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The Steep Price of a Trump Presidency

Ruth Marcus on

WASHINGTON -- I write today to confess error.

A few months back, pondering the ghastly parlor game of choosing between President Donald Trump and President Ted Cruz, I opted -- reluctantly, disbelievingly -- for Trump, as the lesser of two dangers.

Yes, the real estate tycoon is a know-nothing, uninterested-in-learning-anything buffoon. Also: a demagogue and a bully whose emotional instability would pose a threat to national security.

But the Cruz alternative, it seemed to me then, was even worse. Cruz is smarter than Trump, more calculating than Trump (which is saying something) and way, way more conservative than Trump.

A Trump presidency, or so I reassured myself, at least offered the prospect of unprincipled deal-making in the service of what is Trump's only guidepost -- promoting the greater glory of Trump. President Cruz would be as absolutist as Sen. Cruz, and therefore, from my point of view, the worse president.

I was wrong.

 

Since that column in mid-December, Trump has proved himself to be even less knowledgeable and even more unhinged. His election would constitute a grave threat to American values and, potentially, American democracy.

In January, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham likened picking between Trump and Cruz to "like being shot or poisoned. What does it really matter?"

Except Graham, like me, has come to the unexpected conclusion that it does. "We may be in a position where we have to rally around Ted Cruz as the only way to stop Donald Trump," Graham told CBS News' Charlie Rose as the Super Tuesday returns rolled in.

Was that what Graham was really suggesting, Rose asked the man who had joked, just a few days earlier, about how the safest place to murder Cruz would be on the Senate floor?

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