Drudge Report editor and Washington Times columnist Charles Hurt took a look at the state of the Republican presidential primary on Thursday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon.
Hurt said the Republican Establishment loves talking about convention rules, floor fights, and the fine points of delegate behavior because “it allows them to avoid a far deeper and more important problem they have, and that is that they are completely out of touch with Republican voters.”
“They opened this huge avenue for Donald Trump, who isn’t like them, who’s an outsider, who is flamboyant, and is a force unlike anybody else,” he continued. “They allowed him to walk in, and the guy was one hundred percent in tune with voters on everything.”
Hurt said he had some complaints about Trump, including his tendency to get into “ancillary spats” and “misspeaking” on policy, but “no one can deny that he is dead-on when it comes to trade, immigration — when it comes to all of these things, he has been in absolute lockstep with Republican voters, unlike any candidate that has been running for 30 years.” (Hence Cruz adoopting so many trump policies dispite his senate record)
“I think that the Establishment, they’re absolutely freaking out about this,” he said. “So now that they’re getting into this whole big debate about the rules at the convention, and the numbers, and 1237, all this kind of stuff. They love this. This is great for them. This is their honey hole right here!”
“And, by the way, it’s also
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)97%’s honey hole,” Hurt continued. “He is best when he’s doing the back-room horse trading over how to use the rules to screw over some parliamentary trick thing. That’s his bread and butter, man. And Donald Trump looks at this stuff like most Americans, and says, ‘Oh, that’s hogwash, man. Let’s just build the wall, and we’re gonna make Mexico pay for it.’”Hurt also touched on the theme of his recent column “The Nuclear Option: The ‘Experts’ Expand Government With Dirty Deals, Time to Put People In Charge,” posted on Thursday morning at Breitbart News.
“For the past 28 years, we’ve had two Republican presidents. Both of them have been named Bush. What did they do for us? They raised taxes, they doubled the national debt, they gave us the largest expansion of entitlement programs in four decades. They launched a billion-dollar war that they didn’t pay for. That’s not ‘conservative,’” he argued, then corrected his cost estimate to a trillion-dollar war. (“I said ‘billion?’ I’ve been covering Washington too long,” he joked.)
To Bannon’s suggestion that the Republican Establishment “fears Trump and hates Cruz,” and has been telling itself “Hillary won’t be that bad,” Hurt replied: “I’ll never be able to wrap my brain around this.”
“Having covered Ted Cruz, and what he has done in the Senate ever since he has been here, to see him now as the henchman and handmaiden of the Establishment to block Donald Trump?” Hurt marveled, scoffing at the suggestion that the Establishment is actually moving in Cruz’s direction on the issues or that they would allow him to win the White House and become the nominal leader of the Republican Party.
“It is not going to work,” Hurt declared. “All he is doing is, he’s doing their work to prevent Donald Trump from clinching the nomination.”
“Any way you look at it, Donald Trump is an outsider. We’re supposed to be in favor of the outsider right now because the Establishment has proved they cannot be trusted to do any of this stuff. The outsider is absolutely who any conservative should be behind right now,” he declared. “Ted Cruz, all he is doing is, he is aiding the Establishment so that they can pick neither of them.”