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Trump The Sore Loser/ Cruz The Tactician
If whining won you delegates, Donald Trump would be cruising into the June Republican National Convention as a clear victor.
Take one glance at Donald Trump’s petulant Twitter feed, or the Drudge Report’s sensationalized banner — “Cruz Celebrates Voterless Victory” — or the angry headlines from a slew of ignorant blog posts that carry Trump's water, and one would be convinced that some elaborate scheme by “The Establishment” robbed the Donald of Colorado’s delegates and handed them undemocratically over to Ted Cruz.
Reality check.
In fact, this is just one of many that have hit Donald Trump and his shrinking base of supporters right between the eyes ever since the Republican field narrowed down to two actual candidates.
You haven't been robbed, you've been outsmarted.
Your supporters weren't disenfranchised, your campaign was out strategized.
For someone who claims to have invented the ‘Art of the Deal', Trump has proven less than savvy about the reality of doing his homework and knowing how to win delegates.
For someone that claims to be for the people, he has been incompetent at organizing the grassroots in his favor.
And you know who has been awesome at the grassroots? The guy Trump is fuming he keeps losing to as of late, TED CRUZ.
Here's the nitty gritty for adults who want to listen, so now you can educate your Trump supporting friends who are prone to speak before knowing all the facts.
TRUMP CLAIM : “Colorado was rigged in favor of Cruz”.
Iraq War veteran George Athanasopoulos begs to differ, by the way he's also the Republican nominee for Colorado’s seventh congressional district encompassing much of the northern and western parts of the Denver metro area.
Not to mention that George was elected as an unbound Colorado delegate to this summer’s Republican convention in Cleveland. And he has been upfront and forward in saying he backs Ted Cruz, and this is what he's had to say about his favorite candidate's game plan:
“We started organizing on the grassroots level last summer,” Athanasopoulos says. “You don’t show up a week before the state assembly and expect to win.”
Take note Donald and Donald's faithful, you plan ahead, politics is a precise calculation, while Trump has done vaudeville Cruz has prepared for the Moon landing.
You see, while Cruz had his conservative activists organizing in Colorado for months, Trump’s campaign never got off the ground.
And the results are telling: Of the 21 delegates elected at Colorado’s seven congressional-district-level assemblies over the last two weeks, all 21 appeared on pro-Cruz slates (17 are formally bound to vote for Cruz at the national convention, while the remaining four — though officially “unbound” and under no formal obligation — have promised to back the Texas senator). And at Sunday’s state convention, where 13 delegates were at stake, Cruz won ALL 13 delegates.
In fact, it gets worse for his hairness, because overall Colorado had 34 delegates up for grabs and Donald J. Trump, the self-proclaimed organizational mastermind and unbeatable business dynamo, won precisely zero.
It was a complete and utter defeat, geese would've been hard pressed to lay goose eggs like the Trump campaign managed to lay in Colorado. The Trump campaign was so laughably unprepared that all it could do was place seven loyalists on the alternate-delegate list.
Trump disagrees, his campaign claims that the Republican political powers gave marching orders that thrust Cruz onto the voters by some gerrymandering voodoo that defies democracy.
Is Trump presenting any truth in his twitter rants? Not in the educated viewpoint of George Athanasopoulos: “The grassroots made the decision that Ted Cruz was the best candidate for us, and the grassroots made the decision to come out for Cruz and absolutely swept the table,” he says. “We chose Cruz and that was a conscious decision by us, and that was why he swept Colorado.”
Colorado Republicans have been holding nonbinding straw polls at their precinct caucuses since 2004, that decision wasn’t an attempt to lock out Trump. In fact, the reasoning behind that decision was pretty much the opposite: Simply put, the grassroots didn’t want to be railroaded into selecting the establishment’s nominee.
The hope was in George Athanasopoulos' view to “combat the manipulation of the rules that at the time were structured to favor a presumptive front-runner — who everyone last summer thought would be someone like Jeb Bush.”
And so the final decision was made in August 2015 after the Colorado Republican party’s executive committee unanimously voted to enact the chosen plan.
Not only that, but conservative grassroots activists didn’t keep the new rules some kind of guarded secret either. From day one the details of Colorado’s caucus system were displayed out in the open for all sensible campaigns to pay attention to and see for themselves.
Which is to say in no uncertain terms that Cruz’s grassroots supporters didn’t disenfranchise Trump’s supporters.
Cruz's grass-roots supporters were organizing almost a year ago, showed up for the March 1 precinct caucuses, and made their voice heard loud and proud by electing like-minded delegates to the state and congressional-district conventions. Trump’s people, on the other hand, weren’t heard..because Trump’s people by and large didn’t show up, and for that Donald has no one to blame but himself.
Democracy isn't always pretty, but for Trump to say that anything was stolen from him while keeping a straight face is even more ridiculous than his choice of hairstyle. Because at the end of the day it was the lack of preparation that killed Trump in Colorado…and if Trump wants a job who's unofficial motto is that “the buck stops here,” he had better get used to taking accountability for himself.