Presidential Elections: An Update

Jayel Taylor, Guest Columnist

Last week, game changing news was released with regards to the Republican Party. Both Cruz and Kasich suspended their campaigns, which leaves Trump as the only active GOP candidate, and effectively giving him the nomination, and causing a variety of reactions around the political world.

The first of these reactions comes from Chris Christie, who was previously a Presidential candidate. About 2 and a half months ago, he predicted that Trump would get the nomination, stating that he is most likely the GOP’s best chance at beating out Hillary Clinton for the presidency. Trump has also named Christie as the head of his transition team, feeling confident that Christie has the skills and resources needed to help him get into office and set up while there. Christie also has ties to some of the more pertinent Republicans that are reluctant to support Trump in his run.

Speaking of Republicans refusing Trump any support, Speaker Paul Ryan has also done the same, but on national television, saying that he just isn’t ready to support Trump currently, but hopes that he will be able to in the future. This is shocking since Ryan is supposed to be the leader of the GOP, and as such should be supporting the party’s nomination. Questions surrounding this have lead to inquiry upon whether or not Ryan should be chairing the convention, to which Ryan said that he will oblige to Trump’s requests with respect to the convention due to his status as the presumptive nominees.

Ryan’s statements have proven that the Republican Party is in fact divided over the idea of Trump being the nomination, and he has said this publicly. He feels that the party needs to properly address this before going into Fall 2016 as a splintered party, and as such running the risk of losing the presidency. Sarah Palin pitched in, saying that Ryan’s career is evidently coming to an end as he is openly opposing the party stance, which is dividing the party into two. Many Republicans who share Ryan’s reservations have been using him as a way to show that the party isn’t united behind their candidate as they should be.

This divisive force in the Republican Party is starting to make Clinton’s run for President a bit easier. Convinced that she is going to get the Democratic nomination, her focus has turned to working on bringing in the splintered Republicans in hope of stealing away a decent amount of voters from Trump. Of course, these efforts did not occur slander-free, as Clinton did resort to attacking Trump using the excessively offensive statements and actions that he has said and performed over the course of the campaign.

Overall, I think this election is sizing up to be a very entertaining and majorly disappointing election. On the one hand, the predicted candidates going into the general election are shown to be a joke and will definitely spend the majority of their time slinging mud back and forth rather than addressing the people’s political concerns. On the opposite hand, them slinging mud at one another helps the voter population none when it comes to determining who should get into office, and will thus lead to a possibly misled and unintelligible voting process.