Trump Missed the Memo

Donald Trump rages against the “rigged,” “crooked” and “corrupt” system. Valerie Richardson in the Washington Times points out that his poor performance is also a product of his lack of political competence.

Richardson reports:

If Mr. Trump fails to accrue the needed majority of 1,237 delegates before the Republican National Convention, he can chalk it up to those sorts of lapses, said Denver-based political analyst Floyd Ciruli.

“Trump’s problem is that I think he believed his pure popularity and celebrity would translate into delegates, and it doesn’t,” said Mr. Ciruli. “It has been evident for weeks that Trump simply did not understand the process. He never had anybody here until quite late, whereas Cruz figured this out last year and was obviously on the ground and ready to go.”

In August, however, the Colorado GOP decided not to hold a caucus preference poll after the 2012 shenanigans of presidential candidate Ron Paul supporters. Mr. Paul wound up with 25 percent of the convention delegates even though he captured less than 12 percent of the poll vote.

That may have been a mistake, according to Mr. Ciruli.

“The Republicans here made themselves vulnerable to this charge by not having any kind of a preference vote. Caucuses are hard enough to understand to start with,” he said.

“By not having a preference poll, that led exactly to the charge we have today, which is that the process was manipulated and that it’s all insiders,” he said. “[But] the rules were known, and Trump could have at least gotten into the game. He sort of missed the whole memo.”