Trump’s primary victories do not guarantee nomination
As a delegate to eight Republican National Conventions, including the last contentious GOP convention in 1976 in Kansas City that featured the legendary battle between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, I’m aware of the mechanics of the convention rules committee, which must establish the convention rules as the first order of business.
While Donald Trump may accumulate enough delegate votes to claim the nomination before the GOP convention begins on July 15 in Milwaukee, a criminal conviction before July 15 on any of the 91 felony counts he is facing may dramatically shift the trajectory of his nomination and place his fate in the hands of approximately 2,400 convention delegates, including those delegates serving on the rules committee, which has the power to rewrite the convention rules if a felony conviction occurs (“The RNC’s rules for the 2024 convention don’t address what would happen if Donald Trump is convicted,” Nov. 30).
There is already a crack in the monolithic MAGA wall.
The Republican National Committee reportedly may soon be voting on a resolution offered by the Mississippi national committeeman that would bar Trump from dictating the choice of a new RNC chairperson and prohibit the melding of the Trump and RNC fundraising operations until either the former president receives the 1,215 convention delegate votes necessary to clinch the nomination or Nikki Haley drops out of the race.
Polling has consistently indicated that approximately 30% of Republican voters believe that if Trump were convicted of a felony he would be unfit to serve as president. The same percentage of GOP voters believes that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.
The Republican Party today is not a cohesive or coherent entity, and many of the longtime activists who attend conventions as delegates are pragmatically interested in nominating a winning presidential candidate who can help bolster the candidacies of Republicans running up and down the ballot for congressional, state and county offices. Some delegates are candidates themselves.
There are nine state primaries scheduled in either May or June of this year, late enough for GOP voters to indicate their reaction to a potential Trump conviction and early enough to give convention delegates in Milwaukee an opportunity to gauge if a falloff in Trump support is significant enough to signal if he is still a viable candidate to face Biden in November.
A New York court has entered a judgment of more than $400 million against Trump for fraudulently inflating the value of his business.
In another New York case, jurors awarded a Trump accuser millions for sexual abuse and defamation.
These actions do not appear to have loosened Trump’s iron-clad grip on the nomination.
The judges who have ruled against Trump in his civil cases have shown that they are immune from, and repulsed by, his courthouse performance. Not so with the majority of Republican voters.
Is it possible that some Republican convention delegates will change their views if Trump is convicted of a felony? What we can discern is that Trump’s frenetic insistence that he be crowned now as the GOP nominee, before the criminal courts have pronounced judgment, is a reflection of his palpable apprehension.
If there is a falloff of support, the results from the May and June primaries may offer an early indication of what we might expect at the convention in July.