There was nothing left to do but laugh.

Somewhere around nine o'clock ET Tuesday night, in the state of Illinois, Land of Lincoln, the voters in the presidential primary of the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln, gave their overwhelming support to a vulgar talking yam. No talk of mystic chords of memory. No appeals to the better angels of our nature. With malice toward practically everyone who is not like him or like them.

There's nothing like it—lies, deceit, viciousness, disgusting reporters.

I love the smell of bloodlust in the morning. It smells like…victory. Good thing there's another candidate in the race, a man of cool reason and measured judgment. Short of a rules bloodbath at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this coming summer, there's only one man with any chance at all of stopping He, Trump from completing the hostile takeover, and this is what he said last night.

Donald Trump says he will keep in place this Iranian nuclear deal and try to renegotiate it. I will rip to shreds this Iranian nuclear deal on the very first day in office. Over seven years, President Obama has weakened and undermined the military. We've seen this before with another weak Democrat president, Jimmy Carter, who did the same thing. And in January 1981, Ronald Reagan came into office. What did Reagan do? He cut taxes, he lifted regulations, he pulled government off the backs of the necks of small businesses. We saw millions of high paying jobs and it created trillions of government revenue, and he used that money to rebuild the military to bankrupt the Soviet Union and end the Cold War. We are going to repeal Obamacare, pass a flat tax, and stop amnesty. And we will see trillions of government revenue, and we will use that revenue to rebuild this military so it remains the mightiest fighting force on the face of the planet.

I will pursue a flat tax, abolish the IRS, and use the flood of new revenue that inevitably will ensue from massive tax cuts to buy a shitload of new aircraft carriers and I am in no way insane. Pick your preferred mythology, America. Choose between the garish vaudeville present and a past that never was. Reality has taken a holiday.

Let us be honest: He, Trump is winning fair and square.

Undoubtedly, he's been aided by a feckless (and largely imaginary) Republican establishment that never saw him coming and had no idea what to do with him once he showed up. He is playing by their rules. There is no indication that he's playing monkey mischief at the polls. More people are voting for him than are voting for any other Republican. Period. There is going to be no Stop Trump movement organized over coffee and scones in D.C. at the Willard Hotel. Somebody's going to have to beat him out in the country, and they're running out of time to do that.

It's time to stop treating him like a phenomenon. He is a creature of the forces that created the modern Republican establishment, which arranged the party's centers of power in such a fashion that, sooner or later, a demagogue like He, Trump was going to emerge to hijack the party. Every time George H.W. Bush listened to Lee Atwater, and every time his son listened to Karl Rove, they helped hasten the day when He, Trump would force the party to reckon with the choices it had made. Every time they finagled the vote, in Florida in 2000 or in Ohio four years later, they hastened the day when there would be no coherent institutional moral force to bring to bear against a candidate whose entire platform is that He is Trump, you're not, and neither are these other losers, and also winning! Every time they ginned up fear and hatred for the purposes of winning elections, and then turned it off once the voting was over, they hastened the day when the relief valves would break down entirely and the people would find someone who promised to carry their fear and their hatred into office with him and convert them into public policy. It's a little late now for regrets, I'm thinking.

As for the other party, it looks like Hillary Rodham Clinton has righted the ship in a very big way. Barring unforeseen circumstances, she's going to be the Democratic nominee, but the challenge that Bernie Sanders has brought to her needs to continue. The longer he stays in the race, the more firmly he can attach her to the issues that energized his campaign as well as hers. The longer he stays in the race, the less she can afford to listen to people telling her to pivot toward the middle. The longer he stays in the race, the more she can immunize herself against the inevitable attacks that will come from He, Trump on issues like international trade. (William Greider of The Nation cautions that he will attack her from both the left and the right, and that she has shown some vulnerability in both directions. There is no audience for Beltway-satisfying centrism this time around. There are not enough votes in it.) So I hope Sanders rides the campaign at least as far as Wisconsin on April 5. If he can stay in it the whole way, he can influence the party more than anyone has since Bill Clinton wrenched it toward Rockefeller Republicanism—his words, not mine—in the early 1990s.

The forces that would allow Sanders to do that were vividly in evidence in a couple of local races last night. In Cleveland, Timothy McGinty, the prosecutor who moved heaven and earth to keep from indicting the cops who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice to death, was beaten soundly in a Democratic primary. And in Chicago, the same thing happened to Anita Alvarez, the Cook County state's attorney who bungled the investigation into the shooting death of Laquan McDonald at the hands of the Chicago P.D. Alvarez was defeated by Kim Foxx, who grew up in the now-demolished Cabrini-Green housing projects, and who made a meal of Alvarez's performance in the McDonald matter during the campaign. Black Lives Mattered at the polls in Cleveland and Chicago yesterday, and HRC, who has made a point of campaigning with the mothers of African-Americans who have died at the hands of police, or at the hands of vigilante bloodworms like George Zimmerman, seems to know it. I think things might have been quite different had she been running against someone else.

And, very soon, she will be. If this campaign has toughened up her operation, that has to be all to the good, too, because I can't begin to imagine what the general election is going to be like. Let us strive on to finish the work we have started, to rake raw the nation's wounds and Make America Great Again!

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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