New York Times
By Michael Barbaro, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin
July 9, 2015
Republican
Party leaders agonize over the prospect that Donald Trump will mount a
third-party candidacy that could undermine their nominee. They fear
insulting the white
working-class voters who admire him. They are loath to tangle with a
threat-flinging firebrand for whom there are no rules of engagement.
Since
the start of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, a vexing question has
hovered over his candidacy: Why have so many party leaders — privately
appalled by Mr. Trump’s
remarks about immigrants from Mexico — not renounced him?
It
turns out, interviews show, that the mathematical delicacy of a
Republican victory in 2016 — and its dependence on aging, anxious white
voters — make it exceedingly
perilous for the Republican Party to treat Mr. Trump as the pariah many
of its leaders now wish he would become.
A
few weeks ago, those divisions were on vivid display at a regular
gathering of top Republican elected officials, strategists and the
chairman of the Republican National
Committee. Over dinner at the Hay-Adams Hotel opposite the White House,
some argued for a swift response, fearing Mr. Trump would mar the
coming Republican presidential debates with his needless provocations.
Others counseled a hands-off approach, fearing
attempts to rein him in would only turn him into a political martyr
and, worse, tempt him toward that third-party run.
No
consensus was reached, and the party chairman, Reince Priebus, left
with no clear directive, according to two attendees at the dinner.
Dispirited
party elders, worried that Republicans are handing Democratic rivals a
powerful campaign weapon by allowing Mr. Trump’s voice to be depicted as
representative
of the party, are sounding the alarm with growing urgency.
“The
Republican Party is making a mistake if they think they can just remain
quiet when he speaks up, or to demur or to just lightly distance
themselves,” said Peter Wehner,
a former official in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan
and George W. Bush. “He’s doing tremendous damage.”
Mr.
Trump, the New York developer, reality television host and political
provocateur, shows no signs of backing off from his remarks, made during
his announcement of a
campaign for the White House three weeks ago.
“When
Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said then.
“They’re sending people that have lots of problems. And they’re
bringing those problems with
us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
In
the days after, there has been a striking absence of public
denunciations of Mr. Trump from leading Republican candidates for
president and the party’s top officials
in Washington. Only last weekend did Jeb Bush — after a muted earlier
response — call the “rapists” comment “extraordinarily ugly” and “not
reflective of the Republican Party.”
But
Mr. Priebus took a quieter route on Wednesday in a brief telephone
conversation with Mr. Trump, urging him to soften his tone on immigrants
even as he offered praise
of his candidacy, according to Mr. Trump and others told of the
conversation.
In
classic form, though, Mr. Trump quickly thanked the party chairman with
acerbic broadsides that could discourage similar attempts to rein him
in. Mr. Trump reached
out to a New York Times reporter Thursday morning to say the call was
“congratulatory,” not condemnatory, and posit that Mr. Priebus “knows
better than to lecture me.”
He added, “We’re not dealing with a five-star Army general.”
Mr.
Trump’s language about Mexicans highlighted two of the most divisive
issues within the Republican coalition — race and immigration. It was
Mr. Priebus who led a bracing
review of the party’s 2012 losses, resulting in dire warnings about its
need to improve its standing with Hispanics. But Mr. Trump’s support is
expected to draw heavily from those disaffected white voters who lined
up behind Mitt Romney in 2012 — and whom
Republicans acknowledge they will need again to recapture the White
House in 2016.
“As
a presidential candidate, he’s taking a problem we already have as a
party and making it worse,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, another White
House aspirant. “If we
continue this we’re going to accelerate the demographic death spiral
we’re in.”
To
a degree, the party’s problems with Mr. Trump have come full circle. He
first gained attention among Republicans, including Mr. Priebus, when
he flirted with a presidential
run in 2012, gaining a following as someone who viscerally attacked
President Obama. Mr. Trump eventually bowed out, though he continued to
question Mr. Obama’s birthplace.
Now,
what remains so appealing to many of the white voters who like Mr.
Trump is his perceived willingness to tell hard truths about delicate
issues — racial and otherwise
— that, to their mind, the party establishment is too timid to discuss.
“There
are a lot of people who are very angry at the grass-roots level and who
are convinced the Republican leaders in Congress are not doing
everything for the conservative
cause,” said Charlie Black, a former adviser to John McCain in 2008 and
Mr. Romney in 2012. Mr. Trump, he said, holds undeniable appeal to such
voters.
A
poll released by the Pew Research Center in May found that 63 percent
of Republican voters view immigrants as a “burden” who compete for jobs,
housing, and health care
compared with 32 percent of Democrats.
But
Mr. Trump also risks alienating from Republicans a crucial bloc of
swing voters who lean right on economics but disdain any hint of
scapegoating minorities — not to
mention a cross-section of minority voters who are offended by his
message.
“Republicans
have a tremendous opportunity with Latino voters in 2016,” said George
E. Pataki, a Republican candidate who described Mr. Trump’s words as
“slandering” and
called on his fellow candidates to firmly denounce them. “To lose that
opportunity over divisive rhetoric would be tragic.”
But
any top-down campaign by Republicans to marginalize Mr. Trump might
encourage him to follow through with a threat to run on a third-party
ballot, a scenario reminiscent
of Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign, which diverted crucial votes from
President George Bush. Many in the party still blame Mr. Perot, who won
19 percent of the vote, for Mr. Bush’s defeat to Bill Clinton.
“Perot’s
intensely nationalist and protectionist politics resonated with a lot
of center-right voters that otherwise would have voted Republican,” said
Dan Senor, a former
Bush administration official who advised Mr. Romney’s campaign. “And
the environment today is even more intensely populist. If Trump were to
run as an independent, who knows what impact he could have in what will
otherwise be a close election?”
That
possibility, said Thomas M. Davis, a former Republican congressman from
Virginia, is reason enough for the party not to attack Mr. Trump.
“You’ve got to keep him
in the tent,” Mr. Davis said. “He just wreaks havoc, and every vote he
takes comes out of our hide.”
With
the party’s first debate scheduled for Aug. 6, Republicans are
absorbing the likelihood that Mr. Trump, and his parade of provocations,
will be on stage. Fox News
has set criteria for participation primarily on the candidates’
standing in national polls, and Mr. Trump is now comfortably ensconced
in the top 10.
“He’s
100 percent going to do the debates,” said Michael Cohen, an adviser to
Mr. Trump. “I believe he’s either leading or tied for first place in
the polls, and certainly
qualifies to have a seat on the stage.”
Mr.
Cohen said Mr. Trump was aware that party bosses were wringing their
hands over his presence in the field. “They fear him because he’s not
part of the establishment,”
Mr. Cohen said.
Some
Latino Republican officials said they were dumbfounded by the
reluctance of other Republicans to deliver full-throated rebukes of Mr.
Trump — and suggested the debates
might provide that opportunity.
“The
Republican Party is going to have to be much more aggressive in dealing
with him,” said Hector V. Barreto, who has advised every Republican
presidential campaign
since 2000. “And I would expect my party to do that, to call him out.”
He
added: “Maybe this is our Sister Souljah moment when we say, ‘He is not
a Republican, he does not represent us, he needs to get off the stage.’
”
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