Voices Donald Trump: Republican Party facing unprecedented...

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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: Republican Party facing unpreced... http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trum...

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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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6 of 12 01/29/2017 12:37 PM

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

Reuse content

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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