Trumper Tuesday

Washington

THEY threw everything but the kitchen sink on The Donald before the fateful Super Tuesday presidential primaries, suggesting that Mr Trump was buddy-buddy with the Ku Klux Klan, that he had ties to the Mob, that he was a con man, that he wets his pants and that he had, well, short hands, which clearly disqualified him from becoming the next US president.

Mobilising behind Senator Marco Rubio from Florida, the Republicans' Last Great White Hope in their campaign to stop the New York real estate magnate as the runaway leader for the presidential nomination, the GOP's political grandees and the Big Donors poured everything that they had in their arsenal - money, organisation, media - on the eve of the day when the primaries and caucuses in close to a dozen states were expected to determine who would run against the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in November. In short, the Republican leaders were hoping that the 44-year-old Cuban American from Florida would thwart what they considered to be a hostile takeover of the GOP by a political outsider from Manhattan.