end quote from:
Trump Urges Party to Unite Behind Him, but Resistance Remains ...
www.nytimes.com/2016/03/12/us/politics/trump-urges-party...
“We’ve had enough debates,” Donald Trump said on Friday. Those looking to halt his march toward the Republican nomination had other ideas.
PALM BEACH, Fla. — Donald J. Trump
sought to move past the primary fight and toward the Republican
nomination on Friday, saying that there had been enough debates and that
the party needed to come together behind him. But as he cast his eye
forward, he raised fresh questions about his porous understanding of
intricate policy matters that all presidents face.
At a morning news conference at his Mar-a-Lago complex in Florida, Mr. Trump collected the endorsement of Ben Carson,
his former rival, and said that Republicans must begin to unite to
reclaim the White House in the fall. “We’ve had enough debates,” Mr.
Trump said. “How many times do you have to give the same answer to the
same question?”
But those looking to halt Mr. Trump’s march toward the nomination had other ideas. A top aide to Senator Marco Rubio
of Florida, who is fighting for his political life in the primary there
on Tuesday, urged voters to back the candidate best positioned to stop
Mr. Trump, even if it meant that Rubio supporters in certain states
should vote for a rival candidate to prevent a Trump victory there.
The Republican contests on Tuesday are seen as potentially climactic: A loss by Mr. Rubio in Florida or Gov. John Kasich
of Ohio in his home state would probably force either man to exit the
race. A Trump victory in one of those states would dramatically
accelerate his march toward the nomination, and a victory in both could
all but end the primary race, even as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas battles on.
At
Mr. Trump’s news conference making the case for the party to unite
behind him, he said he would win states in a general election that would
otherwise be “unthinkable” for the Republican Party.
He allowed that there might be “two Donald Trumps,” suggesting that
there was a private, more palatable version that did not align with the
showier public version, before he reversed the statement a few minutes
later. He defended violence against some of the protesters at his
increasingly tense rallies, suggesting that they have often instigated
the problems.On Friday night, clashes among protesters and Trump fans at
his rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago grew so intense that
the campaign canceled the event out of security concerns. The televised
scenes of people scuffling inside the arena were the most vivid images
yet of the way Mr. Trump has polarized the campaign.
At
a debate the night before, the New York businessman sought to appear
more presidential than he had been in other recent debates. He was
pressed at length on details of his foreign policy views, exposing
surprising and, to some, alarming positions on issues such as how to
handle the quagmire in the Middle East. Military experts raised eyebrows
at his statement that he would consider deploying 20,000 to 30,000
American ground troops in Syria and Iraq.
Those experts said it did not reflect any current thinking among military experts, even by the most hawkish analysts.
Graphic: 2016 Primary Results and Calendar
“I
know of no active-duty or recently retired military officers who fought
in Iraq or Syria who would say this was a good idea,” said Mark P.
Hertling, a retired three-star general who commanded 30,000 American
troops in northern Iraq. “I’m not sure where any of those numbers are
coming from. None of them are based on what we call troop-to-task
analysis.”
General
Hertling said the United States might have to deploy additional
resources to Iraq when the Iraqi military prepared to retake the
country’s second-largest city, Mosul, from the Islamic State. But under
the plans being prepared by the Pentagon, that would consist of advisers
to help collect and analyze intelligence or to pilot drones, not ground
troops.
“We can’t put ground forces in to fight this,” he said, “or we’re going to get bogged down.”
Mr.
Trump has repeatedly failed to make good on promises to release a list
of foreign policy advisers, and his spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, did not
respond to an email about how he had arrived at the troops estimate.
Looking
to defeat Mr. Trump, a top aide to Mr. Rubio said that the best way to
do so on March 15, when voters in a number of Midwest states as well as
Florida and North Carolina will head to the polls, was for the senator’s
supporters in Ohio to vote for Mr. Kasich in the primary.
“I’m
just stating the obvious,” said Alex Conant, a spokesman for Mr. Rubio.
“If you are a Republican primary voter in Ohio and you want to defeat
Donald Trump, your best chance in Ohio is John Kasich, because John
Kasich is the sitting governor. He’s very close to Donald Trump in some
of the polls there.”
The
remarks dovetail with a strategy proposed by Mitt Romney, the party’s
2012 nominee, who urged Republicans opposing Mr. Trump to coalesce
around the leading non-Trump candidate in coming nominating contests to
deny him the nomination.
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Mr.
Rubio and Mr. Cruz have been the most vocal about stopping Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Rubio’s rivals were not on board with the idea.
Speaking
in Orlando on Friday, Mr. Cruz dismissed the Rubio campaign’s gambit.
Mr. Kasich also was not thrilled with the suggestion, saying that his
supporters should vote for him if he’s on the ballot. “What kind of a
deal would it be if I told my people, ‘Don’t vote for me?’ ” he told
reporters in Moraine, Ohio, on Friday evening.
Highlighting
the stakes, Mr. Trump began airing new ads in Florida and Ohio, one of
which attacked Mr. Rubio as corrupt and another of which flayed Mr.
Kasich for his ties to Wall Street because of his work for Lehman
Brothers.
In
Miami Beach, dozens of leading donors to the Republican National
Committee gathered on Friday morning at the Ritz-Carlton in South Beach
to hear about the party’s progress on data collection and voter
outreach.
At
one session, two committee officials, including the party’s chief
counsel, John Phillippe, also delivered a briefing on the delegate math
in the nominating fight and the mechanics of a contested convention. The
briefing drew so many questions that Reince Priebus, the party
chairman, reconvened the session again after lunch.
Asked
by one donor how close the nomination was to being decided, Republican
National Committee officials indicated that any candidate, including Mr.
Trump, would need more than half the remaining delegates to win the
nomination outright at the July convention.
Some donors concluded from the presentation that Mr. Trump, for all his dominance so far, could still be beaten.
Mr.
Trump’s campaign also announced a team of four advisers, three of whom
worked for Mr. Carson’s campaign, to track and maintain commitments from
delegates leading up to the Republican National Convention.
Mr. Trump’s previous lack of such staff had been of deep concern to
some of his allies, given the potential ability of rival campaigns to
pick off delegates.
Ashley Parker reported from
Palm Beach, and Maggie Haberman from New York. Reporting was contributed
by Mark Landler from Washington, Matt Flegenheimer from Orlando, Fla.,
Nicholas Confessore from Miami Beach, and Thomas Kaplan from Moraine,
Ohio.
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