Donald the inevitable?

When a political observer as experienced and astute as Fred Barnes says so, you’re probably wise to pay attention. And Fred Barnes suggests the race is virtually over.

Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard magazine, of which he was co-founder in 1995. Before that, he had become one of the nation’s pre-eminent journalists while serving at The Baltimore Sun and The New Republic.

So when Barnes asserted a few days ago that Donald Trump is in the driver’s seat to win the contest to become the Republican nominee for president, I had to take notice. Barnes has now and then missed a call for an election here and there. But for the most part, he’s a pretty reliable prognosticator.

Note well that Barnes is not arguing in support of Trump; I’m sure he has other preferences. Nor is he predicting that Trump, even if he becomes the Republican nominee, will win the November election over the Democrats. But as a political analyst, Barnes thinks the odds now greatly favor Trump’s unlikely quest for the nomination.

‘Trump got everything he wanted in the New Hampshire primary—and a whole lot more.’ —Fred Barnes

Barnes reports: “Donald Trump got everything he wanted in the New Hampshire primary—and a whole lot more.” Ironically, the “whole lot more” Trump carried away from New Hampshire was the durability of the field of his opponents. So long as Trump has a handful of opponents, rather than just one, his divide-and-conquer strategy works pretty well. No one knows how he might fare in a one-on-one contest with John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, or Marco Rubio. So Barnes concludes: “Trump’s not only a stronger front-runner in the Republican race than ever; he’s now in the driver’s seat on the road to the presidential nomination.”

And it’s actually better for Trump to maintain that diverse structure of the field of competition for as many weeks and months as he possibly can. If he can hold on to 35 percent of the vote in state after state, while watching his opponents divide up the other 65 percent four ways, he stamps himself in the public eye as a sort of inevitable winner.

To avoid that scenario, at least one or two folks (and probably three) in the Kasich-Cruz-Bush-Rubio quartet are going to have to bow out soon. Of course, a really low vote by any candidate in an upcoming race—especially if it’s paired with a lower-than-expected performance by Trump—would have the same clarifying effect. Stopping the Trump momentum has become a preoccupying goal. Barnes hints that the two governors, Kasich and Bush, are most likely to be forced out of the race, leaving Cruz and Rubio to challenge front-runner Trump.

But the process leading to such a reduction of the field of players is worse than painful. Barnes notes the damage sustained as each of the five remaining candidates viciously beats the others to a pulp. They’ve formed “a circular firing squad,” he says, destroying each other in the process of finding the best man to represent the party in the general election later this year.

All of which blurs the question: What on earth is the 2016 general election going to look like? If Trump lives up to Barnes’ present expectations, nailing down the GOP nomination during the spring months and removing all doubts about the Cleveland convention in July, will the other two-thirds of the Republican family simply fall in line? Or will such skeptics back a call for a “brokered convention” in which standard rules are set aside and the famous smoke-filled rooms become the domain of the real decision makers? Or might a third party take shape between now and the convention?

And how much might all that force the GOP to shape its response to the equally unpredictable Democratic Party? How can the GOP wisely choose its nominee until it knows for sure whether the opponent is a self-declared socialist or a brazen woman perceived by an overwhelming majority of voters as a habitual liar?

Hang on. America may never have experienced anything just like this.

Email jbelz@wng.org

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