OPINION:
The strategy of the Republican elites, to resist Donald Trump for as long as they can and put off thinking about how to retreat gracefully for as long as they can, is still intact. But only barely. The strategists may be drawing their last healthy breaths. Donald won Arizona by 23 points this week, and all its delegates, raising his number of delegates won to 739. Ted Cruz has 465 and John Kasich, 143.
Public-opinion polls continue to compete with the real thing, actual voting at the real polls, and a new Quinnipiac University survey — regarded as among the most reliable — shows Mr. Trump leading Ted Cruz nationally by 14 points. Even without John Kasich in the calculations, the Donald would lead the Texan by 9 points. The speeding Trump train continues down the track toward Cleveland.
The strategy to dump Trump was supposed to have worked best in the Middle West, where anger in the Rust Belt runs deeper than anywhere else, and Mr. Kasich, the governor of Ohio, was to have been the region’s favorite son, with all the advantages such status usually awards. The dogs barked, the din disrupted peaceful sleep, and the caravan moves on. Mr. Kasich is fast becoming another asterisk to the campaign of ’16.
Mr. Trump had a big win this week in Arizona, taking all its 58 delegates, and lost Utah, where Mitt Romney, the captain of the beat Trump at any cost brigades, is a prominent and influential Mormon in the state where almost everyone is a Mormon. The landscape gets friendlier for the front-runner from here on, with primaries in New York (95 delegates), New Jersey (51), Indiana (57) and California (172) still ahead. Mr. Trump, barring the kind of bump in the road that hasn’t taken him down yet, should do well, perhaps very well, in all of them.
As late as the hour may be, the elites have not given up. Some of them have begun to turn their attention to what kind of president Mr. Trump might make. The foreign-policy gurus, some of whom have been waiting to hear their telephones ring, are grumbling because the names of the Trump foreign-policy advisers are not familiar to what one of them calls the “foreign-policy community.” Evidence grows that Mr. Trump considers these professionals part of the problem and intends to look elsewhere, possibly even beyond himself, for help.
He has reached out in recent days to some establishment figures, including Rudy Giuliani, the mayor who cleaned up New York and briefly ran for president eight years ago, and William Bennett, the secretary of education in the Reagan administration. Both have said conciliatory things about Mr. Trump. Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader from Mississippi who is now a Washington lobbyist, thinks he has seen the inevitable signs of a coming spring thaw. “A lot of longtime Republicans,” he told Politico before the latest round of primaries, “had to sit down and think, ’You know, this could happen.’”
The fat lady has not yet sung, but she’s going through her sheet music to find the Donald’s favorite passages, perhaps something from Verdi’s “Aida.” It’s an opera that might be big enough for the Donald.
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