RNC considers cutting cash to Trump
GOP officials lay the groundwork to blame their nominee if Clinton wins.
By Eli Stokols and Kenneth P. Vogel 08/14/16 07:29 AM EDT
politico.com
Publicly, Republican Party officials continue to stand by Donald Trump. Privately, at the highest levels, party leaders have started talking about cutting off support to Trump in October and redirecting cash to saving endangered congressional majorities.Since the Cleveland convention, top party officials have been quietly making the case to political journalists, donors and GOP operatives that the Republican National Committee has done more to help Trump than it did to support its 2012 nominee Mitt Romney and that, therefore, Trump has only himself and his campaign to blame for his precipitous slide in the polls, according to people who have spoken with Republican leadership.
Sean Spicer, the RNC’s top strategist, on Wednesday made that case to 14 political reporters he convened at the organization’s Capitol Hill headquarters for an off-the-record conversation about the election.
Reporters from POLITICO and BuzzFeed were not invited.
According to several people who attended, Spicer spent much of the session detailing all the RNC resources that have been deployed to swing states and how the party’s infrastructure is stronger than it has ever been.
In the words of one person in the room, the message was that the RNC has “all these staffers out there working and knocking on doors, with a data system they believe rivals what Obama build in 2012—so it’s not their fault.”
Spicer emphasized that RNC chairman Reince Priebus has been working aggressively to coach Trump into being a more disciplined candidate, calling the nominee “five or six times a day,” according to another person present at last week’s closed-door meeting.
According to sources close to Priebus, the chairman has warned that if Trump does not better heed this persistent advice to avoid dust-ups driven by his rhetoric, the RNC might not be able to help him as much – suggesting the money and ground resources might be diverted.
To this point, Spicer has suggested a mid-October deadline for turning the presidential campaign around, suggesting last week to reporters and in separate discussions with GOP operatives that it would cause serious concern inside the RNC if Trump were to remain in a weakened position by then.
Operatives close to the RNC leadership, who have heard this argument from party leadership, say the committee might have to make a decision about pulling the plug on Trump before that.
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