GOP summit split on Trump
Romney tells donors he won’t campaign for Republican candidate
PARK CITY, Utah — Donald Trump can be an effective president, and he’s going to win with or without you, Republican Chairman Reince Priebus told several hundred of the party’s top donors and strategists Saturday.
Trump is setting a dangerous example for Americans by promoting “trickledown racism,” and the party must look beyond this presidential election to find its future, the GOP’s 2012 nominee Mitt Romney told the same group later that morning.
Delivered within moments of each other at Romney’s annual business and politics summit at a fivestar ski resort, those opposite messages were enough to cause whiplash. That’s a hazard of being a Republican this year, as the party struggles to figure out what to do with its controversial presumptive presidential nominee.
Blinking back tears as he spoke, an impassioned Romney said many have asked him to get off his “high horse” and back Trump, seeing presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as unacceptable. “Either choice is destructive,” Romney said. “I love this country. I love the founders. I love what this country is built upon and its values. And seeing this is breaking my heart.”
Romney said he would not spend time campaigning for or against Trump and predicted 90 percent of Republicans would vote for Trump.
The attendees, about 300 of Romney’s longtime donors and friends, provided a snapshot of the wide range of GOP sentiment about Trump. While most are eager to keep Clinton out of the White House, Trump keeps giving many of them pause, the latest example being his comments that a federal judge’s Mexican heritage prevents him from fairly overseeing a lawsuit against him.
Behind closed doors at the summit, Hewlett Packard President Meg Whitman likened Trump to Mussolini and Hitler and suggested she might vote for Clinton. House Speaker Paul Ryan squirmed as he was asked how he could support Trump after denouncing the candidate’s comments about the judge. He demurred, as he did during Whitman’s Trump tirade, saying his leadership position means he must convey the will of Republican representatives, not just his own.
Most of the sessions at the three-day Experts and Enthusiasts summit were closed to reporters, but described in detail by multiple attendees. Missing from the gathering was Trump himself; he has never been invited to speak to the Romney crowd.
Trump weighed in from afar, saying at a Saturday rally in Tampa, Florida, that Romney is bitter because he’s a failed presidential candidate who “choked like a dog.”