“Just A Crumpled Up Little Ball Of Paper”: The Night Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, And John Kasich Killed The RNC Pledge
Around 9:36 p.m. on Tuesday night in Madison, Wisconsin, the Republican National Committee loyalty pledge was pronounced dead.
It was killed by the combined efforts of three men, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich, all of whom all but confirmed that they would rather leap in front of a speeding train than support each other for president.
Trump was the most upfront about it when asked during CNN’s town hall. “No, I won’t,” the candy corn-headed frontrunner said when asked by Anderson Cooper if he would promise to back the eventual nominee. “[Cruz] was essentially saying the same thing. He doesn’t have to support me.”
For months, Trump has complained that he has been treated unfairly by the Republican Party and the media and those who don’t support him. He reiterated that sentiment on Tuesday, offering, “I’ve been treated very unfairly” as his main reason for giving any other possible GOP nominee his stubby little finger.
Cruz, as has been his penchant of late, demurred once again when asked about his support for another nominee. “I’m not in the habit of supporting someone who attacks my wife, who attacks my family,” he answered, referring to someone other than John Kasich.
That, of course, was not an answer to the question.
“Let me tell you my solution to that: Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee,” was Cruz’s response to the second attempt at the question.
But the third time he must have gotten it right. Right?
“I gave you my answer,” the senator from Texas said of the man who has recently spent some of his time online mocking Cruz’s wife.
When asked about those responses after the town hall, Alice Stewart, a spokeswoman for Cruz, just repeated his initial answer: “Sen Cruz said he does not make a habit of supporting people who attack his wife.”
That left Kasich, the supposed man of reason in the Republican race, the nice guy just trying to run an honest campaign.
“Maybe I won’t answer it, either,” the Ohio governor joked, the wrinkles from his cheeks touching his ears. Kasich added that he has “respect for people that are in the arena” but also said he’d been “disturbed” by some stuff he had seen on the trail. And he wasn’t referring to the thing that fell out of Cruz’s mouth during a debate.
“I don’t want to be political here: I’ve got to see what happens,” he concluded.
Both the Kasich and Trump campaigns have not responded to a request for additional comment from The Daily Beast. Neither has RNC communications director Sean Spicer.
The pledge was dreamed up in September by the RNC to try to keep Trump from jumping ship and running as an independent candidate. Little did they know that he would become their presumptive nominee.
“I [name] affirm that if I do not win the 2016 Republican nomination for president of the United States I will endorse the 2016 Republican presidential nominee regardless of who it is,” the pledge read. “I further pledge that I will not seek to run as an independent or write-in candidate nor will I seek or accept the nomination for president of any other party.”
It took Trump approximately 24 hours to call a press conference, where he held up the piece of paper like Simba on Pride Rock, proudly declaring: “The best way for the Republicans to win is if I win the nomination and go directly against whoever they happen to put up. And for that reason, I have signed the pledge.”
Oh, how things have changed.
Five months after signing, Trump hinted at potentially running separately from the Republican ticket, claiming that the RNC hadn’t held up its side of the bargain. His two gripes? That establishment donors had packed the rafters to boo him at recent debates and that (Lyin’) Ted Cruz had questioned Trump’s past positions on guns and abortion.
But Trump steeled away and stuck it out!
For another month.
And then, just like that, the pledge died.
By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, March 30, 2016
“Here’s A Shocker”: Republican Voters Really Don’t Care For The Idea Of Party Elites Picking The Nominee
It’s understandable that everybody’s absorbed with figuring out the various ways Republican Party elites could find to screw Donald Trump and/or Ted Cruz out of the presidential nomination and impose on the GOP a candidate more to their — and general-election voters’ — liking. After all, the whole “contested convention” thing is pretty novel, as is the white-hot antipathy of so many prominent Republicans to their party’s most likely nominee in a year when they thought they were going to have a downhill path to the White House.
What most of this speculation ignores is the growing evidence that actual Republican voters would not take too kindly to being shoved out of the decision-making process for a nominee. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post points to two emphatic data points:
A new Bloomberg Politics poll finds that 63 percent of Republican voters nationwide think that the winner of the most delegates should get the GOP nomination, even if he does not win an outright majority. Only 33 percent say the delegates at a contested convention should pick the nominee instead …
[A] CNN poll earlier this week … found that by 60-38, Republican voters think the candidate with the most delegates should get the nomination, even without a majority.
As Sargent notes, both polls also showed Trump losing to Hillary Clinton in a general election, which will be the party elites’ excuse for taking over the nomination process if they can — and if they dare.
But they could be courting disaster if they do so. An even more emphatic indicator of rank-and-file antipathy to a bossed convention comes from a HuffPost/YouGov survey, which shows only 16 percent of self-identified Republicans and leaners being “satisfied” with a nominee chosen from outside the current field, while the idea makes 55 percent angry. The second-worst idea, respondents to the survey say, would be to nominate John Kasich, the closest thing to an acceptable-to-the-Establishment candidate left in the field and the brandisher of many a general-election poll. Seems Republicans who keep passing up opportunities to vote for Kasich may mean it.
There is, of course, more than a little irony in the insistence of Republican voters on intra-party democracy. This is, after all, the party that’s busy creating potholes in the path to the ballot box anywhere it can. And you could make the argument that latter-day “constitutional conservatism” is all about creating iron-clad protections for conservative governing models (and the interests that benefit from them) against popular majorities acting through Congress or the presidency to enact progressive policies. There’s very significant support among conservative activists for repealing the 17th Amendment to take away direct election of U.S. senators in favor of returning the privilege to state legislators.
In that context, this sort of opinion expressed by North Dakota RNC member Curly Haugland isn’t so surprising:
“Do the primaries choose a nominee or do the convention delegates?” he asked. “It can’t be both.” “Democracy is pretty popular,” he added, “but it’s simply not the way we do it.”
I suspect party leaders like Haugland are in the process of finding out that Republicans want democracy for themselves even if they are occasionally willing to deny it to those people who are presumed to want to live off the hard work of virtuous older white people, or murder their own babies, or force bakers of conscience to create same-sex-wedding cakes. And a “brokered convention” that ignores this sentiment may soon find those sunny general-election polls showing some non-Trump or non-Cruz candidate winning may be premature.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, March 25, 2016
“Inside The Doomed Conservative Dump-Trump Plot”: Plans For A Consensus 3rd Party Candidate If Trump Is GOP Nominee
A group of powerful conservatives met Thursday to try to hammer out a plan for a potential third-party consensus candidate if Trump becomes the GOP nominee.
The team that brought you Santorum 2016 has decided to stop Trump.
He must be petrified.
For seven hours on Thursday, a few dozen conservative leaders gathered in an upstairs room of the Army Navy Club off K Street in downtown Washington, D.C., to rack their collective brains—but reached no conclusion on how to thwart the billionaire’s rise.
Quin Hillyer, a National Review contributing editor, fielded questions afterward from print reporters and a Chinese camera crew, explaining that the group hoped all the 2016 presidential candidates who haven’t endorsed Trump will coalesce behind a unity ticket. He added that there wasn’t a consensus that conservatives should unite behind Ted Cruz.
“That was not the consensus,” he said, when asked about support for a Cruz-helmed unity ticket. “The consensus was that we need a unity ticket of some sort and we’ll let the candidates work out who the unity ticket is.”
He added that the group hopes someone other than Trump will be the Republican Party’s nominee.
“Obviously a third party or an independent bid is one other option,” he added. “But we didn’t come to any formal plans. We are exploring every option.”
Other attendees—including Bob Fischer, the president of Fischer Furniture in Rapid City, South Dakota, who quickly jumped in an Uber when approached by reporters after the meeting, and Bill Wichterman, a key Santorum booster and a top D.C. lobbyist—declined to talk about the closed-door discussion.
The invitation billed the event as a meeting of “conservative leaders to strategize how to defeat Donald Trump for the Republican nomination, and if he is the Republican nominee for president, to offer a true conservative candidate in the general election.”
A copy of the invitation obtained by The Daily Beast showed it went to people on the email list of a group called Conservatives of Faith—a group that helped give energy to Rick Santorum’s 2016 presidential bid. The group came together in July of 2011 to connect evangelical leaders with presidential hopefuls. It’s loosely affiliated with another, larger group of powerful social conservative leaders called the Council for National Policy—which has endorsed Trump rival Ted Cruz.
The two groups sometimes have concurrent meetings so members can attend both.
Though the group has a history of helping Santorum, Thursday’s meeting wasn’t just a reunion of the former senator’s old advocates.
Conservatives of Faith held one of its first gatherings in August of 2011 at the ranch of Jim Leininger, a wealthy businessman who supports conservative Christian causes and school-choice efforts. Members of the group met at the ranch with Rick Perry and his wife, Anita, at the start of his 2012 presidential campaign.
Fischer, the furniture magnate, is a key organizer of the group. The invitation to Thursday’s meeting instructed respondents to RSVP to him directly. Acquaintances describe Fischer as “thoughtful,” “low-key,” “lovely,” “wonderful,” and capable of managing others’ big egoes. His basic belief, according to sources, is that if enough conservative Christian leaders get together in a room, discuss the issues, pray, and agree upon one battle plan or chosen candidate, that they will be able to accomplish their ends.
It’s an interesting theory. But—fortunately for Trump—it has a poor track record. A few weeks after Obama won re-election in 2012, the Conservatives of Faith group convened at a country club in McLean, Virginia, to gin up enthusiasm for a second Santorum presidential bid.
We all know how that worked out.
And though members of the Council for National Policy backed Cruz, he got schlonged in the evangelical-heavy Southern states where his team had hoped to do well. The fact that Donald Trump beat him by winning the evangelical vote indicates that evangelical Christian leaders—including those in the Council for National Policy and Conservatives of Faith—don’t have as much clout as conventional wisdom might dictate.
Still, it features a number of evangelical power brokers.
Sources estimated that the Conservatives of Faith email list has upwards of 300 names on it. Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum has been involved with the group in the past, but she endorsed Trump this cycle and didn’t attend the meeting on Thursday.
Trump won every state but Ohio on March 15’s Super Tuesday primaries. So today’s effort is just the latest setback for the #NeverTrump movement—an effort that may have come just after the nick of time.
Perhaps as a result, there is reason for skepticism as this latest faction of the Republican Party sets out to try to change the trajectory of the race.
Dennis Stephens, a long-time conservative lobbyist based in D.C. who backs Trump, said the group’s plans aren’t promising.
“Third party equals Hillary Clinton,” he said.
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, March 18, 2016
“So Long As Party Loyalty Reigns, ‘Never Trump’ Is Just Noise”: Attacks On The GOP Frontrunner Are Little More Than Theater
Oddly enough, two of the most important and memorable moments from last night’s Republican debate came at the beginning and the end. Early on, as we discussed this morning, Donald Trump defended himself from Marco Rubio’s personal attacks by making an oblique reference to his genitals. It represented yet another new low in Republican politics.
But nearly two hours later, Fox News’ Bret Baier asked literally the final question of the event: “It has been a long time since our first debate, seven months ago in Cleveland. A lot has transpired since then, obviously, including an RNC pledge that all of you signed agreeing to support the party’s nominee and not to launch an independent run. Tonight, in 30 seconds, can you definitively say you will support the Republican nominee, even if that nominee is Donald J. Trump?” And then they answered:
Marco Rubio: “I’ll support the Republican nominee. I’ll support Donald if he’s the Republican nominee.”
Ted Cruz: “Yes, because I gave my word that I would.”
John Kasich: “[If Trump] ends up as the nominee – sometimes, he makes it a little bit hard – but, you know, I will support whoever is the Republican nominee for president.”
It was a striking moment. Rubio, Cruz, and to a lesser extent Kasich, had just spent the previous two hours – indeed, much of the last several months – making clear that they don’t want to see Trump anywhere near the Oval Office.
In fact, the Republican frontrunner’s rivals are in need of a thesaurus after nearly running out of attacks. We’ve been told that Trump’s a “con man,” a “fraud,” and a “lunatic,” who’s “unqualified” and “unfit” to lead.
And yet, when push comes to shove, Trump has an “R” after his name – and for the Republican presidential field, that’s ultimately all that matters. If voting for the Republican nominee means making an actual “lunatic” the leader of the free world, according to the GOP’s 2016 field, so be it.
NBC News’ First Read crew explained this well: “They were stunning responses [at the end of the debate], because they undercut the furious #NeverTrump movement we’ve seen over the past week. If you’re going to accuse Trump of being a con artist, a buffoon, or a threat to the country, how can you so easily say you’d support him as your party’s presidential nominee?”
Exactly. For all the handwringing about Trump being a danger to the party, to the economy, to national security, and possibly to our democracy, the moment leading Republicans say, “I’m prepared to vote for him anyway,” the implicit message to voters is unmistakable: “Trump isn’t really that bad.”
There’s simply no way for voters to reconcile the mixed message. If Trump were as bad as his GOP critics say, they’d vow to oppose his candidacy at all costs. Instead, most of them, including each of the remaining Republican presidential candidates, are saying the opposite.
The entire #NeverTrump campaign was suddenly deflated by the very people who stood to benefit from it. The end-of-the-debate positions signaled to voters that the intensity of their attacks on the GOP frontrunner are little more than theater – because they all stand ready to elect Trump anyway if it’s his name on the ballot.
Postscript: The Rubio campaign, which is quite literally selling #NeverTrump kitsch on its website, tried to make the case in the spin room last night the senator’s vow didn’t really count because the question raised “a hypothetical” that Team Rubio believes “won’t happen.”
Just so we’re clear, Rubio said during the debate, on camera, to a national audience, “I’ll support Donald if he’s the Republican nominee.” There’s simply no getting around that.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 4, 2016
“Why McCain’s Shot Across Cruz’s Bow Matters”: In The Senate, ‘Assisting Mr. Cruz Would Amount To A Foreign Concept’
There was a fleeting moment around this point eight years ago in which some questioned John McCain’s eligibility for the presidency. The Republican senator, well on his way to becoming his party’s nominee, was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936, prompting some pointless questions about whether he was literally a “natural-born citizen.”
Few took those questions seriously; even McCain’s harshest critics dismissed the concerns out of hand; and the Senate quickly approved a resolution – written and sponsored by Democrat Claire McCaskill – declaring, “John Sidney McCain, III, is a ‘natural born citizen’ under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution of the United States.” It passed without opposition.
The recent history adds a degree of irony to McCain’s comments about Ted Cruz yesterday.
Arizona Sen. John McCain said he doesn’t know if the Canadian-born Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is eligible to be president, saying the Supreme Court might have to decide if Cruz is eligible to be president.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” said McCain on the Chris Merrill Show on KFYI550 on Wednesday of Cruz’s eligibility.
As the BuzzFeed report added, McCain went on to say, in reference to Cruz, “I think it’s worth looking into.” McCain added he thinks Cruz should try to get ahead of these eligibility issues, though without access to a time machine, how he’d go about doing this is a bit of a mystery.
It’s a genuine shame that Donald Trump has pushed this issue into the spotlight, because as best as I can tell, this entire line of attack is misguided. For all intents and purposes, natural-born citizens are those who were citizens at the time of their birth. This applies to Cruz. End of story.
I can think of about a thousand reasons to be concerned about a Cruz presidency, but his eligibility isn’t one of them.
What I find more interesting, however, is Cruz’s sudden need for friends in high places.
With the developments surrounding McCain in 2008 still in mind, the New York Times asked this morning, “Now the question is, will the Senate again weigh in to clarify the constitutional status of another one of its members and declare Mr. Cruz eligible to be president?”
The answer is, almost certainly not. Among senators from both parties, Ted Cruz is extremely unpopular. He’s gone out of his way to alienate his colleagues, pick fights with his own party leadership, and generally make as few friends in the chamber as possible during his tenure.
On the campaign trail, this serves as a point of pride. Cruz can, in complete honesty, boast to the Republican base that the GOP establishment inside the Beltway has nothing but disdain for him – and the feeling is mutual. John McCain himself once referred to Cruz as a “wacko bird,” which is why it’s not too surprising that the Arizona Republican was needlessly adding fuel to a foolish fire yesterday. He just doesn’t seem to like his colleague very much.
Right about now, Cruz would probably love to see the same level of Senate support McCain received eight years ago, but he shouldn’t hold his breath. As the Times added, for most senators in both parties, “assisting Mr. Cruz would amount to a foreign concept.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 7, 2016
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