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World  

It's a Trump card

UPDATED: 11:20 p.m.

Barring a meteor, a miracle, or a massive, unprecedented plot twist, Donald Trump will become his party's candidate for president of the United States.

He was so dominant in the Indiana primary Tuesday that his chief rival exited the Republican race, leaving Trump the improbable king of a hill that once comprised 17 candidates.

A crowd gasped as Sen. Ted Cruz broke the news.

It was an audible echo of the lingering disdain for Trump among vast pockets of his own party, which failed over the course of a year to successfully coalesce around an alternative.

"It appears (my) path has been foreclosed," said the Calgary-born Cruz. "We left it all on the field in Indiana. We gave it everything we've got. But the voters chose another path.

"And so, with a heavy heart but with boundless optimism for the long-term future of our nation, we are suspending our campaign."

That leaves a scenario that would have been derided a year ago as science-fiction.

A perma-tanned billionaire, heretofore renowned for glitzy buildings, beauty pageants, bountiful bragging, and a reality-TV show, has transformed himself into a champion of the aggrieved everyman.

After a year of bomb-tossing epithets at his rivals, he's arrived near the gates of power with only two obstacles remaining on his path: that hypothetical miracle, and Hillary Clinton.

Trump swiftly swerved toward a general-election message. He complimented Cruz effusively — after having repeatedly called him a liar.

And he turned his sights on Clinton.

"We're going to win. We're going to win in November," Trump said.

"And we're going to win big."

He remains a general-election underdog.

Polls for a matchup against Clinton have mostly pointed to a Democratic rout on Nov. 8. But he's already signalled that he'll attempt to recalibrate, and tailor his message to a general-election audience. He's already started hammering Clinton over trade deals dating back to her husband's presidency — like NAFTA.

He can't be discounted.

Trump steadily grew his support since he entered the race last June. Meanwhile, Clinton's has eroded. She's faced a far-tougher-than-expected challenge from 74-year-old socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.

On the Democratic side, Sanders' campaign technically remains alive. On the Republican side, so does Ohio Gov. John Kasich's — although he appears mathematically eliminated.

Anti-Trump Republicans are already pointing fingers every which way.

Many have blamed the news media for allowing the outlandish showman so much airtime; some grumble that power-brokers were too slow to pick a stop-Trump strategy; some even blame President Barack Obama for the political mood.

A Wall Street Journal columnist this week blamed everybody — including the angry, white working-class voters he said were leading their party to electoral ruin.

On Fox News, a sombre-sounding commentator said history is unfolding.

"What are we just witnessing happening tonight is one of the major American parties changing its political ideology, radically," said Charles Krauthammer, a prominent Trump critic.

"It was ... for the last 50 years, going all the way back perhaps to Eisenhower, the conservative party in the country. As of tonight it's being led by a non-conservative populist."

The day of Trump's triumph was of a weirdness befitting the entire race.

The front-runner rolled enthusiastically in the mud of an outlandish conspiracy theory: that his rival's dad was somehow linked to John F. Kennedy's assassin.

That drew an understandably outraged response from the rival in question — who has already had his mud-flinging front-runner insinuate that his wife's ugly and now that his dad was pals with shooter Lee Harvey Oswald.

"This is nuts," an exasperated Cruz told reporters earlier in the day.

"Yes, my dad killed JFK. He is secretly Elvis. And Jimmy Hoffa's buried in his backyard. ... I'm going to tell you what I really think about Donald Trump: this man is a pathological liar. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He lies, practically every word that comes out of his mouth. ... He combines it with being a narcissist. A narcissist at a level I don't think this country's ever seen ...

"Donald Trump is such a narcissist that Barack Obama looks at him and goes, 'Dude, what's your problem'?"

The trigger for this outburst was Trump's habit of using the platform of a presidential campaign to elevate urban legends into national discussion topics.

He did it recently by recycling a made-up story about a general who supposedly executed Muslims with bullets dipped in pig's blood more than a century ago. He did it again Tuesday by referring to a supermarket-tabloid item about Cruz's father Rafael. It had originally appeared in the National Enquirer — owned by Trump's buddy, David Pecker.

The Miami Herald more recently ran a report questioning the tabloid story — so, naturally, a Trump spokesperson defended the candidate's decision to raise it by saying it had appeared in the Miami Herald.

The original tabloid story was headlined: "Ted Cruz's Father — Caught With JFK Assassin." It said the Cuban-born father was with Oswald a few months before the assassination, at a protest where the latter handed out pro-Castro-Cuba flyers.

Trump brought it up in a morning TV interview.

Hours later in his victory speech, he expressed surprise at how well the day had gone.

After Cruz dropped out, Trump said: "I didn't expect this."



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