Friday, writing for the NYTimes, Maggie Haberman asserted that Trump's response to his collapsing poll numbers is that he "hasn't started yet." When asked about fears that he's dragging Republican candidates up and down the ticket into an unprecedented disaster, "he dismissed concerns from Senate Republicans that he may be a drag on their candidacies in the fall. 'And I have tremendous Republican support,' Mr. Trump said. 'Unfortunately they never talk about that, they talk about the few rebels... I think I’m going to help,' Mr. Trump said of the Senate candidates. And he suggested that senators who were lagging in polls themselves had troubles long before he became the nominee. 'Certain of these senators you’re talking about are not doing well,' Mr. Trump said, referring to a group who are being aided by former President George W. Bush with fund-raising. 'Then, if they lose they’ll pin it on Donald Trump,' he said. 'But I don’t let that happen easily.'"I was on a long train ride yesterday thinking about how this clown could be so close to becoming president of the United States. It's beyond disappointing. It's a huge, almost unthinkable system failure by the establishment-- not that the establishment hasn't earned it-- and the blame, at least for now, rests firmly with the Republican Party. How did they let this happen? They got taken to the cleaners by a low-grade New York street hustler. That "Deep Bench" of theirs certainly turned out to be a colossal bust, but now they seem to be making a half baked effort to stop Trump again, despite the fact that the public sees no conceivable way to deny him the tattered party's near worthless nomination. Yesterday Reince Priebus was reported by CNN to be sniffing around state parties looking for people willing to get behind a serious anti-Trump push. "Priebus," CNN reported, "has spoken with GOP party chairmen in multiple states in recent days in part to get a better sense of how large the anti-Trump faction is among their convention delegations, according to two people familiar with the conversations... [S]ome anti-Trump forces are hoping to garner enough support to press the convention's rules committee to alter the rules governing the convention and open a path for a different candidate." One warning signal Trump must be noticing is that Priebus appointed former Congresswoman Enid Mickelsen of Utah to chair the convention's rules committee, the committee that has to be on-board with dumping Trump if the rebels are going to have any chance at success. If she can persuade the committee to unbind the delegates for the first ballot, Trump isn't likely to be the nominee. She has publicly said that "Neither Hillary or Donald Trump are going to be the people that we point our children toward and say, 'I want you to be just like them when you grow up.'"Ed O'Keefe, writing for the Washington Post, reported Friday that "dozens of Republican convention delegates are hatching a new plan to block Donald Trump at this summer’s party meetings, in what has become the most organized effort so far to stop the businessman from becoming the GOP presidential nominee... Given the strife, a growing group of anti-Trump delegates is convinced that enough like-minded Republicans will band together in the next month to change party rules and allow delegates to vote for whomever they want at the convention, regardless of who won state caucuses or primaries... 'This literally is an "Anybody but Trump" movement,' said Kendal Unruh, a Republican delegate from Colorado who is leading the campaign. 'Nobody has any idea who is going to step in and be the nominee, but we’re not worried about that. We’re just doing that job to make sure that he’s not the face of our party.' The new wave of anti-Trump organizing comes as an increasing number of prominent Republicans have signaled that they will not support Trump for president. In addition, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), who is slated to chair the Republican National Convention next month in Cleveland, said in remarks released Friday [in advance of his Meet the Press appearnace today] that House Republicans should follow their consciences on whether to support Trump."
Eric Minor, a GOP delegate from Washington state, said that he felt compelled to join Unruh’s group because “I hear a lot of people saying, ‘Why doesn’t somebody do something about this?’ Well you know what, I’m one of the people who can. There’s only 2,400 of us. I’m going to reach out to us and see if there seems to be momentum for this. And if there is, we’ll see where it goes.”Steve Lonegan, a veteran GOP operative from New Jersey, is not a delegate but is advising the group and building financial support through a super PAC, Courageous Conservatives, that backed Cruz in the primary. The group has said it is willing to spend money on advertising and to help delegates across the country find one another.Ever since Trump reached the threshold for claiming the GOP nomination last month, “I’ve woken up every day struggling to accept that he’s going to be our candidate,” Lonegan said. “He’s spent more time talking about getting Bernie Sanders voters to vote for him than conservatives. What do you think he has that Bernie Sanders’s supporters would like? A secret socialist agenda?”Unruh, Minor, Lonegan and a number of others involved in the effort are former Cruz supporters, but they insist they are not working on his behalf. Cruz has said he would not accept the presidential nomination as a result of an attempt to strip Trump of the prize.Other top Republicans, including Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and Rep. Fred Upton (Mich.), said this week that they will not back Trump. Ohio Gov. John Kasich said he’s not ready to support Trump. And Richard Armitage, a deputy secretary of state in George W. Bush’s administration who is close with other members of the party’s national security establishment, announced that he plans to vote for Clinton if Trump is nominated.
Their convention is just a month away and even though Clinton is still viewed as a horrible canddiate, in the battle of the two evils, she's viewed as the lesser evil by the great number of people. Trump is handing her the White House. Other than Wall Street predators and dumb Democrats-- and obsessed women-- no one is for her; they're just against him... and his popularity with voters is diminishing rapidly the more they see of him. Maybe it really was prescient of Ryan to have guns banned from the Republican Convention in Cleveland, an open-carry state, despite the claptrap about how everyone is safer if everyone is packing heat.Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is salivating at the prospect of a "partnership" with Trump... I wonder why. As horrible as Hillary is, let's keep focused on #NeverTrump, not for the GOP-- they deserve him-- but for our country.