The Patriot Post® · Trump Seals His Biggest Deal

Twelve-hundred and thirty-seven. That’s the number of delegates a Republican presidential candidate must accrue to represent the party in November’s election. For a while the odds of seeing a contested convention in Cleveland looked not just distinctly possible but increasingly likely, particularly after Ted Cruz managed to topple Donald Trump in Wisconsin. But quicker than an email gets deleted from Hillary’s homebrew server, Trump swept five Northeast states on a single night, then cleaned up in crucial Indiana, and the Republican race was all but settled. Today, Trump went from being the presumptive candidate to the candidate after passing the 1,237 threshold. The Associated Press reports that “Trump was put over the top in the AP delegate count by a small number of the party’s unbound delegates who told the AP they would support him at the national convention in July.”

So what now? Regardless of the results on November 8, this week marks a formal turning point for the Republican Party, including likely changes to its platform. As we noted, “ Come July, the Republican Party will do more than officially name its presidential nominee; the party will also formalize its 2016 platform. … The issue here isn’t that the Republican nominee must adhere to the party platform point by point. But, for better or worse, the nominee is the standard-bearer of a platform meant to unite the party. And right now, the party is anything but united. A wide chasm separates the Trump and #NeverTrump factions — almost as wide as the chasm between Trump and the current platform.” So while Trump represents the party, the all-important question remains: What will the party become?

Perhaps an even more interesting question is who Trump’s opposition will be on election day. Earlier this week the State Department’s Office of Inspector General published what amounts to a smackdown of Hillary Clinton regarding her nefarious email practices as secretary of state. An indictment is long overdue, but if the perennially corrupt politician is finally held to account, it raises the prospect of a Biden-Warren ticket. The Trump freight train may have arrived at the GOP station, but we can expect a few more surprises before voters hit the polls in November.