Here's How The Establishment Will Steal The GOP Nomination From Trump
March 15, 2016
The political establishment in America is terrified.
Donald Trump gets closer to securing the GOP nomination
with each passing month and his rivals on both sides of the aisle are in
disbelief.
Worse – or “better” if you enjoy entertainment – Trump has
seemingly given up any attempt to be anything other than… well… than
Donald Trump. He recently offered to pay the legal fees of a supporter
who punched a protester, shouted almost maniacally about “Bernie guys” at a recent rally, and frankly seems to have gone punchdrunk with his newfound political clout.
That’s not necessarily a criticism. Heaven knows it’s funny
and obviously there’s something highly satisfying about watching the
establishment squirm.
All the same, no one – not even Trump’s staunchest
supporters – really knows what to expect from a Trump presidency. And
virtually no Washington veterans want to find out. In fact, as we reported last week,
a group of GOP and tech execs recently made stopping Trump the topic of
the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum, a secretive
affair held on Sea Island, Georgia.
And although everyone now jokes about just how unstoppable
the Trump “juggernaut” has become, the establishment isn’t called “the
establishment,” for nothing. Trump may have proven remarkably adept at
whipping certain sectors of the electorate into a veritable frenzy, but
he himself will tell you that he’s no politician. In fact, he prides
himself on being “outside the political fold,” so to speak.
He may know quite a few tricks in the boardroom, but he doesn’t know all of the tricks of the political trade, and as Bloomberg outlines below, he could still have the nomination “stolen” from him, if the party pulls out all of the stops.
Below, find excerpts from “How To Steal A Nomination From Donald Trump”.
* * *
MARCH
The Hunt for Double Agents
On Saturday morning, while the candidates were scattered
across Ohio and Florida, Illinois, and Missouri, Cruz’s campaign was
back in Iowa trying to wring another victory out of the state that gave
him the first win of the primary season. After Iowa Republicans caucused
on Feb. 1, diehards who stuck around their precinct got the chance to
elect a local delegate to the county convention. It was those 1,681
precinct delegates who attended conventions in each of Iowa’s 99
counties this weekend, where they selected from among themselves the
delegates to subsequent conventions at congressional-district and state
levels. Cruz’s victory awarded him eight of the state’s 30
delegates—Trump and Rubio each got seven—but his campaign saw that as a
beginning rather than an end.
In many states, primaries and caucuses are just the most
public face-off in a multi-step process to select the individual
delegates who will choose the party’s nominee. Only a small share of the
2,472 total convention delegates are free to pick the candidate of
their choice, regardless of the election’s outcome, on the first ballot,
while about three-quarters of them are gradually freed to do so on
subsequent votes. That means there is a small pool of so-called
unbound delegates who are pure free agents, but a much larger number who
can be recruited throughout the spring as double agents—delegates who
arrive in Cleveland pledged to Trump, all the while working in cahoots
with one of his opponents and confessing their true allegiances once it
is safe to do so.
APRIL
Reports of the Party Boss’s Death Have been Greatly Exaggerated
It has become fashionable to renounce the term “brokered
convention” with the argument that, as strategist Stuart Stevens has
said, “there aren’t any brokers.” There may no longer be the handful of
national leaders able, as their early 20th Century predecessors did, to
settle multi-ballot convention battles in smoke-filled hotel suites.
But delegate selection is still an internal party matter,
and in state capitals, the Republican establishment holds unusual sway.
In those states with a Republican governor, the state party is typically
a fiefdom of the executive controlled through a chosen chair.
During the nominating season, this often means a governor
can freely stack an at-large slate with cronies, expecting a
rubber-stamp from a subservient party committee. In Iowa, where Governor
Terry Branstad in 2014 helped to reclaim the state party after an
unexpected takeover from supporters of Ron Paul, Republican officials
actively discourage their rank-and-file from even understanding how the
state’s 18 at-large delegates will be selected.
Party bosses stand ready to gut some of Trump’s greatest primary-season successes.
He won every one of South Carolina’s 50 delegates, by finishing first
statewide and in each congressional district, but Trump is powerless to
fill that slate with his own people. “Whoever is chosen as national
delegate will have allegiance to the party establishment, and the party
establishment is never going to be fond of Donald Trump,” says a South
Carolina Republican insider.
MAY
The Art of the Deal
There is nothing in the RNC’s rules that prohibits
delegates from cutting a deal for their votes, and lawyers say it is
unlikely that federal anti-corruption laws would apply to convention
horse-trading. (It is not clear that even explicitly selling one’s vote
for cash would be illegal.)
Every delegate and alternate are already paying for
individual travel costs to get to Cleveland. Most state parties tell
delegates to expect to spend $3,000 out of pocket on airfare, hotel, and
meals, and for some, it could prove an unexpected hardship. (Delegates
are assigned hotels by state; some could end up paying for the La Quinta
Inn, others stuck with a bill from the Ritz-Carlton.) As blogger Chris
Ladd has noted, Trump’s slate in Illinois contains “a food service
manager at a juvenile detention center, a daycare worker from a
Christian School, an unemployed paralegal, a grocery store warehouse
manager, one brave advocate for urban chicken farming, a dog breeder,
and a guy who runs a bait shop.” Could some of them be tempted
to flip their votes if a generous campaign, super-PAC, or individual
donor picked up the costs of their week in Cleveland?
JUNE
The Disqualifying Round
If the primary calendar ends without any candidate emerging
as its presumptive nominee, all those responsibilities will remain with
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. Thus far, Priebus has been docile toward
Trump, who early on made being treated equitably by the national party a
precondition for promising not to run as an independent in the general
election. But if Trump doesn’t finish with a clear majority of
delegates, Priebus will face immense pressure from party officials and
donors to undermine him.
* * *
And there’s much, more in the full article at Bloomberg including how the party could take the nomination at the convention in a series of procedural maneuvers.
But perhaps Ted Cruz put it best when he said the following
in Maine: “If the Washington deal-makers try to steal the nomination
from the people, I think it would be a disaster. It would cause a revolt.”
It sure would. And make no mistake, Trump would be more than happy to lead it.Reprinted with permission from Zero Hedge.
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