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David Usborne New York | @dusborne | Wednesday 3 August 2016 |
Donald Trump: Republican Party facingunprecedented splits as candidatecontinues to sow disunity
Newt Ginrich said things weren't as bad as they are for the BritishLabour Party. Is that so?
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Donald Trump will every now and then deliver a plea for
Republican Party unity. Those are the moments of sanity when
he is thinking more or less like a regular candidate. It’s not
electoral rocket science; if you want to be president it helps to
have your party behind you.
Party unity is about discipline, however, and Mr Trump is the
chaos candidate. Keeping everyone off balance is his modus
operandi, including people who should normally be his allies.
He is also the candidate of microscopically thin skin. When he
perceives a slight, considerations of party and strategy vanish.
It matters not if the person who has flicked dust in his eye
happens to be Republican. He will knock their eye out with a
brick.
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Yet all of a sudden the talk is about the party now coming
asunder because Mr Trump has now committed the greatest
sin yet, telling The Washington Post that he cannot back the
re-election bids of either Senator John McCain in Arizona or
House speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin. Reince Priebus, the
head of the Republican National Committee, is said to be
“apoplectic”.
There was talk on Wednesday, even, of Mr Priebus and other
top party officials confronting Mr Trump, in a sort of campaign
intervention, to force him to start behaving the way they think
they should. For the sake of the party and for his campaign.
They see all hopes of turning the White House Republican
again dimming fast.
The remarks to the Post, by the way, were an attempt first by
their candidate to change the subject from the catastrophe that
his vendetta with the parents of a slain Muslim-American
soldier had become. It has more or less worked. But they are
also merely a continuation of what Mr Trump has been up to
months - tweaking his own party almost for fun, never mind
the consequences.
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Could Trump be dropping out of the race?
In late March, I watched as Mr Trump paused while addressing
a jammed hotel ballroom in Janesville, Wisconsin, to say how
honoured he felt to be in the home town of Mr Ryan. It
triggered a chorus of jeers and boos, to which he said: “Wow. I
was told, ‘Be nice to Paul Ryan”
A Trump supporter close to this reporter, yelled out so
everyone, including the candidate, could hear, “Throw him
over the wall.” Mr Ryan, second in line to the presidency, that
is. Mr Trump replied replied, “Really? I am very surprised at
this statement.” Surprised, my backside. The candidate was
deliberately making mischief. Party unity be damned.
Relations with Mr Ryan were later to turn more poisonous
when he he publicly agonised over whether to endorse Mr
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that at this point. I’m not there right now,” the speaker
famously told CNN in May.
Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, has backedDonald Trump (Getty)
Note what Mr Trump told the Post this week about Mr Ryan.
“I’m not quite there yet,” he said, with just a week before next
Tuesday’s primary election in the speaker’s Wisconsin district.
Mr Trump never forgets, never mind that Mr Ryan did
eventually endorse him. He then went onto Twitter to express
admiration for Mr Ryan’s challenger.
Maybe he too will come round and back Mr Ryan before it’s
too late. But that is unlikely in the case of Senator McCain
whose prospects in his 30 August primary are much more
uncertain. Mr Trump just doesn’t like him. “I’ve never been
there with John McCain because I’ve always felt that he should
have done a much better job for the vets,” Mr Trump.
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splitting. After months of rough seas, the Republican galleon
has now sailed into a full-blown hurricane, one set off by Mr
Trump’s belittling of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of
the dead soldier, and now his public dissing of Messrs Ryan
and McCain.
President Barack Obama himself on Tuesday challenged his
Republican colleagues to revoke their endorsements of Mr
Trump. That isn’t happening yet. Even Mr McCain, a Vietnam
War hero seemingly doesn’t have the guts to go there. But
some in the party are starting to jump ship.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump said via Twitter, remarkably, insists
that party unity is greater than "ever before". Meanwhile, Paul
Manafort, his campaign manager, took to Fox News to push
back against any notion that his boss had lost the plot entirely.
Mr Trump "is in control of his campaign", he averred, adding,
"the campaign is in very good shape".
There is great unity in my campaign,perhaps greater than ever before. Iwant to thank everyone for yourtremendous support. Beat Crooked H!— Donald J. Trump(@realDonaldTrump) August 3, 2016On Tuesday, Richard Hanna, a Republican Congressman from
New York, declared he would vote for Ms Clinton in
November. (Brave-ish only, since he is not running for
re-election.) That evening Meg Whitman, a top Hewlett-
Packard executive and former Republican candidate for
governor in California, called Mr Trump a demagogue and
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Vin Weber, who used to be New Gingrich’s number two in the
House of Representatives, said on Wednesday he could no
longer stomach the New York billionaire and would become a
Democrat if he wins the White House in November.
It was Mr Gingrich, a former House speaker, who when asked
about the spinning apart of the Republican Party by Sky News
at last month’s convention in Cleveland replied: “Well, we’re
much better off than the British Labour Party”.
Is that so? “Every where I go, I encounter disunity,” Larry
Sabato, the University of Virginia politics professor, told CNN
on Wednesday. “This is the story of 2016, the dissolution of the
Republican Party and I don't know if they can come together
when it is all over.”
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More about: | US election 2016|Donald Trump| Republican Party
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Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. The RNC, guided
by Mr Priebus, managed somehow to stitch together a
convention in Cleveland that did not come asunder.
But the last few days have shown us beyond all doubt that Mr
Trump has never given more than lip service to party unity. He
isn’t binding the party together. He is willfully blowing it apart.
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