New York Times
Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman
July 9, 2015
The
Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, faced with
growing pressure from inside the party to quiet Donald J. Trump, called
the provocative developer-turned-presidential
candidate on Wednesday and asked him to speak in more measured tones.
Days
of round-the-clock cable news coverage of Mr. Trump’s incendiary claims
about Mexican rapists and criminals coming across the border forced Mr.
Priebus to show alarmed
Republicans that he was taking action.
“The
chairman had a private conversation with Mr. Trump, as he does with all
of our candidates pursuing the nomination,” said Sean Spicer, a senior
aide at the Republican
National Committee, who said Mr. Priebus was returning Mr. Trump’s call
from last week. “It spanned several areas, including his recent
comments about illegal immigration. The call lasted no longer than 20
minutes.”
That
issue has become a dominant topic at insider dinners, on phone calls
between members of the Republican National Committee and in the offices
of the cable news networks
planning to air debates among the candidates.
“Trump
is just dominating the race right now, he’s sucking the air out of this
thing,” said Thomas M. Davis, a former Republican congressman from
Virginia. “Our candidates
are all being forced to react to his comments.”
Mr.
Trump, in an interview Thursday, characterized the call as
“congratulatory” over his rise in recent polls, saying that Mr. Priebus
at one point told him, ‘If you could
tone it down – I know that’s tough – but if you could tone it down,
that wouldn’t be bad.’”
With
Mr. Trump rising in opinion polls and appealing to Republican activists
hungry for a pugilist, officially neutral officials like Mr. Priebus
are reluctant to publicly
criticize him, let alone call for him to be barred from the party’s
initial debate in Cleveland next month.
And it increasingly appears certain that Mr. Trump will be on the stage for that first face-off.
Fox
News, which is hosting the Aug. 6 Republican debate, has set criteria
for participation primarily on the candidates’ standing in national
polls. Thanks in part to
an avalanche of news coverage in recent weeks, Mr. Trump is now
comfortably ensconced in the top 10 and likely to make the cut.
Some
Republicans, according to three people briefed on the debate planning,
have nudged Fox to clarify its broad requirement that candidates file
“all necessary paperwork.”
They are said to be seeking a specific reference to the personal
financial disclosure that presidential candidates must submit to the
Federal Election Commission within 30 days of beginning their
candidacies, the theory being that Mr. Trump would be unwilling
to disclose his full worth.
But
several candidates, including Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida,
have asked for an extension before they file their financial
disclosures, meaning that enforcing
such a standard would eliminate other hopefuls and not simply Mr.
Trump, who insists he will file the disclosure and will not ask for an
extension.
“Fox
News has never wavered from the initial debate criteria we set forth,”
said Michael Clemente, executive vice president at the network, who is
overseeing the debates.
“As we have said from the beginning, part of that criteria involves
filing ‘all necessary paperwork with the F.E.C.’ The F.E.C., as is well
known, requires that presidential candidates file a financial disclosure
statement as part of that paperwork.”
That is exactly what worries some of the Republicans involved in the debate process.
Matt
Borges, the chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, is uneasy about the
specter of offering Mr. Trump a podium for his views while denying one
to the candidate who
is the governor of the state where the forum is being held, John R.
Kasich, who is expected to announce his candidacy this month.
“It’s
hard to be terribly excited about what he’s had to say so far,” Mr.
Borges, a Kasich supporter, said of Mr. Trump. “But if he qualifies and
he’s there, I guess it
will be up to other folks onstage to offer a different point of view.”
Privately,
Mr. Borges has been even more pointed in conversations with Mr. Priebus
and other party officials, pleading for some sort of intervention over
Mr. Trump.
Mr.
Priebus is said to be sympathetic to Mr. Borges’s complaints, but party
officials say he is unwilling to step in publicly to confront Mr.
Trump. Even if he were, it
is unclear what he could to do persuade Fox to keep Mr. Trump off the
air. It is the networks, not the Republican National Committee, that
determine which candidates appear in debates.
Mr.
Spicer, who has been working on the forums, said the committee faced
legal barriers in trying to determine who was invited, as well as
“slippery slope” political risks
when it comes to including or excluding participants.
Aides to Mr. Trump are confident he will participate next month.
“He’s
100 percent going to do the debates,” Michael Cohen, an adviser to Mr.
Trump, said in an interview before the phone call with Mr. Priebus. “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 concerned about his presence in the field.
“They
fear him because he’s not part of the establishment,” Mr. Cohen said.
“He’s not beholden to special interests and large donors.”
Influential people in the party argue otherwise.
“For
years, Donald Trump has wanted to run for president in the worst way —
and now he is,” said Scott Reed, the top political adviser to the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce.
At
the very least, though, Mr. Borges and Steve Duprey, a member of the
Republican National Committee from New Hampshire and the head of its
panel handling the debates,
are pushing the networks to offer more clarity on the standards to
determine who is in the forums.
More
broadly, there is an evident sense of regret among some Republicans
that, despite the party committee’s having agreed to the national
polling threshold set by the
networks, high-profile figures such as Mr. Kasich, Senator Lindsey
Graham of South Carolina and former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas could be
barred from appearing in the initial prime-time debate.
“We
did suggest to all our media partners that they include the biggest
possible field of candidates and use state polls,” Mr. Duprey
Some
of the campaigns, especially those counting on their candidates to
break out with strong debate performances, are unhappy about having to
compete with Mr. Trump for
access, attention or both. But for now they are reluctant to attack Mr.
Trump or the networks.
John Weaver, Mr. Kasich’s chief strategist, called Mr. Trump’s remarks about Mexicans “not healthy.”
“So
yeah, you’re concerned about what harm can be done to the party,” he
said. “But I don’t know anybody who thinks they can control what Mr.
Trump says or doesn’t say,
so I’m not going to worry about it.”
Mr.
Davis, the former congressman, said the threat of Mr. Trump running as
an independent was reason enough for the party not to declare war on Mr.
Trump.
“You’ve
got to keep him in the tent,” Mr. Davis said. “He’s Ross Perot as an
independent. He just wreaks havoc, and every vote he takes comes out of
our hide.”
That
sentiment arose last month when Mr. Priebus attended a regular
Washington dinner meeting that features some of the capital’s leading
Republican elected officials,
strategists and lobbyists.
Some
of the Republicans who were gathered at the Hay-Adams hotel argued that
Mr. Trump would mar the debates, garnering attention with bluster and
ensuring that the moderators
would spend time asking the other candidates to respond to his
inevitable provocations.
But
others in the room noted that by trying to bar a figure who feeds off
publicity, they would only turn him into a political martyr and, worse,
tempt him toward that
third-party run.
No
consensus was reached, and Mr. Priebus, who has sought to bring a
measure of order to the party’s presidential debates, left with no clear
directive, according to party
officials with knowledge of the meeting.
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