On Sunday night, the campaigns for Ohio Governor John Kasich and Texas Senator Ted Cruz released simultaneous statements declaring an alliance of sorts aimed at taking on the runaway frontrunner, Donald Trump.

Jeff Roe from the Cruz campaign released the following statement details exactly how the arrangement would work:

To ensure that we nominate a Republican who can unify the Republican Party and win in November, our campaign will focus its time and resources in Indiana and in turn clear the path for Gov. Kasich to compete in Oregon and New Mexico, and we would hope that allies of both campaigns would follow our lead.

The divide-and-conquer policy would allow for Cruz to focus his campaign infrastructure in Indiana while Kasich tackles Oregon and New Mexico. “We will shift our campaign resources West,” clarified the Kasich camp is its statements.

It was already a bizarre allegiance of sorts, considering the explicit flaw in the plan: neither Cruz nor Kasich can outright ask his own voters in certain states not to vote for their candidate of choice. When pressed on this issue, Kasich fumbled the ball in disastrous fashion; he tried to defend the arrangement by confusedly saying, “I have laid out a strategy and I have not told anybody to not vote for me, I’m just not [in Indiana] campaigning.” Alice Stewart from the Cruz camp gave the same bizarre runaround to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer this week.

And now, enter a third candidate with no hope of derailing the Trump Train: Carly Fiorina, who was named as Cruz’s VP choice in the event he miraculously wins the GOP nom. Either Fiorina isn’t quite caught up on how the Cruz campaign has been playing politics as of late — or the whole Oregon/New Mexico/Indiana debacle is already deemed a likely failure — because Fiorina relayed to MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson a strange message about her campaign’s unlikely bedfellow from Ohio.

Jackson asked, “How are two people who have not been able to beat Donald Trump yet better than one person how hasn’t been able to beat Donald Trump?”

After some jockeying about the states where Cruz has been victorious, Fiorina pivoted and took aim at Kasich. “I actually think the person you should be asking this question to is John Kasich. He didn’t get the memo. When you can’t win, you need to get out.”

You need to get out? This is about the same man who just days ago was the Cruz campaign’s best method of forcing a contested convention in Cleveland, and in the amount of time that it took to print up 1,500 “Cruz/Carly” campaign posters, Kasich has gone from indispensable to Hit the road, Jack?

There has been no formal announcement from either the Cruz or Kasich camps that Sunday’s plans have been removed from consideration heading into the next batch of primaries. In her report, Jackson noted that a Cruz source indicated that the maneuver was more about “manipulat[ing] the narrative,” ahead of their blow-out losses on Tuesday.

So many questions here. So what happens this Tuesday in Indiana? Does Kasich stick with the original plan of largely abandoning campaign efforts to focus out West? And what happens after Tuesday (when Trump is expected to win again) as the attention shifts to Oregon and New Mexico? Do Cruz/Fiorina instead move to California (where Fiorina is batting 0.00 lifetime in political elections) and leave those other two states to Kasich? How hard is Donald Trump laughing right now?

Fiorina’s interview with MSNBC proves that not even anyone associated with the process has any idea what’s going on, but they’re willing to quadruple down on the assertion that they can still beat Trump. Boy, are we in for a great few weeks.

—

J.D. Durkin (@jiveDurkey) is a columnist at Mediaite

[image via screengrab]

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.