In his book TAKEOVER and for many years before that CHQ Chairman Richard Viguerie has been telling audiences of conservatives, journalists and anyone else that would listen that the first and most important impediment to governing America according to conservative principles is not the liberals and Democrats – it is the Republican establishment and their principle-free desire to hold onto power and public office.

Ted Cruz is the first national figure since Ronald Reagan to seriously challenge the Republican establishment’s hold on power, and his promise to “break the Washington Cartel” is received loud and clear where it matters most – in the inner councils of the lobbyists, corporate donors and self-appointed powerbrokers who hold outsized influence over the Republican Party’s Capitol Hill leaders.

While they fear Ted Cruz and see him as an existential threat to DC’s business as usual, the assumption among the insiders of the Washington Cartel is that they can make a deal with Donald Trump.

And that’s a reasonable assumption to make about a candidate who wrote a bestselling book titled “The Art of the Deal.”

“You can coach Donald. If he got nominated he’d be scared to death,” longtime GOP insider Charlie Black explained to The New York Times. “That’s the point he would call people in the party and say, ‘I just want to talk to you.’ ”

“We can live with Trump,” one Republican lobbyist told The New York Times. “Do they all love Trump? No. But there’s a feeling that he is not going to layer over the party or install his own person. Whereas Cruz will have his own people there.”

What’s more, just as Donald Trump often appears unfamiliar with the Bible and the principles of Biblical living, so he often appears to be unfamiliar, even contemptuous of Constitutional principles and the idea that the Constitution is the law that governs government.

Indeed, many of Trump’s big applause lines such as, "We're going to get Apple to build their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries," could only be accomplished by extra-constitutional means, such as coercive taxes and regulations that no president could properly accomplish on his own authority.

And that’s the key to why nominating and electing Ted Cruz is so vital to the future of this great Republic: Donald Trump is singular—he does not stand for a set of constitutional conservative principles – he stands for nothing but himself and his own idiosyncratic ideas.

Ted Cruz, however, represents the conservative movement within the GOP, and if he wins, he brings a new class of conservative activists to Washington, who would displace the present feckless Republican establishment. And this is what the Republican establishment fears more than anything; when Ted Cruz wins he brings more than a new Republican administration to power – he brings us – the limited government constitutional conservative movement to power.

And that anonymous “Republican” lobbyist is right. Ted Cruz is an existential threat to the establishment because Cruz isn’t interested in deals or outreach to the other side. Instead, he believes he can win, and govern, by engaging in and winning a great conservative crusade for the soul of the Republican Party and America.