J’accuse (#RNCinCLE)

Jeb Bush.

Marco Rubio.

Ted Cruz.

John Kasich.

Chris Christie.

And all their top-level donors, supporters, and influencers.

Yes, a year ago, one could reasonably believe that Donald Trump’s campaign as a novelty, that he wouldn’t make it past the summer, that voters would turn their minds toward them, the Serious Candidates, once they started paying more attention to the news.

In the fall, they could have told themselves that there’s simply no way that voters would actually select Trump, that they were telling pollsters they supported him just for the novelty of it.

But when he began to win primaries — well, at that point, these men have no excuse.  At that point, their further decisions were all a matter of putting their personal political objectives, and their own desire for power, ahead of the well-being of the American people.

To be sure, Chris Christie turned into a professed Trump supporter.  Does he not see his ignorance, his bluster, his foolish policies, when he even has any?  Or does he, like seemingly many others, think he can influence Trump rather than be trampled in his wake?

And Kasich’s motives were bewildering when he stayed in ’til the end.  I griped at the time about this, and wondered if he might have concluded that Trump was really a secret moderate, and not so bad, but reports that he rejected the VP slot (though in dispute) suggest that this was not the case.

Jeb Bush?  How could he possible have believed he could win, rather than just sucking funds and attention from more viable candidates?

And Rubio and Cruz, who I’d believed for a long time had the best shot if they’d joined forces, insisted on each going it alone, even as Trump won primary after primary, garnering disproportionate votes from winner take all contests, and even winning absolute majorities.

Megan McArdle, in a postmortem back in May, exonerated these two, writing,

Certainly Cruz is a charmless candidate with little hope of winning outside the Bible Belt, and Rubio is a charming politician who failed to win many primaries, and shot himself in the foot making jokes about the size of Trump’s … hands.

But both of them behaved basically rationally throughout this campaign. Cruz executed by far the most masterful campaign this cycle, hoped that this would be enough to give him a chance outside the Bible Belt, and dropped out this week when it became clear things were hopeless. Rubio was a good politician facing impossible odds, as a series of completely irrational decisions by Bush, Christie and Kasich battered him, then siphoned off just enough of his voters to make it impossible to consolidate a lead. He made a Hail Mary pass by attacking Trump on Trump’s own terms, and it didn’t work. And as soon as it became clear that it hadn’t, he left the race.

If everyone else had been behaving as rationally as these two, I suspect we would not be now looking forward to another six months of Donald Trump speeches. And perhaps then another four years of same.

But I wouldn’t give them a pass.

Not now.  Each of them made decisions that put us in the position we are in today.  However rational those choices may have been in an ordinary election, in which one’s opponent was a reasonable man with moderate policy disagreements, that’s not the case in 2016.

And I don’t care about speculation on the 2020 election, or the fate of the Republican Party four years from now.  In the meantime, either we have Trump or Hillary, both candidates who risk bringing about very negative world events and U.S. public policies.

And Cruz, with his “vote your conscience” speech?  (By the way, here’s a great commentary on the speech, pointing out that it’s Trump supporters, not Cruz himself, who take “vote your conscience” as a slam against Trump.)  Everyone’s talking about how he’s either positioned himself well for 2020, or has failed at what is presumed to have been an attempt to do so.  But maybe he was admitting that, at this point, we’re all stuck.  There is only conscience — and, perhaps, ironic gratitude to be living in a firmly blue or red state where one’s top-of-the-ticket choice doesn’t matter.