From Conrad Black writing at the New York Sun:
Denying Mr. Trump the nomination will be very difficult, but he should have started on Tuesday night the process of conciliating kindred spirits in his party and independent voters who like his Archie Bunker attacks on Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton, and the mealy-mouthed Republicans who weaseled on immigration and other hot subjects. He was brief and graciously praised the other Republican candidates as a group, but there were too many “huges” and “greats” and no specifics about how he was going to make America “great” again except building the wall on the Mexican border, tearing up trade pacts, and “knocking the hell” out of ISIS.
If his opponents in the Republican party want any chance of stopping him, they will have to coalesce around one of the alternatives right after South Carolina, and that candidate will be an underdog. Mr. Trump should win the nomination, and Mr. Clinton should limp to a listless and clichéd victory at the head of her fatigued party. Mr. Trump still faces a high but porous wall of anyone-but-Trump sentiment, slightly more numerous than the anyone-but-Clinton bloc. He should move soon to dissolve this antagonism by speaking more seriously and precisely, and in finished sentences, and showing that he is, in all but his presentational flamboyance, a moderate.
Shame on the New York Daily News for referring to his followers as “the brain dead” and on the Huffington Post for its scurrilous attack on him as “a racist, sexist demagogue.” He is none of that and his followers are too numerous and righteously angry at those who have failed the nation to be so disparaged, especially by such lowbrow outlets. Now is Donald Trump’s chance to defeat and humiliate that sentiment by behaving with exemplary dignity, modesty, and precision, as he has waxed the floor with the elders of the Republican party and stolen much of the old Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy coalition among working and middle-class Democrats.
With only a light clean-up of his forensic techniques, Donald can ease the concerns of the reluctant without forfeiting any of the exaltation of soul of those who are grateful for his assault on politicians and institutions who have failed and disserved the United States. It looks like Mr. Trump and Mr. Clinton, and Mr. Trump should win. Whatever else may be said of him, he has had no hand in the savage violence the political class has done to America with debt, wars, the Great Recession, corruption, and the pell-mell appeasement of America’s enemies of the last 20 years.
Hillary is not blameless and has fish-tailed through the last two decades facing in all four directions on many issues. Mr. Trump has a mighty and unsuspected tidal wave of opinion behind him; he has only to make the turn from bombast and braggadocio to a simple program of reform of immigration, entitlements, taxes, health care, and campaign financing, all of which he has promised. The people will support it and he will get it adopted before the summer recess of 2017.
As with FDR’s promise of a New Deal in 1932, the great Reagan campaign of 1980 proclaimed: “The time is now for strong leadership.” It was and it is, in more suave and purposeful vocabulary and cadences than we have heard so far. The revolution is Mr. Trump’s, not Mr. Sanders’s, the more welcome because of the hostility to him of both the mainstream national press and the Murdoch organization, with its absurd promotion of an independent campaign by Michael Bloomberg.
Donald Trump is very close to one of the most astonishing political victories in American history. Never has that office sought such a man, and in a democracy, the people are always right.
Read the rest of the story at the New York Sun.