Donald Trump doesn't sing the blues as he heralds New York win in Trump Tower

Pushing Senator Ted Cruz to third place the biggest morale booster for Trump as he sweeps his own state

Not too shabby for Donald Trump celebrating New York landslide (AP)

If your lobby is on Fifth Avenue, is draped in marble and gold with a waterfall to boot, then why feel awkward about a slightly obvious playlist? “Start spreading the news,” boomed Frank Sinatra as the most famous New Yorker of all stepped to the microphone. “If I make it there, I can make it anywhere”.

Which, of course, Donald Trump had done handsomely in the latest Republican primary Tuesday and not in just the city, which is what Sinatra was crooning about. He had crushed his opponents, Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich, all across the Empire State. No “little town blues” for him.

Ebullience erupted among Trump courtiers as the polls closed and within seconds the US networks declared the former reality host the winner and by a very wide margin. A gaggle of his aides – and there are some new ones nowadays – spontaneously broke into applause. Sliding into an elevator almost unseen was Donald Trump Jr, preening himself in its mirror before the door closed. Tie straight? Check.

Forgive Family Trump a little exuberance. The candidate who had been so cocky for so long, often holding these post-primary events in his other humble home, Mar-A-Lago in Florida, had just endured a bloody few weeks. He had lost the last contest, in Wisconsin, badly to Mr Cruz and his campaign has since been riven by turbulence and strife. He need a really big win in New York, which he has got.

And in fact he exuded something close to generous humility at the microphone. There was no mocking ‘Lyin’ Ted’. “This is really nice,” he said three times. Nice? Really, Donald.

“It’s been an incredible evening, it’s been an incredible day,” he declared, facing a deep throng of reporters wedged between the glossy windows of the Gucci store that anchors Trump Tower, a slightly discordant Starbucks above him the mezzanine. (Lots of product placements here if this were a movie.)

“We have been all over the state. New York state has problems just like every other state in the union… we are not going to let it happen anymore. We are going to stop it.”

He was getting going, the oxygen of victory almost audibly filling his tanks again. “You are going to be really proud of this country very soon,” he boomed. “Nobody is going to mess with us.”

Still, things that have been bothering him were still ricocheting through his mind. Like all those delegates that Senator Cruz has been winning in states like West Virginia and Colorado by working the arcane Republican Party rules to the max and leaving the Trump campaign empty handed.

“It is really nice to win the delegates with the votes, you know, it’s really nice,” he said (that word again) triggering a round of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” from the coterie of pals and hangers-on. “Nobody should take delegates and claim victory unless they get thosee delegates with voters and voting.”

And he sounded a warning to those in the party, and his rivals, to disabuse themselves of the notion that if he arrives at the party convention in July with the greatest number of delegates but fewer than the majority that the rules asked for that they might snatch the nomination away from him. “The people aren’t going to stand for it,” Mr Trump suggested. “It’s a crooked system, it’s a system that’s rigged.”

Lingering on the topic he even had words of sympathy for Senator Bernie Sanders who on the Democratic side can “win and win” only to be told over and again that he has no chance of securing his party’s nomination. (Though Bernie bungled New York.) “But the Republican system is worse,” he averred.

And he pushed back against those stories of strife and infighting in his campaign as he reshuffles and hires fresh folk precisely in response to the poor job he has done of grabbing extra delegates outside of the primaries. “It’s actually a team of unity, its evolving, but people don’t understand that,” he said.

But it was not a night for whining. Mr Trump likes to win. And he likes landslides, which is what he was getting. And he may have taken particular pleasure in the news that his greatest threat, Mr Cruz, had been sent crashing to a third place in New York. That miserable result was surely the fruit of Mr Cruz’s attempts to smear Mr Trump several weeks ago for representing so-called “New York values”.

And is there anything wrong with New York values? Mr Sinatra surely wouldn’t have thought so.