An inside look at the GOP's frantic effort to derail a Donald Trump nomination

[seafan]

.... from a fly on the wall in that dingy back room.


Tampa Bay Times, February 27, 2016

The scenario Karl Rove outlined was bleak.

Addressing a luncheon of Republican governors and donors in Washington on Feb. 19, he warned that Donald Trump's increasingly likely nomination would be catastrophic, dooming the party in November. But Rove, the master strategist of George W. Bush's campaigns, insisted it was not too late for them to stop Trump, the New York Times reports, citing three people present.

At a meeting of Republican governors the next morning, Paul R. LePage of Maine called for action. Seated at a long boardroom table at the Willard Hotel, he erupted in frustration over the state of the 2016 race, saying Trump's nomination would deeply wound the Republican Party. LePage urged the governors to draft an open letter "to the people," disavowing Trump and his divisive brand of politics.

.....

At least two campaigns have drafted plans to overtake Trump in a brokered convention, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has laid out a plan that would have lawmakers break with Trump explicitly in a general election.

.....

The American Future Fund, a conservative group that does not disclose its donors, announced plans Friday to run ads blasting Trump for his role in an educational company that is alleged to have defrauded students......
Two of Trump's opponents have openly acknowledged that they may have to wrest the Republican nomination from him in a deadlocked convention. ..... While still hopeful that Rubio might prevail, McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election.

.....

After a Tuesday night dinner with former campaign aides, during which he expressed a sense of horror at the Republican race, Romney made a blunt demand Wednesday on Fox News: Trump must release his tax returns to prove he was not concealing a "bombshell" political vulnerability.

Trump responded only with casual derision, dismissing Romney on Twitter as "one of the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics."

.....

Yesterday, on the heels of the Christie endorsement, Gov. Paul LePage also endorsed Trump.


Gee, Governor LePage, what happened between February 20, when you fumed that Trump's nomination would 'deeply wound the Republican Party, and your demand that an open letter "to the people" should be drafted, 'disavowing Trump and his divisive brand of politics'.....

....and yesterday, February 26, when you got on the radio and whip-lashed into a Trump endorsement, saying that he could be "one of the greatest presidents." ??

Should Trump clinch the presidential nomination, it would represent a rout of historic proportions for the institutional Republican Party, and could set off an internal rift unseen in either party for a half-century, since white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party en masse during the civil rights movement.

Carry on, Mr. Trump.

This is the goal that only he can deliver. And with it, he tears down one half of the Establishment's greed-driven siege of the machinery of power.



(via TB Times)

[Xipe Totec]

1. They will do anything to bring Trump down short of getting a spine. nt

[world wide wally]

2. Maybe the Republicans should break away and form a third party!

[MrMickeysMom]

3. OH! Look who fucked up! It's the GOP!

This is what you create, motherfuckers!

[3catwoman3]

4. How rich the irony of...

...Willard grumbling about Trump not having released his tax returns. He resisted as much and as long as he could. I am sure I am not the only one who remembers Ann saying, "That's all you people are going to get."