After that, it’s all subject to manipulation, and the people who are proving most adept at this kind of thing are the Ted Cruz forces. “They understand how to organize,” King County GOP chair Lori Sotelo told the Seattle Times. “They’re working it.”

Thus the Cruz strategy becomes clear. Since he can’t win by marshaling voter sentiment in the primaries, he will burrow his way through the delegate-selection tunnels and come out with second-ballot commitments from people whose first-ballot votes belong to the electoral winner, but aren’t cast with any true sense of commitment to that winner.

Trump calls these delegates “double-agent” delegates in a “voter-nullification scheme.” He accuses Cruz, who trails him by two million votes and has “no democratic path to the nomination,” of pursuing a strategy of “voter disenfranchisement.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with party caucuses or conventions as delegate-selection vehicles. They hold a hallowed place in the political tradition of both parties. But they aren’t what they used to be, because the old system of political loyalty and ties that bind is dead. Now they seem to be vehicles for calculated, bloodless political manipulation.

If this system elevates Ted Cruz to the nomination with double-agent delegates, the cry will go up: Give us back our democracy. And all the arguments of the Wall Street Journal and like-minded institutions, however logical and rule-book sound, won’t forestall the political firestorm that ensues. That will elevate to another level the politics of disruption from a man who already is the greatest political disruptor we have seen since Huey Long in the 1930s.

Robert W. Merry is a contributing editor at the National Interest and an author of books on American history and foreign policy.

Image: Flickr/Jamelle Bouie