from Quin:
Indiana’s primary Tuesday is shaping up as a do-or-die stand by Ted Cruz if he is to keep Donald Trump from hijacking a Republican Party whose positions he abandons on matters ranging from spending to entitlements to health care to abortion to Russia to religious liberty to constitutionalism to privacy rights and to the primacy of freedom as a core American concern. (Trump is well to the Left of most Republicans on all these issues.) I have made no secret of my disdain for this vulgar, pathologically lying, liberal (in the modern American political sense), proto-fascist, vicious, unstable, lawsuit-abusing, mob-connected, ignorant, little-guy-trampling, serial-business-failing, serial-adulterous reality-TV star and personal branding expert.
For at least a dozen years, on the other hand, I have been an admirer and ally of Indiana’s current governor, Mike Pence, a solid and thoughtful and courageous conservative. Pence endorsed Cruz last Friday. He sees what I do: Cruz is a committed conservative; Trump is not.
Meanwhile, there are reasons — many reasons, not just the three listed in the ad I’m about to mention — to wonder if most Americans really don’t know Trump at all. He keeps hiding things that Americans should know. He keeps lying about what the facts say are multiple, major business failures, and about the size of his own inheritance (and even more, his de facto inheritance, including the times his father signed to guarantee deals Trump couldn’t make and the times his father bailed him out of major financial trouble).
In that light, there is a new digital and radio ad out in the Indianapolis suburbs, asking what Trump is hiding. The digital “buy” is fairly significant. It should attract former Kasich (and former Rubio) voters around Indy who are starting to realize there’s just something a little too shady behind all of Trump’s bluster — and who even are wondering if Trump is even very smart, aside from a cleverness at branding and an intuitive sense of how to feign toughness at the right times.
Here’s the digital version of the ad. It’s a rather bare-bones production — heart-to-heart rather than slickly produced and fancied up with all the usual, annoying consultant’s tricks.
Meanwhile, at PJ Media, I pondered how a person of faith should react to the Trump candidacy. Please take a look.