Whitman, a major GOP giver who ran for California governor in 2010, compared Trump to historical demagogues like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and wanted to know how the speaker could get behind him.
.. This week, Trump slashed his original fundraising expectations, saying he no longer believed he needed to raise $1 billion. Some of his top fundraisers think he’ll struggle to top $300 million, a figure that’s less than a third of what Romney raised in 2012
.. And while they may be reluctant to admit it, some are starting to think about the next presidential election — in 2020. Among those making the trek to Utah this week were Ryan, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — all of whom were seen here as potential future White House contenders. All were mobbed.
.. One option, he said, is for Trump to accept public financing. Under federal election laws, that would allow him to receive a lump sum of government funds while capping how much he’d be able to spend.
.. The prospect of a controversial billionaire accepting taxpayer funding would be one of the more bizarre twists of the 2016 campaign. But for a struggling Trump, it might be worth pursuing — especially with rising doubts about whether he can fill his coffers.
Why Trump’s Fake Publicist Charade Matters: A Closer Look
Seth takes a closer look at Donald Trump’s penchant for posing as his own publicist.
They Tilt Right, but Top C.E.O.s Don’t Give to Trump
The C-suite leans right.
Republican candidates have drawn overwhelming support from the highest-paid chief executives in the country this election cycle
.. That may not be so surprising, given the Republicans’ reputation as the party of business. But none of the people on this year’s highest-paid list contributed to the campaign of Donald J. Trump, a fellow businessman and the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
.. Leslie H. Wexner, chief of the company that owns Victoria’s Secret, along with his wife, Abigail, were the top political donors among those included on the Equilar 200 Highest-Paid C.E.O. Rankings.
.. But even among the big donors supporting Democrats, few of the chief executives supported Hillary Clinton, who is closing in on the Democratic nomination for president, and none contributed to her rival, Bernie Sanders.
How to Get Trump Elected When He’s Wrecking Everything You Built
it fell to Reince Priebus to formally surrender on behalf of a shellshocked party Establishment. This being 2016 and the Age of Trump, Priebus, the long-serving chairman of the Republican National Committee, did so in a tweet: “@realDonaldTrump will be presumtive [sic] @GOP nominee, we all need to unite and focus on defeating @HillaryClinton #NeverClinton.”
.. In the weeks before Trump prevailed, the political media made a sport of trying to get Priebus to concede that his party was falling to pieces, while Priebus insisted against all evidence that things were going great. Commentators on both the left and right likened him to “Baghdad Bob,” ..
.. And his vision of the GOP’s future is in many ways the diametrical opposite of what Priebus and the party Establishment had imagined. Many politicians, Trump told me, had privately confessed to being amazed that his policies, and his lacerating criticism of party leaders, had proved such potent electoral medicine.
.. In 2007 he became the youngest-ever chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, and part of a triumvirate with Paul Ryan and Scott Walker that led the GOP takeover of Wisconsin in 2010.
.. control debates to shield candidates from what Republicans believed was hostile questioning by liberal moderators trying to embarrass presidential hopefuls. While the report was unblinking about the need to win more support from women, minorities, and young people, it betrayed no hint that Republican policies beyond immigration reform might need adjusting to attract them. Emphasis fell instead on such things as hiring a more ethnically diverse staff (“The RNC must hire [Asian Pacific Islander] communications directors and political directors for key states”) and injecting a dash of Hollywood glamour to impress fickle millennials (“Establish an RNC Celebrity Task Force of personalities in the entertainment industry … to attract younger voters”).
.. “After Romney’s loss, every major donor was just distraught and ready to bail, convinced we could never win a national election. So the autopsy was absolutely necessary from a donor maintenance standpoint. But it was public relations, nothing more. Reince never had the power to implement it.”
.. “I told him, ‘Listen, you’ve had four unbelievable years,’ ” says Georgia’s Evans. “ ‘If you stop now, you’re gonna be regarded as one of the most successful party chairmen in history. If you run [for another term], you’re going to be judged by one presidential election.’ He said, ‘You’re right.’ But he really thought we had in place all the pieces to dominate the election cycle.”
.. But then came Trump, a walking exaggeration of every negative attribute the autopsy had warned against.
.. “Reince is not the general,” says Murphy, the Republican strategist. “He’s stuck in the job of being the supply clerk to a losing presidential army.”
.. I asked Trump what he thought the GOP would look like in five years. “Love the question,” he replied. “Five, 10 years from now—different party. You’re going to have a worker’s party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry. What I want to do, I think cutting Social Security is a big mistake for the Republican Party. And I know it’s a big part of the budget. Cutting it the wrong way is a big mistake, and even cutting it [at all].”
.. He’s the subject of a steady stream of articles that describe how Republicans are working to “shape” and “guide” his views—meaning block his ideas. On May 9, Priebus took the unusual liberty of dictating terms to Trump by telling a conservative radio host that Trump wouldn’t touch the platform, and furthermore ought to “tell people that you don’t want to rewrite—you like, you appreciate, and agree with the platform the way it is.”
.. A moment later, Scavino hustled in and handed him a folder, from which he drew, from beneath printouts of the Drudge Report, a bright-red map of the U.S. showing how he dominates Google search ratings in all 50 states. His point was that he has the power to convey any message he likes: “I have the loudspeaker.”
.. To spend $2 billion or $1 billion, I was saying to my people the other day, I said, ‘Explain it to me. I just won against 17 people, all governors and senators who are very successful people. I just won, and I spent $45 million. That was over a period of a year.’ ” Did he really think he would raise $1 billion? “No,” he replied. “I’d say over $500 million. I just don’t know why you need that much money.”
.. Even as Trump takes over, Priebus is trying to enforce a distinction between “Trump” and “Republican Party” that might preserve the inroads he believes he’s made in minority communities.
..
In 2011, when Trump was still in the embryonic stage of learning how to roil the national political debate, he began insisting Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. Priebus, as the new chairman, had to field awkward questions about Trump’s “birther” antics, and while he made clear his own view that Obama was born in Hawaii, he never denounced Trump and Trump never recanted. How, I asked, could his plan to moderate his party’s image possibly withstand a nominee who’s a birther and has labeled Hispanics “rapists” and “drug dealers”?
Priebus reddened and replied, with Freudian clarity, “What the RNC doesn’t do, we’re not able to muzzle people and put a sock in people’s mouth and take duct tape out and tell people what they can say and can’t say. Nor is it fair to then criticize the national committee for something that some person says somewhere around the country.” He added, “I can’t be judged based on things I don’t control.”
..
“What do you know about—you know something about voter data and outcomes and messaging and microtargeting? I mean, what kind of expert are you?”
“I know that the public face of the party saying these things has driven his own negatives up astronomically high.”
“I’m not so sure about that. Did you see the poll yesterday that he actually had better numbers with black and Hispanic voters than Mitt Romney?”
“I did.”
“What did you think of it?”
“I was surprised.”
“OK, well, then you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
At this, Priebus’s deputy jumped in to announce that we were going off the record.
.. Trump criticized Ryan’s proposed entitlement cuts as unfair and politically foolish. “From a moral standpoint, I believe in it,” Trump told Ryan. “But you also have to get elected. And there’s no way a Republican is going to beat a Democrat when the Republican is saying, ‘We’re going to cut your Social Security’ and the Democrat is saying, ‘We’re going to keep it and give you more.’ ” Afterward, both sides offered platitudes, but Ryan didn’t endorse.