Clinton Has a Few Days to Savor Her Historic Victory

The following is a sampling of the Washington Post’s June 8 front page headlines.

Under the Campaign 2016 category: “Clinton celebrates victory” with a subhead of “On second try, faith in her plan and a determination not to repeat mistakes.” Sidebars: “A Win in N.J. and a Pivot to Trump” and “Race Against Sanders in California is tight.”  Pictures: A jubilant Hillary Clinton before a crowd at a history-making moment.  A grumpy Bernie Sanders.

Below the fold: “Trump: Judge remarks ‘misconstrued.’ Subhead: “As GOP criticism grows, statement says he’ll stop talking about the jurist.”  Picture: another in hundreds, maybe thousands, showing Trump, mouth wide open, fingers tightly together. Behind him, a somewhat glum family Trump, the wife, a son, the daughter.

We could stop right here, but not to worry.  You just can’t.

But to sum up: the long Democratic and GOP primary battles for the presidential nominations are over.   The battles for the presidency have already begun.  Or, as one might also construe, the more things change, the more things stay the same.

Clinton is now officially the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee — a result just about every so-called campaign strategist, pollster and media type predicted more than a year ago.  She has been somewhat bruised by a surprisingly strong and nagging challenge by Vermont’s Independent-turned-Democrat, Sen. Bernie Sanders, by an e-mail account scandal that still hangs over her head, pending the results of an FBI investigation, and by a general disinclination on even the part of her followers to become truly smitten.  They love her, but they’re not IN love with her.

Still, sparks of passion are now being felt in Democrat land and the Clinton household, after denying Sanders any solace with the next-to-last primary of the season (we do have a primary in Washington, D.C., along with local council  primaries next Tuesday), by winning not only New Jersey, Chris Christie’s home state, but also in a cleanly and closely held battle, California.  She did it by getting a majority of the delegates won in elections, and with super delegates, the bane of Sanders’s political life.

She did it by making a stirring and strong assessment of why Donald Trump should not ever become president of the United States in no uncertain terms.

She did it, and the moment was sweet, just as the four-years-ago moment when she admitted defeat in an equally long struggle against Barack Obama was bittersweet.

Now, she could talk about the cracks coming down in the ceiling against women. Now, she could talk about what she had achieved not just for herself but women — and, therefore, for the country.

Now, also, it may be time for Bernie Sanders to call it a day, for Hillary to reach out, and for the two to work together and make sure that Trump never gets to say “I, Donald Trump, do solemnly swear . . .” for real, as opposed to practicing it in the mirror.

It was a triumph for women by a woman, and, of course, women are the constituents and voters with whom Donald Trump has a lot of trouble. Trump, who was campaigning in California even though no one was left to run against him, celebrated also. He is the presumptive GOP nominee for President of the United States, a result that no one had seen coming a year ago, and for quite some time afterwards. It seems that only weeks ago the last man wobbling — that would be Ted Cruz, or Lying Ted, as he had been called by Trump in the last weeks of the campaign — called it a campaign.

Unlike Clinton — and her followers and her staff — who seems to have found her political and personal mojo in the course of the last week or so, Trump, in victory started floundering, which is to say his staff was letting Trump be Trump, not necessarily a good thing and always something of a runaway carnival ride.

After getting House Speaker Paul Ryan to support him, he almost got him to throw that support away when Trump ferociously, and in unseemly and incongruously self-destructive fashion, attacked a Latino federal judge involved in a law suit against Trump’s now defunct university. He insisted and insisted that he could not be treated fairly by U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, because the judge was “Mexican,” and therefore biased,  even though he was in fact born in Indiana. He carried the attack day after day, calling the judge biased because he, Trump, was building a wall.  A high number of the Republican leadership told him to cease and desist, and Ryan said the attacks were the definition of racism. Even Newt Gingrich, who is said to be coveting the vice presidential nomination, called the judge attack Trump’s biggest mistake of the campaign.

Trump yesterday responded by saying that would stop talking about the judge and that his words had been misconstrued.  He said he would not apologize.  No one, however, said, thank God that’s over,  because as long as there are microphones, as long as Twitter and Instagram operate 24/7, there will be something — the judge for sure — coming from Trump land that will astound, shock, amaze, frighten, disturb and, yes, disgust swaths of humanity and large clumps of voters.  Judge-gate was not the only controversy that  erupted from the Trump political theme park. There was violence at his rallies. There was “look at my African American over there.” There was an ugly fight with the media over fairness on their reporting on the charities for veterans. There was the tone of his already ongoing attacks on Clinton: his nickname for her is “crooked Hillary.” He says she should be in jail. 

Trump has promised a major speech next week on his take on Clinton’s foreign policy, which was a reasoned, detailed  analysis of the workings of the Hillary Clinton view of the world and its problems. Or not.  His “victory” announcement Tuesday included several pronouncements that resembled full-length sentences, which is, of course, a huge development.

The temptation is to laugh at Trump when he stumbles — and at the same time be deeply worried about what might come out of his mouth.

The race for the presidency will be over in five months.  Meanwhile, there are conventions to come, debates to be had and the ever watchful House Republicans trying very hard to find something in Benghazi. They will not try at all to do what they’re supposed to do, which is to consider the president’s nomination for an empty Supreme Court seat.   We will, it appears, have to wait for a Trump victory for that to happen.