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Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

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Friday, July 10, 2015

Republican Party Leaders Struggle to Rein In Donald Trump

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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