With the Republican establishment getting increasingly squeamish over the optics of a brokered convention and with the wind in his sails following a yuuge streak of primary wins, Donald Trump is going for the kill in the Hoosier State. After shrugging off the botched hit job by the cheesehead mafia in Wisconsin and then rolling in the northeast to regain momentum, the Donald is preparing to gut the fading Ted Cruz like a winter hog. If new polls are any indication then tricky Ted is in deep trouble in Indiana as are the best laid plans of the party elite to use him to shave enough delegates so that they can install their own candidate in Cleveland. Now Trump is upping the ante by pushing the meme that if he wins Indiana that it’s a done deal.

Reuters reports “Eyeing an Indiana victory, Trump says, ‘It’s over’”:

Front-runner Donald Trump said on Sunday that he will have essentially sealed the Republican U.S. presidential nomination if he wins Tuesday’s contest in Indiana, where he holds a big lead over chief rival Ted Cruz.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist opinion poll showed Trump with a wide lead in Indiana, 49 percent to 34 percent for Cruz and 13 percent for a third candidate, Ohio Governor John Kasich.

Trump, a 69-year-old billionaire real estate developer, sounded confident in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” when asked whether Indiana would basically end the long-running Republican race in his favor.

“Yes, it’s over,” Trump said. “It’s already over.”

The poll showed the depth of the challenge facing Cruz, a conservative U.S. senator from Texas who is trying to prevent Trump from winning the 1,237 delegates needed to seal the nomination.

Cruz’s hopes rest on emerging as a consensus alternative to Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 18-21. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, 68, leads U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, 74, of Vermont in the race for the Democratic nomination.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Cruz, 45, was asked several times whether he would support Trump if the New York businessman was the Republican nominee. Cruz evaded the question each time and turned the questions into an attack on broadcast media.

“I recognize that many in the media would love to see me surrender to Donald Trump because that means that Hillary wins. The media has given $2 billion in free advertising to Donald Trump,” Cruz said.

Cruz said he has momentum in Indiana based on his choice of former candidate Carly Fiorina for his vice president and Friday’s endorsement by Indiana Governor Mike Pence.

The Cruz campaign is on life support right now and his message has been reduced to three things: exploiting the transvestites in public restrooms frenzy, lying about Trump plotting riots at the convention and calling Trump a liberal. Hardly a platform worthy of a serious candidate for the presidency. While the establishment, the neocons and even revered former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are picking apart Trump’s actual “America first” foreign policy the condemnations of Cruz are absent. This is because he has no foreign policy and outside of boilerplate talking points about restoring the Constitution and keeping perverts out of women’s restrooms , he has no domestic policy either.

Combine Cruz’s stumbles of late with the simple fact that Indiana Governor Mike Pence has nowhere near the local party apparatus that Scott Walker-Paul Ryan did in Wisconsin and it could be a very miserable Tuesday for Ted.