Nothing it seems now stands between Donald Trump and the Republican Party's nomination to contest the White House in November. He dominated "Super Tuesday" winning Republican voters' endorsement in seven of the 11 states involved. His only real challenger, Texas Senator Ted Cruz won three states, including Texas, while Florida Senator Marco Rubio managed to win a single state, his first of the race. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton's wins over Bernie Sanders were no less emphatic. Leaving aside remarkable upsets, the race for the White House is already mapped out. It will be Clinton, the wily former Secretary of State with a cupboard full of political skeletons, versus Trump, the billionaire property developer who has not always had a squeaky-clean business past . But there has been a major difference between the two. Clinton, like her president husband before her, plays by the rules of the political establishment. She talks in sound bites tested by professional speechwriters. She rarely tackles a real problem head on. Instead, as politicians have now been long trained to do, she pulls out glittering side issues. She responds to questions by giving answers which have nothing to do with the original inquiry. She is busy being all things to all men and women. The principles she embraces with sonorous phrases are actually like tissues to be screwed up and thrown away if necessary. She is, in short, a professional politician, schooled in the art of dissimulation and half-truth whose only real motive is the desire for power. The Donald has until now been her complete antithesis. Shooting from the mouth, he has gloried in his lack of the correctness of politicians just as much as he has excoriated the lunacies of the mass of politically-correct fanatics, who while imagining themselves to be in the vanguard of liberalism are actually America's new fascists with social media as their killing ground. But on Tuesday night, as the extent of his triumph became clear, it was a startlingly different Donald Trump who took to the podium. Gone was the expected demagoguery, the gloating and fresh gratuitous insults. He even congratulated Cruz on his three wins. Yet only 24 hours before he had called him "a liar". Trump almost seemed to think that he had the Republican nomination in the bag and was looking ahead to the November fight with Clinton. This might explain his sudden softening of tone, his extraordinarily "political" presentation of himself at this moment of further victory. Or then again, he could have just been dog-tired after all the campaigning and felt he lacked the energy to launch into yet another of his mocking tirades. His army of supporters may well have been disappointed at the Donald's change of tone. They may suspect that from here on in he is out to woo the Republican Party establishment who view his candidacy with such horror. The core of his appeal so far has been that he condemned them so vigorously. Yet there is a precedent for a political wolf lying down with the sheep. After his inconclusive victory in the 1933 Reichstag elections, Hitler was prepared to go into a coalition government with politicians he had mocked. Trump's Islamophobia has played to Republican voters in his bid for power. But maybe there is justice in the analysis of one pundit who wrote: "Trump is a very clever man who knows what stupid people want".
