Cruz and Kasich’s Sorry Plan to Stop Trump

“It is sad,” Donald Trump said in a statement Sunday night, “that two grown politicians have to collude against one person who has only been a politician for ten months in order to try and stop that person from getting the Republican nomination.” It’s telling that Trump referred to Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich, who had made him sad by forming a tactical stop-Trump pact, as “grown politicians,” rather than “grownups”—no one is pretending that there are any of those left on the Republican side of the race—and to himself as a political toddler. He is always on the verge of a tantrum, and they, by announcing on Sunday that they would not compete with each other in three upcoming primary states, are desperately and belatedly trying to patch something together that is already badly broken. But the key word in the statement, which Trump repeated on Twitter and elsewhere, was “collusion”: it was his way of saying that Cruz and Kasich were not only pathetic but cheaters.