Reince Priebus should expect a stern letter from more than 70 prominent Republicans this week, according to Anna Palmer at Politico. The signers want the Republican National Committee to divert funds from the Trump campaign to the campaigns of Republicans running for Congress.
“Only the immediate shift of all available RNC resources to vulnerable Senate and House races will prevent the GOP from drowning with a Trump-emblazoned anchor around its neck,” they write in a draft obtained by Politico, which earlier today reported that “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.” So Priebus will probably receive the letter not as a raging radical proposal but as affirmation of something he’s already been hearing from respected sources.
Mitch McConnell seems too politic to publicly endorse the strategy, but, except for the detail about the RNC’s distribution of funding, it’s essentially what he was advising Senate colleagues privately six months ago, according to the New York Times (February 27):
Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to [Republican] senators. . . .
He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.
Like Dole, Trump is a weak general-election candidate. That’s the gist of McConnell’s remarks as quoted. He could have elaborated.
Clearly the argument that the RNC should defund Trump is about more than money. It’s also about the message that the RNC’s funding of his campaign sends. Many Republicans are predisposed to the argument for electoral triage because, even if Trump were not sinking, he would represent political premises and instincts at variance from theirs — and because, even if he and they agreed on first principles, they would want the party to dissociate itself from the taint of his “divisiveness,” “recklessness,” and “incompetence,” three attributes of his that the authors of the letter to Priebus take pains to reference in their draft.
The RNC will not cut Trump loose, in Rich’s view — at least not anytime soon. In an editorial earlier today, the Wall Street Journal gives him three weeks. If it “can’t get Mr. Trump to change his act by Labor Day, the GOP will have no choice but to write off the nominee as hopeless and focus on salvaging the Senate and House and other down-ballot races,” the editors conclude. “As for Mr. Trump, he needs to stop blaming everyone else and decide if he wants to behave like someone who wants to be President — or turn the nomination over to Mike Pence.”