After Wisconsin, Cruz Looks to Churchill and Trump Turns to Troy

Senator Ted Cruz had just won the Wisconsin primary decisively last night, with forty-eight per cent of the vote to Donald Trump’s thirty-five per cent and John Kasich’s fourteen per cent, and he was searching, in his victory speech, in Milwaukee, for the words that would convey the significance of the moment. He had already talked about how wrong the media had been (although his win had been widely predicted); thanked Governor Scott Walker for his “principled” work on his behalf (Walker’s experience in fighting off a recall vote helped); promised to abolish the I.R.S. (“a flat tax!”); and tallied the six delegates that he’d picked up in Colorado earlier in the week, and the two million dollars that his campaign had raised, he said, on Tuesday alone. Now it was time for a little history, and so, after a mention of J.F.K., Cruz drew his eyebrows together and raised one hand slightly, in the manner of Bugs Bunny at the Roman Forum. “As Winston Churchill said on taking office, ‘If we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall be in danger of losing the future.’ The same is true today.”