Donald Trump was massacred in the delegate battle in Colorado and Wyoming, leading to the resignation of his field director.
Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore (Flickr)
There really cannot be a week of news without Donald Trump starring in the center of some sort of controversy. The polarizing GOP candidate has been in an uproar over losing Colorado’s GOP presidential contest in a clean sweep to Sen. Ted Cruz all the way back on Super Tuesday at the beginning of March.
Trump has claimed that Colorado’s delegate selection process, which deviated from the delegate selection process all other states have used in this election season, was part of a conspiracy by officials in the Republican Party to sabotage his chances to get in the White House.
Yet, what Trump is forgetting is that the GOP leaders in Colorado made the decision to deviate from the standard delegate selection process back in the summer of 2015. It is not like a GOP leader in Colorado got a bright idea last week and said, “Well guys, we have got to put an end to Trump. Let’s isolate the voting in our state to a small group of people instead of the voting public to ensure Trump’s downfall.”
This decision was made back when no one actually took Trump as a serious threat for the GOP presidential nomination. There is no conspiracy here — it is just the horrendously convoluted nature of election season at play.
While I do not feel that what happened in Colorado was the outcome of any behind the scenes shenanigans, I feel that this latest controversy is another example of the lack of any sort of professionalism from the GOP during this presidential campaign season.
As Trump has been going around news circuits complaining about the “crooked deal” he was given in Colorado, he should instead be looking at himself for how things turned out. At the Republican Colorado conventions, Cruz was the only candidate who showed up and thus was able to make himself known to the voters.
Trump made this same mistake back in February when he decided not to attend Iowa’s presidential debates because he felt highly confident that he was going to win the Iowa caucuses. As with Colorado, Cruz won Iowa and left Trump stomping his feet in protest.
When Trump talks about how he has the deck stacked against him, he should understand that deck is one he has stacked against himself. If Trump did not try so hard to stir up drama on a weekly basis, there would not be so many GOP representatives determined to take him down.
While you can make a name for yourself by being the guy who always starts trouble, that will only lead you down a path on which you are going to make a lot more enemies than friends. Polarizing figures often make a lot of enemies, and you simply cannot do that when you are running for the presidency of America. After all, it is the United States of America, not the Divided States of America.
Yet, this brings me to the other side of the issue, where the opponents of Trump in the GOP are acting like spiteful children. After Cruz won the Colorado convention, the Twitter account for the state party tweeted, “We did it. #NeverTrump.” Colorado GOP chairman Steve House claimed that the tweet was a product of an online hacker, though House did state that the tweet was deleted by the official party.
It is funny to me that a hacker could manage to get into an account and only send out one brief message before being quickly deleted with no further shenanigans. It is also funny that a hacker just happened to send that tweet after Trump lost, when the Twitter account had no known previous instances of being hacked. The funniest part of this is the claim that the party would be investigating how this tweet got out. I can only imagine the effort that will actually be put into that.
The release of the tweet and the lame excuse offered by the party showcases what this whole presidential campaign has been for the GOP party. It has been nothing but petty squabbling among grown men who are supposed to be promoting wholesome values and searching for intelligent ways to solve our nation’s problems.
This has been common with presidential campaigns over the years on both sides of the political spectrum, but this year has seen it get to the point where you actually feel like you are watching a bunch of 5-year-olds fighting to be the ruler of the sandbox on the playground.
The presidential campaign is not about stopping one candidate from winning out of spite. It is about electing who the people honestly feel should be the right leader of the free world, yet that outcome is likely not to happen given the immaturity on display throughout this presidential campaign.
