It's amazing how quickly everything can abruptly change in this goofy and scary election cycle on the Republican side. Until -- almost literally -- yesterday, the strategy had been to defeat Trump by pointing out his weaknesses and simply beating him at the polls, and finally after Tuesday's primaries by uniting the party (consolidating) around either Cruz or Rubio. Now, just a day later, the plan has changed again. Nobody should drop out. Instead, feed money and support to every remaining candidate, which could be any of Cruz, Rubio or Kasich, in hopes of diluting his vote totals among the rest of them.
You can do that without the other candidate's willing cooperation by putting the money into super-PACs and managing the process independently. But even though the other three don't have to help this effort, why wouldn't they? If that works, Trump won't reach the necessary number of delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot at the convention, and neither would any of the others. The delegates would then be free to vote for anyone they like on any ballots that follow.
That would leave the others, and any other draftable alternative, campaigning to be the "other guy", not the guy at the convention with the most votes. I think that raises Kasich's chances to get the nomination to be as good as the other two, but would allow Paul Ryan to leapfrog them all, too.
But, that's today's plan. Here are two more ways to play it out, where the second is the nuclear option.
1. Spend the necessary money to find out what Trump has buried in his past that would force him to drop out of the race if it were exposed. Then blackmail him with the threat to reveal it or destroy the evidence if he withdraws. He says he would date his daughter if he could. Did he? He hires illegal workers and has been sued for their mistreatment. Has he done worse than that? What other kinds of things may lurk?
2. If Trump does have enough delegates to win on the first ballot by the time of the convention, I think the Party might be willing to take even more extreme steps, like changing the rules so that some delegates, perhaps from a few states with the weakest delegate binding rules, are freed to set aside their commitment on the first ballot.
Trump doesn't have this locked up yet, and the Party seems determined to stop him at any cost. How far are they willing to go?