhere, including the front pages of every national newspaper in the country on Wednesday, Ted Cruz, the abrasive senator from Texas, soundly defeated Trump in the Wisconsin primary last Tuesday, at once dealing a blow to the narcissist’s chances of clinching his party’s nomination, and paving the way for a potentially brokered convention.
In the event you hadn’t done 101 in American studies at college, a brokered, or contested convention happens when a front-runner had failed to secure that magic number of 1,237 delegates. Delegates are traditionally bound to vote for the candidate they were already pledged to (during primaries and caucuses) on the first ballot. But if there is no winner on the first ballot, there will be a second and a third, and so on, until one is found — a time during which a whole lot of wheeling and dealing goes on and “backroom deals” are hatched.
According to the rules, if there’s deadlock, then an outsider, someone who had not campaigned at all, could still win the nomination, say, in this case, former presidential aspirant Mitt Romney, current House Speaker Paul Ryan or former Gov. Rick Perry. (In 1952, for example, Adlai Stevenson, who had had no plans to run for president, was nominated by the Democrats at their convention Chicago — and of course went on to lose to Republican Dwight Eisenhower.)
Marco Rubio, the candidate with a baby face and locker-room lingo, is truly out of the picture now, gradually retreating into obscurity. The dejected Floridian was spotted last Monday, according to Politico, sitting in “Seat 19C on an American Airlines flight from Miami to Washington, with no aides in attendance and no reporters in pursuit.” And John Kasich, who has won primaries only in home state in Ohio and is being urged to drop out of the race by both Trump and Cruz so they could have delegates, is having his eclipse. Do the maths, and he doesn’t figure in anyone’s scheme of things, but he still clings on, nevertheless.
In any case, Trump’s loss to Cruz in the Midwestern state earlier this week was his most significant — and given the man’s narcissism, mot traumatic — setback since he announced his candidacy last June, when he proceeded to dominate the Republican field. In the interim, an ascendant Cruz, who may after all be hitting a chord with voters outside his constituency of hard-line religious conservatives, will be nipping at his heels over the next three months.
Still, Trump soldiers on, undaunted, advancing more and more dubious ideas, including most recently his plan, should he be elected president, to force Mexico to pay for the border wall (to ward off illegal immigrants) by threatening to cut off the flow of billions of dollars in remittances that millions of Mexican immigrants in the US send to their families back home, a plan that could wreak havoc on Mexico’s struggling economy, and create bad blood between the United States and a key regional ally.
Without a doubt, this has been the most bizarre presidential election in the United for decades, and we have not yet gotten to the Republic convention yet, when, should Trump be “robbed” of the nomination, as the mogul’s supporters will see it, riots may erupt similar to those in 1968, outside the International Amphitheater in Chicago, where the Democratic convention was held, when 10,000 protesters amassed at the nearby Grant Park, and fought with police, and vice versa.
Someone from our part of the world should be in Cleveland to “observe” the scene. “If the United States or Britain is having elections, they don’t ask for observers from Africa or Asia,” declaimed Nelson Mandela at one time. “But we have elections, they want observers.”
Yes, I plan to be at the four-day Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July, which will bring together 50,000 attendees, all playing dress-up and wearing outfits that boast loudly of their love for America, for conservatism and family values. My tailor is almost done working on my sequinned American flag jacket, as is my milliner on my tinsel hat sporting the legend, “Make America Sane Again.”
