WarSclerotic

In Indiana, the gun for the real race went off: Clinton versus Trump. Yes, Trump. The man who put egg on the faces of pundits worldwide, even here in Israel; the man who became his party’s presumptive nominee before reaching the minimum of 1,237 delegates necessary to guarantee his candidacy for president. You can argue with the Republican voters, but they are the ones who decide.

Since the Indiana primaries, experts, pundits, and members of the GOP establishment, which produced former presidents Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln, have changed their tune, falling in line with the winner. On their Twitter accounts, they expressed a unified opinion — in the end, when a serious decision has to be made, Trump is preferable to Clinton.

A little over two months from now, the Republican convention will take place in Ohio. It looks like those who did not want Trump as the party’s candidate could see him win the presidency in November.

Clinton is marking time. Trump, on the other hand, keeps moving up. The man whom many called “Mr. 30%” has risen to 50% within weeks. It happened just when he was expected to hit a bump in the road, just when his opponents, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich joined forces to stop him.

Trump’s leaps and bounds this past month defeated all expectations. Since the primaries in New York, his home state, Trump has won in five northeastern states — Connecticut, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Delaware. On Tuesday, he managed a victory in Indiana and with the statistics of a real winner — between 50-60% support.

The wind went out of the sails

America is watching the finance stag from New York galloping on and cannot understand how it happen. Why did no one foresee this phenomenon? Why, when Trump declared his candidacy last June, did everyone treat it like a gimmick? The answers can be found in the eight years of U.S. President Barack Obama’s terms in office. Despite the efforts of his supporters to present the 44th U.S. president as a success story, his administration has been a failure, due mainly to the expectations that he himself created. From a president who wanted to change America and the rest of the world along with it, Obama turned into a president who mostly changed America, but not the world. And if so, not for the better.

Many Americans today think that the president, to a large extent, stole their country from them. Rationality has given way to emotions: They do not think in terms of numbers — unemployment percentages, inflation, deficit, GDP; they think about values — country, military, family. They are finding it hard to believe that their America, a superpower that once led the world, has changed its face and suddenly become just another country. A country that “leads from behind,” as Obama himself put it in the Libya campaign, and does so willingly.

That is not the American dream — but it might be the American nightmare. Once, even an immigrant to the U.S. from Asia, Europe, or Africa was asked to conform to American values. In the age of Obama, the immigrants learned that the U.S. may try to conform to them. Good? Bad? What is certain is that this isn’t the American spirit. And it might be the reason we were reminded this week of Andrew Jackson, considered one of the most successful American presidents. Although controversial in his time, he won the presidential election twice and captured the hearts of the masses. Jackson was not the establishment’s choice — the elite despised him — but the people voted for the hero general. And in America, the people are sovereign.

Jackson’s and Trump’s stories are very different, but there are similarities. Jackson was also very crude on one hand and popular on the other; like Trump, the establishment did not want him and in 1824 even managed to negate his presidency and hand it over to John Quincy Adams. The fact that Jackson won more votes and electorates did little to help, but Jackson — a hero of wars against the English and the Indians, won the next two election campaigns. Today, his image graces the U.S. $20 bill.

The seventh U.S. president was not one of the founding fathers, but he is still associated with many of the values America is proud of today: honor, independence, world recognition of America’s status and role, the importance of military service, the right to bear arms (under the Second Amendment of the Constitution), and of course courage, which includes willingness to die for the flag and for the safety of one’s family.

All these, if you like, are values attributed to the time of Jackson’s presidency, but also characterize Trump’s agenda. The former’s tradition has become the latter’s promise.

If America had not drifted so far away from Jackson’s legacy during Obama’s presidency, Trump’s promises might not have hit a soft spot with American voters. But luckily for the billionaire, the things he is saying hit home with the voters even if, like Jackson, they stand out for their crudeness.

A gentleman to the enemy

Let’s get back to Indiana. Time and again, reports said that this would be the decisive primary, and it was. This primary made Trump the party’s de facto nominee, and Cruz decided to pack it in.

Cruz, like General Custer, stood bravely to the last. Indiana was his last stand. After his losses in New York and the other northeast states, he was still trying to steal the show when he named Carly Fiorina his running mate. That nomination will remain on paper only.

Cruz, a fundamentalist Christian, was expected to win in Indiana, a state with a high percentage of religious voters. Two weeks ago, he even signed an agreement with Ohio Governor John Kasich, in which the latter agreed to support him in the fateful vote. In practice, the polls predicted a painful loss for Cruz, and turned out to be completely correct.

The last day of Cruz’s campaign was marked by mutual mudslinging with Trump. First, the finance baron from New York said in an interview to Fox News that Cruz’s father, Rafael, had ties to Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963. He was repeating a very problematic report from the National Inquirer tabloid, which had run a picture that showed Cruz Sr. and Oswald allegedly handing out flyers praising Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

Cruz Jr., who was deeply hurt by the remarks, called Trump a “pathological liar” and other choice names. That did not prevent Trump from commending Cruz after the latter’s loss in Indiana. There, another facet of the billionaire’s personality came out — that of a true gentleman.

Meanwhile, Cruz has yet to endorse Trump, and could still cause him some headaches at the convention given the number of delegates he won before suspending his candidacy. In theory, he could try to enlist superdelegates, who are not committed to voting for a certain candidate, but it looks like Trump’s path to the Republican nomination is paved. Nine states have yet to hold primaries, and he does not need more than 50% of the remaining delegates to win the party nomination. California (with 172 delegates), New Jersey, and West Virginia are already in his pocket. In effect, the nomination is his.

Even Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus tweeted that Donald Trump would be the party’s presidential candidate, and that “we all need to unite and focus on defeating @Hillary Clinton.”

Indiana also proved what a CNN poll revealed on the eve of the election: 84% of voters already see Trump as the Republican presidential candidate, and 85% see Clinton as the Democratic candidate. No one is ruling out the possibility that the Republican convention in Cleveland could go over quietly, while the Democratic convention in Cleveland winds up being stormy. Who would have believed in February that such a scenario was even possible?

But even if a Rasmussen Institute poll showed Trump beating Clinton in the general election (41% to 39%), all other national polls are predicting a victory for the former secretary of state. Still, Clinton is in trouble. The victories of her rival Sanders are keeping him in the race, which shows that she has to take the left flank of the Democratic Party into consideration.

Centrist Democrats are threatening to go over to Trump or not vote. Clinton is not Sanders fans’ cup of tea. It will be hard for her to run after and sweep up his army of supporters. In Indiana, 70% of young Democrats voted for Sanders, and Independent voters preferred him as well.

One thing is clear — there are no rules and no logic in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. All preexisting concepts have collapsed. The Indiana primary, for example, buried the notion that religious and conservative voters follow a one-dimensional agenda. We also learned that American voters from both parties are looking for a candidate with unconventional ideas. Thorough, boring plans are greeted with suspicion, whereas someone who floats a simple, catchy idea will get the voters’ support.

National honor above all

Something happened in Indiana. It was the first time Trump had won more than 50 percent of the votes in a state not considered his home court. Another barrier fell.

“It won’t be easy to beat Trump in November,” said Senator Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania), a man with a keen political sense. He believes that Clinton will win the nomination at the convention, but will have a hard time in the western states “among Reagan Democrats, who live in cities that still haven’t recovered from the [2008] economic crisis and are hostile toward Washington and the [political] establishment.”

In 2012, when Trump was first discussed as a possible presidential candidate, his chance of winning was one in 80. In 2015 his chances improved to one in 50, and now he is the de facto Republican candidate. Have we already said “moving ahead by leaps and bounds”? Clinton has another problem: It is very difficult for a candidate from one party to win after a president from that same party has been in office for two terms. Take the victory of George Bush Sr. in 1988, after Reagan’s second term in office. But we are not there yet. Most Americans start to take an interest in the elections only around September, after the primaries are over, and much could change by then. Trump and Clinton are expected to duke it out; it will not be a clean fight, and their televised debates should air after the kids are in bed. Trump has lots of skeletons in his closet, but Hillary has graveyards, and everything is about to come out. It is time to tune in.

Meanwhile, before the election, Trump should read the excellent biography of Andrew Jackson. Obviously, he will have to start thinking about a running mate, and former presidential hopeful Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s name came up more than once this week.

Aside from Jackson’s legacy, the billionaire must have thought about the words of fifth U.S. President James Monroe, who said, “National honor is a national property of the highest value.” Trump understands that well. America used to be something, and he wants it to be that way again.