Krauthammer’s Take: With an Iowa Win and an Establishment Endorsement, Trump Becomes ‘Inevitable’

If Donald Trump handily wins Iowa, he’ll likely receive an endorsement from at least one Republican governor, and those two events could set him on a course to become the “inevitable” Republican nominee, Charles Krauthammer said tonight.

“If Cruz loses Iowa, Trump wins convincingly, I think all he will need at that point is to have a single current establishment figure, meaning a sitting governor or a sitting senator endorse him,” Krauthammer said on Thursday’s Special Report. “If you get somebody today from the so-called establishment, who endorses him, I think it becomes a flood. At that point the dam breaks and you will get a rush of other establishment figures who will rally around him.”

“And that could be the point at which he becomes inevitable as the nominee,” he added.

Asked why no sitting senators have endorsed Cruz, Krauthammer said:  

I think the short answer is because everybody who knows him in the Senate, hates him. And I think hate is not, is not an exaggeration. The enmity which he wears on his sleeve as, with pride, is something that he’s now, you could almost say cultivated. To make him a freshman senator with no particular record into a national figure rallying everybody against the Washington cartel, you know Republicans in the Senate, in the House have been out there half of their lives, don’t appreciate being called essentially traitors to the cause of conservatism. And then you get antipathy and they will put that antipathy perhaps even over what’s best for the party.