Donald Trump “has some ideas for how to jazz up the Republican National Convention, and he previewed one at a rally on Friday evening: a ‘winner’s evening’ of sports celebrities and champions addressing the convention rather than politicians,” the New York Times reports.
He said he wanted to have them all address the convention as examples of “winners,” rather than “these people, these politicians who are going to get up and speak and speak and speak.”
“There’s no question in my mind, he will never release his tax returns. He will follow one excuse after another to say why he can’t.”
— Mitt Romney, quoted by The Hill, insisting there is a “bombshell” in Donald Trump’s tax returns.
Politico: “Clinton’s team also prepared a Twitter trap for her rival last week, when she delivered a blistering speech in San Diego that denounced Trump’s worldview as a series of ‘bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies.’ When Trump tweeted that she was telling tall tales — ‘She made up things that I said or believe but have no basis in fact. Not honest!’ — her account dryly responded, ‘You literally said all those things,’ linking to a page that listed dozens of Trump’s statements on topics like torture, terrorism, Mexico, Russia and the pope.”
“According to the Clinton campaign, her tweet was viewed more than 2 million times.”
“I am not a racist, in fact, I am the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.”
— Donald Trump, quoted by The Hill.
“House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) faced tough questioning here Friday for his decision to endorse Donald Trump, and he tried to explain to an audience hostile to the New York mogul the factors that led him to back the presumptive GOP nominee,” the Washington Post reports.
“Ryan’s appearance briefly brought into the open the issue that has shadowed the annual ideas summit hosted by 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney — the alarm with which many establishment Republicans view Trump’s pending nomination and the potential damage it could do to the party in November and beyond.”
CNN: Romney retreat puts spotlight on Trump’s fundraising problem
Ron Brownstein: “Trump has reason to be surprised because until now, Republican leaders have mustered no more resistance to his provocations than momentary grumbling, followed by capitulation. Trump personally demeaned Marco Rubio during the campaign as contemptuously as one presidential candidate has ever belittled another; yet Rubio compliantly endorsed him. Ryan criticized Trump over his Duke remarks and his proposal to temporarily ban Muslim immigrants. But then, after briefly withholding his endorsement, he too fell into line (if perhaps only temporarily).”
“Throughout, even the Republican leaders most uneasy with Trump have recoiled from confronting him partly because he has demonstrated how much of the GOP coalition responds to a racially barbed message of defensive nationalism.”
Matthew Sheffield: “The time to stop Trump was in the 1990s, when the movement’s intellectuals were busy prostrating themselves before Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as they sought to remake the GOP into a party for white Christians. The time to stop Trump was during the George W. Bush administration, when Republicans swallowed the nonsense that deposing secular dictators was a great way to promote moderate Islam. The time to stop Trump was in 2009, when Sarah Palin was dumbing down conservatism into an alternative lifestyle that glorified anti-intellectualism. The time to stop Donald Trump was in 2013, when Ted Cruz was opportunistically telling Republican voters that obstreperousness was the equivalent of conservative philosophy.”
“2016 was far too late to stop the Trump Train.”
Elizabeth Drew: “It’s by now clear that the presidential election of 2016 is something larger than and apart from just another quadrennial contest for the highest office; it’s a national crisis. The crisis will last as long as there’s a possibility that someone totally unsuited for that office could win it. As a potential president, Donald Trump presents us with dilemmas and difficulties we’ve never faced before: his behavior is so out of line with what’s expected, and yet we don’t know what lies at the core of that behavior.”
“It’s one thing to say, as numerous people now have, that Trump doesn’t have the temperament or knowledge or curiosity that are the requirements for anyone who occupies the White House. Trying to envision the candidate in the Oval Office and asking whether he belongs there wasn’t required in any other presidential election in modern history.”
“The faction of the GOP that is unhappy with Donald Trump as the party’s presumptive nominee has one last plan to stop the mogul: staging an all-out delegate revolt at the Republican National Convention,” CNN reports.
“The far-fetched idea is the latest reflection of a campaign cycle that has been anything but ordinary, and stems from a continuing dissatisfaction among some conservative stalwarts with how Trump is behaving and running his campaign.”
Meanwhile, a Politico survey of GOP insiders finds that nearly 4 in 10 want to derail Trump at the convention.
For members: It’s Not Too Late to Dump Trump
New York Times: “It is no accident that Mrs. Clinton’s first campaign swing of the general election will take her next week to Ohio and Pennsylvania, and that her first joint rally with Mr. Obama will be in Wisconsin. Mr. Trump has long vowed to compete in traditionally Democratic-leaning Midwestern states, viewing the Rust Belt as the cornerstone of his electoral map.”
“Given Mr. Trump’s dismal standing with Latino voters, his prospects look tenuous in traditional swing states like Colorado, Florida and Nevada. That means his most realistic path to victory runs not only through Ohio, a perennial battleground, but also through states like Michigan and Pennsylvania that have not voted Republican in a generation. If Mrs. Clinton can fortify her support in these areas, Mr. Trump’s electoral map may disintegrate.”
Washington Post: “Trump’s failure to build a truly national campaign has left it to the GOP to run one on his behalf, while also trying to extinguish the regular political brush fires set off by the unpredictable candidate. The arrangement has intensified the burden on the Republican National Committee, forcing it to absorb core campaign tasks and testing whether it has improved the field and data capabilities that it fell short on in 2012.”
“The Trump campaign has yet to build out its headquarters or national staff, ending the primaries with just 70 employees compared with 732 on the payroll for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. His backstop is the party: The RNC has deployed 461 field staffers to 16 states — more than it has ever had on the ground at this point in an election — while spending $100 million on its data and digital operations since the last presidential campaign. The investments were pushed by Chairman Reince Priebus after the Democrats outgunned the GOP in 2012.”
Donald Trump “is pursuing a financial strategy that would leave him largely reliant on party spending that he won’t be able to fully control,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The presumptive Republican nominee on Thursday convened his and the Republican National Committee’s top fundraisers from each state at an event at the Four Seasons hotel here. Collectively, they will raise money for the Trump campaign, the RNC and 11 state parties. Mr. Trump is set to attend a series of fundraisers for the committee in the coming weeks.”
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) refused to say whether he thinks Donald Trump is fit to serve as president, the Washington Post reports.
Said Hogan: “I just said I’m not going to talk about Donald Trump anymore. I have nothing to do with it.”
“Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will ‘protect your job.’ But a USA Today analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them.”
“At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA Today Network, document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.”
Wall Street Journal: Donald Trump’s business plan left a trail of unpaid bills
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President Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders discussed at the White House “how to engage Sanders’ largely young, enthusiastic supporters and bring their ideas into Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Donald Trump,” Bloomberg reports.
“Afterward, Sanders said he thanked Obama and Vice President Joe Biden for remaining impartial through the Democratic primary campaign… He said he still planned to compete in the Washington, D.C., primary election on June 14, but that he looked forward to discussing with Clinton how they can work together to defeat Trump. He did not endorse her.”
Said Sanders: “Needless to say I am going to do everything in my power and I am going to work as hard as I can to make sure Donald Trump does not become president of the United States.”
Matt Bai: “The critical window between Trump’s effective nomination five weeks ago and next month’s convention is closing fast, and far from projecting more gravitas, Trump seems bent on making a fool of every credible Republican who has stepped up to tepidly endorse him… Here’s the thing Ryan and I both should have understood about Trump, and that now seems to me the central fact of his existence: He is a man tragically enslaved to his own neediness.”
“For Trump, insecurity is not a manageable motivator. It is the black hole that consumes him…He has an almost pathological obsession with ratings, polls, flattering profiles…Every criticism, every judgment, every potential obstacle seems to evoke in him a latent rage, a sense that the world – as embodied in Manhattan’s unbreachable elite – is condescending to him again… The black hole, left unchecked, could swallow the party’s electoral hopes and leave no trace.”
“Carl Paladino, the campaign’s co-chair in New York and the 2010 gubernatorial nominee, said they will also rely on conventional get-out-the-vote efforts and blanketing the upstate region with signs and bumper stickers,” CNN reports.
Said Paladino: “Upstate will give us a wave in this election, and my instruction from HQ is really simple. It’s one word: Win. And that’s what we intend to do.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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