Ted Cruz and John Kasich have a message for Donald J. Trump: They don’t care if they are not invited to speak at his convention.
As Mr. Trump tries to plan a convention that will run as smoothly as possible, he said in an interview with The New York Times last week that he would not invite either Mr. Cruz or Mr. Kasich, both former rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, to speak at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland unless they endorsed him.
That is fine, both said on Monday. A spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz, Catherine Frazier, said the Texas senator did not have any expectation about receiving a speaking slot. A spokesman for Mr. Kasich, the governor of Ohio, was similarly indifferent.
Trump’s secret plan to quash a ‘Dump Trump’ convention plot
The presumptive GOP nominee is building a massive whip team in preparation for a possible floor fight.
In a Tuesday night conference call led partly by Trump’s top adviser Paul Manafort and including 200 staffers and volunteers, Trump’s senior convention aides sketched out a whip operation led by a half-dozen operatives with deep convention experience. The effort will rely on a team of 150 volunteers and paid staff to keep the convention’s 2,472 delegates in line, and it will utilize a database with information on many of the delegates.
.. The team will be overseen primarily by Doug Davenport, a former lobbying associate of Manafort, who was brought on board by the Trump campaign in April to court supportive delegates.
.. Trump campaign attorney Bill McGinley, who was counsel to the 2012 convention’s rules committee, will handle all of the campaign’s legal operations at the convention.
.. Anti-Trump delegates, meanwhile, have yet to compile even a complete roster of members of the convention Rules Committee, let alone the entire attendance list.
.. Davenport and Manafort did not respond to requests for comment. But the offer to pay for travel and accommodations for members of the whip team, many of whom are not campaign staffers, is notable, given the dire financial straits facing the campaign. It seems to suggest that Trump’s team is leaving nothing to chance when it comes to securing the nomination.
New anti-Trump movement grows to include hundreds of GOP delegates
But several delegates said they were buoyed by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that “it is not my job to tell delegates what to do, what not to do, or to weigh in on things like that. They write the rules. They make their decisions.”
The Republicans’ Big Hot Mess
In the Year of Trump, Republicans are racing for the exits.
.. one of Trump’s advisers recently suggested that the candidate not wait until the climactic hour to deliver his remarks but, in a break with precedent, speak every single night.
.. Now they’re looking at four excruciating days that will be light on appropriate speakers, short on cash
.. Politico published a story noting that Trump’s vice-presidential finalists may come down to the puny band of miscreants who can bear to say yes.
.. but how many blacks and Hispanics will be willing to buttress Trump?
.. So I suppose they stand sheepishly at the microphone and rant without interruption about the evils of the Clintons. Do politics-soured swing voters really crave hour upon hour of that?
.. Chris Christie is at the ready, with a hunger for attention that’s not quickly sated. So maybe we get several scoops of each of them, with an omnipresent topping of Trump.