Donald Trump’s abortion gaffe undermines his aura of invincibility

ANALYSIS:

Maybe Donald Trump isn’t inevitable after all.

In yet another undermining of the New York tycoon’s aura of invincibility, the influential National Right to Life Committee’s board of directors voted over the weekend to endorse his chief rival, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Meanwhile, several prominent Republicans who had advised making peace with the inevitable are now walking back their earlier acceptance.

Those events were then followed Sunday by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus’ virtually ruling out any “consensus” candidate emerging as the surprise nominee at the Republican National Convention in July, specifically ruling out his personal friend and fellow Wisconsinite, House Speaker Paul Ryan or anyone else not now running the for GOP nomination.

Mr. Trump set himself up for the weekend whacking when he blasted to smithereens what was left of his credibility with women voters when he said a woman should face some punishment for aborting her unborn child in the event abortion were to become illegal.

He then reversed himself after being told that’s not the pro-life movement’s position.

That about-face played a role in the National Right to Life Committee’s endorsement of Mr. Cruz, said Chelsea Shields, director of the Wisconsin Right to Life Political Action Committee.

The National Right to Life Committee is the nation’s largest pro-life lobby, with 3,000 chapters across the country.

Those chapters can now be expected to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in independent expenditures for direct mail, phone banking, radio ads and email promoting Mr. Cruz in the 18 states that have yet to hold their presidential primaries or caucuses.

Ahead of a rally in Wisconsin on Sunday, Mr. Cruz himself said Mr. Trump’s serial remarks on abortion were an example of “a liberal trying to say what he thinks conservatives want to hear.”

TV news organizations also began highlighting over the weekend poll findings that have Mr. Trump scoring prohibitively high negative ratings with not only women, and even Republican women, but other key voter groups.

The pounding Mr. Trump has taken in the last week has led several influential and surprising sources to cast doubts on their own previous judgments about The Donald’s near inevitability, an outcome seemingly supported by numerous delegate-math analyses by The Washington Times and other news outlets.

Veteran presidential campaign strategist Alex Castellanos had been urging fellow Republicans to swallow hard and accept what he regards as the gloomy reality of Mr. Trump as the party’s nominee, and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan had been explaining to her readers why Mr. Trump was right for the times.

Both have done an about-face in recent days.

Mrs. Noonan re-evaluated after a tipping point came in her effort to try to explain away Mr. Trump’s series of missteps.

The former Ronald Reagan speechwriter argued in her latest column that it was always a mistake to think one “explosive statement” would bring about the end of Mr. Trump. The damage rather is cumulative and by now perhaps irreversible.

“It’s been going on for four or five weeks, and you can take your pick as to the tipping point,” she wrote. Maybe it was his threatening to ’spill the beans’ about Mr. Cruz’s wife, or Mr. Trump’s puzzlement over who David Duke is. Or maybe it was Mr. Trump’s ’hinting at riots’ if cheated out of nomination.

“Maybe it was when Mr. Trump referred in debate to his genitals, a true national first,” Mrs. Noonan wrote. “It has all added up into a large blob of sheer dumb grossness. He is now seriously misjudging the room. The room is still America.”

In a missive he sent out to selected recipients over the weekend, Mr. Castellanos said that while the party establishment cannot engage in subterfuge at the convention, beating Mr. Trump fair and square now looks possible.

“I was wrong about the inevitability of Mr. Trump,” Mr. Castellanos said. “Even after [Mr. Trump’s primary win in] Florida, I should have kept dreaming of a brighter dawn. In these final primaries, we see a few new rays of light.”

But Mr. Castellanos repeated that for someone to defeat Donald Trump, “he has to do it fairly.”

“The Party’s fate in November depends on how it treats Donald Trump at the convention,” Mr. Castellanos wrote. “It is up to the players on the field, not the referees on the floor, to determine the outcome. As I’ve previously expressed, ’It is too late for the limp GOP establishment to ask their mommy to step in and rewrite the rules.’ “

But Mr. Castellanos hasn’t given up the establishment dream of a Ryan or Kasich nomination over Mr. Cruz or Mr. Trump.

“Would Ryan take the nomination? Would he accept a better-than-even shot at being handed the leadership of the free world? Republican[s] can pray. It doesn’t hurt that the House Speaker made this speech last week calling for Party unity and setting himself up as the alternative to Donald Trump,” Mr. Castellanos wrote.

Mr. Ryan has himself repeatedly and emphatically ruled out a convention “white knight” scenario. But the reliability of those denials has been suspect among anti-establishment voters on the right since he flatly said in 2012 he would not seek or accept the House speakership — before he accepted the post.

In his appearance Sunday, Mr. Priebus reiterated that a current non-candidate is not going to win, a move seemingly calculated to take some steam out of the Trump forces’ planned “Days of Rage” protests in the event the nomination were to be taken from their man.

Their worst-case fear, to which Mr. Castellanos also alluded, involved reported establishment plans to stack the convention delegate deck in favor of Mr. Ryan or someone else who is not now running but who would be acceptable to party regulars who see themselves as power brokers.

“Even if something like that were remotely possible, that candidate would actually have to have a floor operation and an actual campaign going on with the delegates to make something like that possible, and Paul’s not going to do that,” Mr. Priebus said of Mr. Ryan. “He doesn’t want to do it. I know Paul very well.”