Rick Klein: “The central, huge personality of the 2016 campaign has set up a larger-than-life contest for the future of the Republican Party, with battle lines etched long before Donald Trump’s fate is decided. Wednesday night laid out the future paths of the GOP in dramatic, boisterous fashion. If Trump wins, Trumpism, along with its angry populism and strains of nativism, prevails. If he doesn’t, the party will have Mike Pence, whose answer to Trump was to join him, while offering a twist of earnestness and conservative commitment. On the opposite side, there’s John Kasich, rejecting it all by not even showing up at the Trump convention in his home state. There’s Paul Ryan, seeking a middle path though leaning in enough to speak twice – and even wield the gavel – at the convention.”
“And then there’s Ted Cruz, who laid down unmistakable markers with three words: ‘vote your conscience.’ Cruz anticipated a backlash, but he couldn’t have anticipated angry delegates yelling ‘Goldman Sachs’ at his wife. However this breaks, Cruz’s gambit figures to have the longest tail. He will have either sounded conservative alarms about Trump – so much so that his wife and father were threatened with physical harm – or he will have rained on a parade that’s marching to a drummer that’s very much not like him. Cruz’s play may prove to be the boldest, since it’s predicated on the assumption that the Trump phenomenon hasn’t changed the Republican Party in any fundamental way.”
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