Will GOP Elites Frighten The Trumpanzee Into Endorsing Paul Ryan?

When Le Trumpanzee started snarling about how the debates, the fire marshalls, the polls and the elections may be fixed, he may not have had in mind the reports that "senior RNC" members are now actively exploring how to replace him on the ballot. All that crackpot nonsense he's been spouting since he rode down the escalator with the mail-order bride just over a year ago, that they giggled about and even encouraged... and it's just now, 97 days before the election that the wise old men of the Republican Party are "getting serious?" These people, this elite of the right, thinks it is somehow deserving to run the country? No longer in contention for the VP slot, suddenly, the Newtster finds the Trumpster "unacceptable?" The Trumpanzee "is still behaving," he said, "like as though it was the primaries and there are 17 candidates. He has not made the transition... Some of what Trump has done has been very self-destructive." In a separate interview published this morning he added that "The current race is which of these two is the more unacceptable, because right now neither of them is acceptable. Trump is helping her to win by proving he is more unacceptable than she is... He cannot win the presidency operating the way he is now. She can’t be bad enough to elect him if he’s determined to make this many mistakes."

Yesterday's morning outrage-- following his boneheaded, pointless, self-destructive and perverse attacks on Paul Ryan, John McCain and Kelly Ayotte as "weak" just hours before-- was that he kept whining about the U.S. having all these expensive nuclear weapons that they never use. He asked a foreign policy advisor 3 times in an hour why we can't use nukes. Right after that Sweaty Little Marco Rubio-- currently trying to avoid campaigning with Trump in Miami (where Rubio is popular) and trying to limit the joint appearances to the Panhandle (where Rubio is not popular but Trump is)-- was at a press conference where he refused to re-assert his old fears that Trump is unfit to have his stubby little tiny fingers on the nuclear button. Rubio needs Trump in the Panhandle and some of the other more backward parts of the state if he's going to have any chance of keeping his seat in November.



But hopes of GOP elites to pressure Trump to drop out were quickly dashed when his campaign reported that they raised $80 million dollars in July and have $74 million cash on hand. Unless he can figure out a way to put the $74 million in his pocket, he's not dropping out-- not when he can spend that money on his own businesses and shifting it to Melania, Ivanka, Donald Jr., Eric and Barron. Republicans who are starting all the talk about him dropping out are basically the same elites who have opposed Trump-- ineffectively-- from day one.

Yes, Chuck Todd was correct yesterday when he delineated a really catastrophic half week from the Trumpanzee-- GOP, Trump go from 'unraveling' to 'break glass' mode. "Yesterday morning, we wrote that Donald Trump's campaign seemed like it was unraveling over his inexplicable clash with the Khan family. Twenty-four hours later, the word 'unraveling' seems like an understatement. Take a look at what's happened in the last 24 hours:"

• In a Washington Post interview, Trump declined to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan against his primary challenger
• He reiterated that he hasn't endorsed Sen. John McCain and said the onetime prisoner of war "has not done a good job for the vets"

• He slapped out at Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, saying "she has given me zero support"
• He suggested that Americans should pull their 401(k) funds out of the stock market
• He said he's "always wanted" to receive a Purple Heart but that having one gifted to him by a supporter was "much easier"
• He said that the handling of sexual harassment has "got to be up to the individual"
• He accused Khizr Khan of being "bothered" by his plan to keep terrorists out of the country, and said that he had no regrets about his clash with the family
• He appeared to feud with a crying baby during a rally
• He reiterated that "if the election is rigged, I would not be surprised"
• The sitting president of the United States publicly called Trump "unfit to serve" and urged Republicans to withdraw their support for him.
• Trump spokesman Katrina Pierson suggested that Obama and Clinton are to blame for the death of Humayan Khan, who died in 2004, when neither were in the executive branch at the time
• An ally of Paul Manafort told our colleague John Harwood at CNBC that the campaign chairman is "mailing it in," leaving the rest of the staff "suicidal."
• Sitting GOP congressman Richard Hanna, HP head Meg Whitman and former Christie aide Maria Comella all said they plan to vote for Hillary Clinton
• The Washington Post released a transcript of its full interview with Trump, indicating among other things that he paused five times to watch TV coverage in the middle of the sit-down
• A GOP source told NBC's Katy Tur that Reince Priebus is "apoplectic" over Trump's refusal to endorse Ryan and is making calls to the campaign to express his "extreme displeasure."

He then added that "Any one of these items would be problematic on a normal campaign day. This all happened since 8am yesterday. With all that, do we need to be asking a new question: Do Republicans go public with their hope that Trump withdraws from the race? We're at the point where there's GOP chatter about key Republicans coming out hard against their own nominee-- and especially eyeing Trump's falling polling numbers to gauge the point at which they need to come up with a 'break glass' backup plan to save down-ballot seats. Republicans have been hoping that Trump would change his ways for nearly the entirety of his campaign to no avail. (And for a GOPer, it's got to be hard to read the transcript of that Washington Post interview and come away not thinking that something drastic has to be done.) If you're a Republican, can you just un-endorse Trump, or do you take the next step to push the candidate to get out now for the good of the party?"

Someone at Trump Towers-- perhaps Barron?-- was smart enough to send out a memo to Trumpanzee surrogates called "Urgent Pivot" ordering all of them to stop talking about the Khan family. That's because Frank Luntz's focus groups are telling him that Trump can't recover from this one. The memo was signed by Scott Mason, the Trumpanzee director of congressional affairs and said "As usual, the media is working against our efforts and our messaging specifically as it relates to the tragic death of Capt. Humayun Khan. We are asking you to review and use the attached talking points in your daily messaging, including a release and/or statements you can put out in your social media immediately to support Mr. Trump and OUR message, that we must end radical Islamic terror so that soldiers like Capt. Khan, and all Americans, will be safe." It doesn't appear that Trump himself bothered to read the memo. Alexander Burns reports that it's fraying the ties between the Trumpanzee and the institutional Republican Party establishment.

Ignoring the pleas of his advisers and entreaties from party leaders in Washington, Mr. Trump only dug in further on Tuesday. He told a Virginia television station that he had no regrets about his clash with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of an Army captain killed in Iraq. And in an extraordinarily provocative interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Trump declined to endorse for re-election several Republicans who had criticized him, including the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, who both face primaries this month.

He also belittled Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, who had criticized his treatment of the Khans, for not being supportive of his campaign.

For days, Mr. Trump’s top advisers and allies have urged him to move on from the feud, which erupted when Mr. Khan criticized him at the Democratic convention, and focus instead on the economy and the national security record of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Yet, facing outcry on the left and right, Mr. Trump has insisted to associates that he has been treated unfairly by Mr. Khan, the news media and some Republicans, said people familiar with the campaign’s deliberations who insisted on anonymity to discuss them.

Republicans now say Mr. Trump’s obstinacy in addressing perhaps the gravest crisis of his campaign may trigger drastic defections within the party, and Republican lawmakers and strategists have begun to entertain abandoning him en masse.

...[Tumpanzee] advisers have impressed upon him for days that his clash with the Khans was counterproductive, urging him instead to show deference to them and train his attacks on Mrs. Clinton, people close to the campaign said. Emissaries from the Trump campaign who spoke with Republican lawmakers and party officials in Washington were given the same bracing assessment. A few Republicans in Washington even suggested that Mr. Trump should apologize to the Khans.

Mr. Trump has instead gone in the opposite direction, standing by his harsh treatment of the couple and brazenly antagonizing Washington Republicans.

Liesl Hickey, a Republican strategist who led the party’s defense of its majority in the House of Representatives in 2014, said lawmakers should feel liberated to split with Mr. Trump if their survival depended on it.

Ms. Hickey has quietly circulated a battle plan to Republican leaders and vulnerable members of Congress, calling for a sharpened focus on winning over wavering Republicans, moderates and women-- even if that means withdrawing support from Mr. Trump.

“Even if you were with Trump before, it doesn’t mean that now you necessarily need to stay with him,” she said.

Ms. Hickey, who has worked extensively with Republicans in swing districts, said the urgent imperative for many of them was “getting away from the national message.” She added, “Everybody who hasn’t fully kicked off their campaigns yet should be encouraged to do this.”

The Republican Party has not yet come close to abandoning Mr. Trump’s candidacy: Most of the lawmakers who have denounced him for fighting with the Khans have not said they will vote against him in the general election.

Even the Republicans assailed by Mr. Trump on Tuesday responded in muted language. Zack Roday, a spokesman for Mr. Ryan, said Mr. Ryan had not sought Mr. Trump’s endorsement and was confident that he would win his primary. Ms. Ayotte, who faces re-election in November, wrote on Twitter that she would “always stand up for our military families and what’s best for the people of New Hampshire.”

Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, has acknowledged the dispute with the Khans has harmed Mr. Trump, but he has pleaded with party leaders and donors to give Mr. Trump time to adjust to the general election, according to people briefed on Mr. Priebus’s conversations.

The Trump campaign has taken a few steps to recover its footing: Mr. Trump canceled a Thursday event in Plattsburgh, N.Y., a community with ties to the military in one of the country’s most heavily Democratic states. Trump strategists said the campaign would redouble its criticism of Mrs. Clinton’s support for military action in Iraq and Libya.

Takeaway: By the end of the day, one crazy, small-minded and self-centered Trumpazee had turned his latest set of imaginary grievances into an explosive confrontation with the leaders of his own party.