Bent on sucking the GOP dry and leaving it for dead at Hillary Clinton's Wolverine Steel-Toed Booted feet.
Looks like ABC's report of a Trump retreat to party fealty was a tad premature:
Real-estate magnate Donald Trump, who tops the polls in the Republican presidential nomination race, doubled down Tuesday on his insistence he would "keep the door open" to a potential independent run.
The brash billionaire stunned viewers and fellow Republican candidates last week during their party's first debate of the 2016 presidential campaign by saying he would not rule out a third-party candidacy -- a nightmare scenario for the Republicans.
Why they were "stunned" is, of course, anybody's guess. I sure as hell wasn't.
But after days of controversial statements in the wake of the debate, including a series of comments and tweets seen by many as sexist and offensive, Trump returned to the idea of running for president outside the Republican Party.
"We're going to keep the door open," Trump told Fox News in a telephone interview.
"I want to run as a Republican," he added. "But I do want to keep that door open in case I don't get treated fairly."
In other words, in case the RNC doesn't rig the GOP primaries to guarantee him the nomination.
Interestingly enough, the RNC doesn't appear to be leaning in that direction:
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has directly called on all candidates to pledge not to make a third-party run. The Republican Party has leverage here: senior GOP officials say it is possible that future debates could be limited to candidates who have pledged support for the party — a move that could leave Trump out of debates if he is still leaving open the possibility of running as an independent.
[ABC News' Jonathan] Karl also notes that the GOP can withhold voter data from the primary campaigns. The RNC has worked very hard on improving its data-collection infrastructure, and that data would be invaluable to primary campaigns. It would cost a campaign a fortune to start from scratch on that kind of research, and even then, there would be almost no time left to accomplish it — even for someone of Trump’s wealth.
This looks a bit like someone at the RNC — Reince Preibus, presumably — has let it known that he’s prepared to call Trump’s bluff on a third-party run.
Priebus really has little other choice. He can't very well stand by and let Trump carry out a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. He practically has to stand up to the bully, whether or not he wants to. And, of course, Trump will conveniently interpret that stand as the GOP "not treating me fairly" and then promptly bolt to Perot Land, taking a big chunk of the Tea Party base with him.
Game, set, match Hillary:
Political experts and observers have stressed that an independent Trump candidacy could spell disaster for Republicans because such a move would likely split the GOP vote and hand an election victory to likely Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
There is this caveat, however:
It takes a tremendous amount of resources to pull that off, and Trump hasn’t even begun to put together a traditional primary organization, let alone something on that scale. Republicans and Democrats have State organizations in place to get their nominees on ballots, but an independent Trump would have to do that by himself in all fifty states.
Ross Perot did all the due diligence legwork and preparation for an independent run and never flirted with running for the Republican nomination in either 1992 or 1996. Can Trump do as well as Perot did on the strength of nothing beyond his McMahonesque manly Alpha Male swagger? Or might La Clinton Nostra be secretly assisting him in that regard?
Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment