begin quote from:
| New York Times | - |
A
delegate from Texas at the 2012 Republican National Convention in
Tampa, Fla. Mitt Romney, the party's nominee that year, has said he will
skip this year's convention.
The widening rift in the Republican Party grew deeper on Sunday and threatened to upset the July convention as Donald J. Trump refused to rule out removing Paul D. Ryan, the speaker of the House, as the convention’s chairman.
Mr.
Trump’s warning was his latest affront to Republicans who have urged
him to adopt a more cooperative and unifying tone. And it amounted to an
extraordinary escalation in tensions between the party’s presumptive
nominee and its highest-ranking officeholder.
In
a series of television interviews that aired Sunday, Mr. Trump
demonstrated little interest in making peace with party leaders like Mr.
Ryan who have called on him to more convincingly lay out his commitment
to the issues and ideas that have animated the conservative movement
for the last generation.
“I’m
going to do what I have to do — I have millions of people that voted
for me,” Mr. Trump said on ABC’s “This Week.” “So I have to say true to
my principles also. And I’m a conservative, but don’t forget, this is
called the Republican Party. It’s not called the Conservative Party.”
If
anything, Mr. Trump’s candidacy has thrived because of his resistance
to party politics as usual, not in spite of it. He has broken with
Republican leadership in Congress on trade, military intervention and
immigration policy. And he appears as determined as ever not to fall in
line now that he has effectively secured the nomination.
Mr.
Trump’s differences with those in the party who think they have earned
more of a right to set its political and ideological course have led to a
rupture at the time when Republicans would ordinarily be trying to put
the messy personal clashes of the primary contests behind them.
These divisions have played out most openly and vividly around the planning of the Republican National Convention. It is a telling reflection of the state of Republican politics: an escalating spat over going to a party for a party that is coming undone.
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Four of the last five Republican presidential nominees — George Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney — have said they will skip the convention in Cleveland, where Mr. Trump is expected to be formally nominated.
Mr. Ryan, who serves as the convention’s ceremonial chairman, has made the provocative declaration that he is not ready
to support his party’s likely nominee, a rebuke that drew Mr. Trump’s
threat, in an interview with NBC News, to remove him from that role.
The
large corporations that usually fund both parties’ conventions have
grown wary of becoming involved. They are holding back on sponsorships,
leaving Cleveland about $7 million short of its $64 million fund-raising
goal just 10 weeks before the festivities begin.
“Conventions
have always been platforms for different views inside the party, with
the understanding that primaries are about our differences and the
general election is supposed to be about coming together,” said Kevin
Madden, a Republican consultant who has worked on several presidential
campaigns, most recently in 2012 for Mr. Romney.
“But the big, open rift that nobody can deny is that there’s a lot we still don’t agree on,” he said.
With Mr. Trump’s two remaining rivals, Senator Ted Cruz
of Texas and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, now out of the race, Republicans
have defused their biggest possible crisis ahead of the convention:
having a bitter fight for the nomination play out in front of tens of
millions on television. But they seemed to be barreling toward another.
Questions
over Mr. Trump’s conservative credentials refuse to die, causing some
Republicans to make demands of him that are unheard-of for the party’s
standard-bearer.
Conservative
activists have called on Mr. Trump to identify before he arrives in
Cleveland people he would appoint as cabinet members, Supreme Court
justices or even vice president, gestures they say would calm fears over
the sincerity of his conservatism.
Tony
Perkins, a convention delegate from Louisiana who is the president of
the conservative Family Research Council and had supported Mr. Cruz
before he dropped out of the race last week, said Mr. Trump could not afford to antagonize any more voters.
“The
margins he has to work with in terms of electoral success are very
small,” he said. Unlike other Republican nominees who have been greeted
skeptically by social conservatives, Mr. Trump faces deep and
unrelenting hostility, Mr. Perkins added. “Now, not only do you have
indifference, you have outright resistance to his candidacy,” he said.
Having
a nominee who engenders such mistrust poses complications for other
aspects of the convention. As much as the party gatherings are meant to
convey cohesiveness and cooperation, they have also become platforms to
highlight diversity and inclusiveness, virtues Mr. Trump has not shown
an inclination to promote.
Republicans
have filled their speaking slots at recent conventions with women,
African-Americans and Hispanics, in an effort to overcome an image as
the party of old white men. But the list of speakers from the 2012
convention reads like a list of Mr. Trump’s enemies. Many have denounced
him, including Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina, Gov. Brian
Sandoval of Nevada, Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and
Representative Barbara Comstock of Virginia.
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