DUMP ME AND THERE WILL BE RIOTS: TRUMP
REPUBLICAN FRONT- RUNNER WARNS PARTY NOT TO MOVE AGAINST HIM
• Donald Trump fired a warning shot at the GOP establishment on Wednesday, predicting that “riots” may break out across America if he is denied the Republican U. S. presidential nomination even if he wins most of the party’s primary and caucus elections.
Buoyant from victories in three more i mportant voting states, Trump warned against a Republican campaign to prevent him from becoming the nominee.
On Tuesday, Trump won Illinois, North Carolina and, most crucially, Florida, dealing a fatal blow to Sen. Marco Rubio in his home state.
It marked a historic moment in what is proving to be a primary quite unlike anything seen before. Maverick politicians have been a staple feature of presidential races, but rarely has one made it so far.
Party elites and top financiers had put their hopes i n Rubio, feted as their saviour, in the belief that the public’s fascination with Trump would dwindle, and that, ultimately, they would settle for the establishment man.
But when Trump beat Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and the youngest in the field at 44, by almost double digits in Florida, a state with a large Latino population, the U. S. senator had no choice but to resign from the race.
But if Trump falls short of a majority of delegates — 1,237 — he is faced with the prospect of a floor fight at the party convention in July.
“I think we’ l l win before getting to the convention, but I can tell you, if we didn’t and if we’re 20 votes short or if we’re 100 short and we’re at 1,100 and somebody else is at 500 or 400 cause we’re way ahead of everybody, I don’t think you can say that we don’t get it automatically,” Trump said on CNN Wednesday.
“I think you’d have riots. I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.”
He added the outcome would “disenfranchise” his supporters.
The prospect of a brokered, and chaotic, Republican convention grows ever greater.
Although Trump is leading in the race for the nomination, he still needs to win 54 per cent of the delegates outstanding.
The possibility of a chaotic convention led former U. S. House of Representatives speaker John Boehner to say Wednesday he would hypothetically support his successor, Paul Ryan, as nominee, despite voting for John Kasich in the Ohio primary.
However, Trump s uggested in calls to morning TV shows the party establishment is starting to fall in line behind him. Without naming names, he said some of the same Republican senators who a republic ly running him down have called him privately to say they want to “become involved” in his campaign eventually.
Meanwhile, Trump claimed to have been caught off guard by the next televised debate, set for Monday in Salt Lake City hosted by Fox News.
“We’ve had enough debates,” he said on the network Wednesday. “Nobody told me about it and I won’t be there.”
Skipping the debate would allow him to speak at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference running from Sunday to Tuesday in Washington, he said.
Meanwhile, in an emotional concession speech Tuesday night, Rubio said he was bowing out because this was not the year for a campaign being run on “hope.”
He also attacked Trump for taking the “easy route” by playing on people’s concerns about the American economy.
“The easiest thing in this campaign is to jump on all those anxieties,” he said.
“The politics of resentment against other people will not just leave us a fractured party — they’re going to leave us a fractured nation.”
I WOULDN’T LEAD IT, BUT I THINK BAD THINGS WOULD HAPPEN.