Dem
51
GOP
49
Joseph Stalin had an excellent strategy for avoiding election defeats: Don't hold elections. Taking a cue from Joe, Trump lackey David Bossie had an idea that the Dear Leader thought was pretty swell: Cancel the rest of the Republican primaries and caucuses this year. The general idea: Trump has already locked up the nomination (probably true), so the RNC should just declare him to be the presumptive nominee, and call it a day.
As a purely strategic matter, this probably wasn't the brightest idea. If Trump is nominated the normal way, it's pretty hard for him to be denied the nomination, barring some disastrous setback (death, conviction, etc.). If everyone arrives for the Republican National Convention as a de facto free agent, by contrast, it opens up a much higher possibility of something... surprising happening.
Despite this, the plan was sailing along, right up until Republican voters heard about it. They pitched an absolute fit, with the result that about 3 hours after news of the resolution became public, Trump announced that he did not support the maneuver after all. In other words, he was for it before he was against it. Shortly thereafter, Bossie withdrew the proposal.
We note this news because it's an illustration of something we have seen many times. Trump can talk like a dictator or strongman or fascist, but he just doesn't have the stones to walk like one. Can you imagine Stalin changing his "election" plans because it might hurt some people's feelings? We can't. And we continue to believe that Trump's fundamental lack of courage and conviction, his unwillingness to do the really unpleasant stuff, is one of the best insurance policies against a potential Trump presidency v2.0 becoming Trump dictatorship v1.0. (Z)