Trump’s Candidacy Is in Motion, but His Campaign Is a Work in Progress
The world’s eyes have been on Donald Trump. Not just in America, but in Europe, for example. On Monday, Donald Trump defeated Ted Cruz, becoming the first major-party presidential candidate since 1976 to defeat his political party’s front-runner. Since then, the race has gone off the rails. Trump took the unexpected step of announcing that he would not seek a third primary, saying that he wouldn’t “waste” his time by being seen as the “establishment” candidate, and instead, decided to run a candidate who was more in line with the way people really want to see the country run. “I’m building a movement that will change America,” he said on Monday.
In order to understand how Trump thinks he’s going to shake up the race and change the way people think in the next few months, it’s worth looking back at the way he got to where he is today. Trump ran for the Republican presidential nomination in June 2015, after the party’s convention had ended and the general election was about to begin. He ran in a field that was so crowded he could probably be considered the front-runner at this point, if not the front-runner. At the time, it was thought that he was going to defeat John Kasich, who had been the party’s most recent nominee and was known as a fiscal conservative. (In order to win a general election, you have to win two or more primaries.) At the time, Ted Cruz was thought to be the front-runner, too, with his long history of supporting the same types of policies as Trump.
Trump, however, had the advantage of not having to make a decision right then. Donald Trump’s main criticism of his campaign is that he didn’t do enough to build his base in the general election. He said he wasn’t ready to go to New Hampshire and Iowa before the primaries in early January, and he said he wasn’t going to do enough to do his part (like, say, win Iowa’s caucuses) to gain traction before the Republican National Convention on July 18 in Cleveland, Ohio. (The campaign believed that this was a disadvantage for Trump, but he was confident that he was going to win over voters who would not