Super Tuesday Put Donald Trump One Step Closer to Ruling the GOP

To recap: Donald Trump wants to keep Muslims out of the US. He's in favor of illegally torturing America's enemies, of building a massive border wall that likely wouldn't even work, of making it easier to sue journalists for libel (First Amendment, Shmirst Amendment), of forcibly deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants, of retaliating against terrorists by targeting their families (a war crime), and of wanting to cut taxes in a way that would make the national debt skyrocket.

On Tuesday, the message Republican primary voters across the country sent was that all of this—the casual racism, the violent rallies, the endorsements from white supremacists, the birther shit—is not only acceptable, but what America needs more of to be Great Again. A lot has been written about Trump's appeal among these voters, especially the working-class white ones, but his whole campaign can best be summed up in two words: Fuck you. He's on track to win the GOP nomination because a lot of people have been getting screwed by the machine for years, and they believe Donald Trump is the guy who can screw the machine back.

On the Republican side, the Super Tuesday results were pretty unambiguous. Trump won at least 40 percent of the vote in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Massachusetts, and eked out closer wins in Virginia, Arkansas, and Vermont. According to a CNN exit poll, the results were fueled by large numbers of GOP voters who said they were dissatisfied with the government and who, perhaps more tellingly, felt they'd been "betrayed" by the their own party.

Virginia was perhaps the most significant win for Trump, extending his routing to a state where Marco Rubio—who's become the de facto standard-bearer for the Republican Establishment—was supposed to be able to compete. The Florida senator did come close, with 32 percent of the Virginia GOP vote to Trump's 35, but it didn't come close to making up for his third-place finishes in the rest of the South. Rubio's only win of the night—and first of the 2016 election cycle—was in Minnesota, which hardly amounts to a win at all.

Ted Cruz, on the other hand, managed to hold his home state of Texas, and he also scored wins in neighboring Oklahoma and Alaska, making him the surprising comeback story of the night. It wasn't quite the Super Tuesday sweep his campaign had planned, but it was enough for the Texas senator to call on the other remaining non-Trump candidates to drop out so he can put an end to The Donald.

"So long as the field remains divided, Donald Trump's path to the nomination remains more likely and that would be a disaster for Republicans, for conservatives, and for the nation," Cruz told the elated crowd at his primary night party in Stafford, Texas. "We are the only campaign that has beaten Donald Trump once, twice, three times."

The remarks were clearly aimed at Rubio. Problem is, Cruz's Republican colleagues generally despise him, if only just slightly less than they hate Trump. So far, the rest of the candidates are still refusing to drop out. Rubio has a lot of endorsements and hopes to pick up a lot of delegates in his home state of Florida's winner-take-all contest later this month; and Ohio Governor John Kasich, who finished second in Vermont and has also yet to win a state, is apparently sticking around to see what happens in Michigan and Ohio. Ben Carson is also hanging around, possibly because he just doesn't have anything better to do.

As the logjam demonstrates, Trump's rise and continued dominance wasn't inevitable—it represents a massive institutional failure on the part of the Republican Party. For years, right-wing infotainers have been telling viewers and listeners not to trust experts, politicians, or any sort of established authority. Then, when the GOP base inevitably embraced the most anti-establishment candidate out there, an anti–free trade pseudo-fascist who rejects the rules of political discourse, the Establishment failed to agree on a strategy to stop him. One way to frame it is that the insiders have lost control of the Republican Party—another is to just admit that there is no such thing as the Republican Party anymore, just a lot of white people angry at the way the world is turning.

Unable to channel the base's rage, prominent GOP leaders denounced Trump in every way they knew how in the days leading up to Super Tuesday. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham called him "generally a loser as a person and a candidate"; political consultant Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, wrote Monday that it is "impossible to pretend that Trump is not only an idiot but also a racist idiot" and that "he's proven he's a uniquely ugly figure to emerge in American political history."

But by now it's clear that Trump voters don't care what people like Graham and Stevens have to say—their comments just prove that their candidate is hated by the right sort of people. So far, no op-ed or anti-Trump cri de coeur has made a difference, not even John Oliver's heavily googled "Donald Drumpf" takedown. The GOP's big-money donors haven't done much to fund Trump attack ads, either because it's too late to stop him or because negative press simply doesn't hurt him. Calling Trump a con man, or an authoritarian snake-oil salesman with a racist streak and a marked disinterest in the business of governing isn't an insult—it's his brand.

What often isn't said in all the Trump-bashing, though, is that he's right about some of the ways that Americans have been mistreated by their elites. NAFTA, which Trump has called a "disaster," really did fuck over ordinary workers. Letting Medicare negotiate drug prices really would save a lot of taxpayer money at the expense of Big Pharma. (Incidentally, those are positions typically voiced by left-wing politicians.) He really is saying things that he can say only because he's not courting the donors other candidates have to kowtow to. But it says something about America—something not very nice—that in response to these actual problems, Republican voters are embracing a candidate whose most prominent positions involve keeping brown people out of the country. (One exit poll found that six in ten Republican voters on Super Tuesday favored banning Muslims who weren't citizens from entering the US.)

So what happens now? According to the latest AP tallies, Trump has locked up 285 delegates, compared to 160 for Cruz and 87 for Rubio. Republican candidates need 1,237 delegates to win the party's nomination, and with several winner-take-all states set to vote later this month, it looks like Trump is well on his way to achieving that number. Conservative business leaders are now finally talking about bombarding the reality-TV mogul with negative ads, and GOP strategists are reportedly trying to scheme up a way to thwart his coronation at the national convention this summer.

Some conservative politicians, meanwhile, seem to have read the writing on the wall and decided that maybe Trump isn't so bad after all. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie made the leap before Super Tuesday, and opened for Trump at his press conference on primary night, but he won't be the last. If Republicans can't beat Trump, sooner or later, they're going to have to join him.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.