Well that was quick. Only a couple of weeks ago Ted Cruz, fresh off of a big victory in Wisconsin, thought he had stuck a big fat detour into Donald Trump’s road to the GOP’s presidential nomination. All over the conservative blogs and cable networks all you heard was Cruz! Cruz! Cruz!, while Trump kept getting battered left and right. As Sundance at Conservative Treehouse writes:

…32 private jets belonging to dozens of millionaires and billionaires flew into Sea Island Georgia to meet with top RNC officials and GOPe leadership to strategize how to eliminate Donald Trump. They spent hundreds of millions attacking him. Trump remains standing – because voters remain standing.

Every professional political entity behind Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and the DC republican establishment coalesced with Ted Cruz to defeat Donald Trump. Billionaires have spent more attacking Trump in the past three months than they spent countering President Obama in the prior seven years. Their efforts continue today.

And, of course, for the umpteenth gazillionth time, you heard that Trump’s campaign was dead and buried.

Then came the Empire State. Cruz got walloped, never even got a delegate. In the end Kasich might get three or four, but the night clearly and overwhelmingly belonged to Trump. And now it’s Cruz’s campaign that is going to have to answer for staying in the race when he no longer – even were he to run the table going forward – has a path to a first-ballot nomination. Of course, that’s not Cruz’s strategy – his campaign knows that were his delegates to be based strictly off the voters he’s stick-a-fork-in-him-done. No, Cruz knows the only way he’s going to get the nomination is to stop Trump from getting the requisite 1,237 delegates for a first-round KO, then work the system with the GOP insiders to get the nomination on a second or even third ballot.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. Increasingly, over the past few weeks, Cruz and his campaign have revealed themselves to be nothing short of total GOP insiders, working and gaming the system to influence as many delegates as they can in the hopes Trump falls short. Sleaze-ball politics, perhaps, but then I always thought Cruz to be more than just a disingenuous sleaze-ball, oh-so-cleverly portraying himself as a total outsider in the Senate when few know how to play the insider game better.

Perhaps if Cruz had kept Trump under 50% in New York to force a genuine split of New York’s delegates (say, both he and Kasich coming in with over 20%, with, say, something like Trump in the fifties), and Cruz getting between two and three dozen there would be hope for the Cruz camp. But he got smoked, Kasich got smoked, and the upcoming primaries in the Northeast portend more of the same. One has to think that behind the scenes the GOP establishment would love to get Cruz out of there to give Kasich a little better chance going forward, but that’s not going to happen. Everyone is stuck with each other, and it’s Trump who once again has the wind at his back.