2016-05-04newyorker.com

There is a lot of anger in the electorate, which Trump's victory reflects. Yet one of the many problems that Cruz had in filling the stop-Trump role was that the anger he retailed came in packages of contempt that were too cunningly crafted and too widely strewn, like the mini-munitions in a cluster bomb, with too much indifference about whom he might hurt. Cruz's misanthropy doesn't seem to have been lost on voters. With his wife, Heidi, on one side, and Carly Fiorina, his play-acting running mate, on the other, Cruz ended his press conference by refusing to say whether he would support Trump as the nominee. They formed the same tableau a few hours later, when Cruz, in response to the Indiana results, unexpectedly stepped aside. He suspended, rather than ended, his campaign, and it's unclear what will happen to his delegates. But, at this point, any contested Convention would have to be premised on a gimmick--a rule change, for example--or a true upheaval in the Party. And the G.O.P. doesn't seem organized enough for that.

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The electoral map looks very good for the Democrats now, but complacency would be a mistake. Clinton lost Indiana to Bernie Sanders. Thanks to superdelegates, she still has a strong hold on her Party's nomination, but that doesn't remove the question of whether Sanders's endurance in the race points to unaddressed weaknesses in her candidacy, such as the way she talks about money. On Tuesday night, Sanders said that he would take the fight to the Convention, and also said that he wanted superdelegates to think hard about who would do better against Trump. They undoubtedly are, though it may lead not to support for Sanders but to more calls for him to get out of the race. The general election is going to be ugly, not easy, no matter how wide the final margin is. Those who wrote off Trump as a joke have, since the beginning, willfully ignored two factors that are, in retrospect, pretty obvious. First, Trump wants to be President. He has, in his way, imagined himself as a creature of politics for decades. Second, in order for him to lose, someone else had to beat him--and the Republican Party has failed to produce that person. If Jeb Bush doesn't become a byword for the collective delusions of a political class, then the lessons of this election won't have been learned.



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