Republican leaders fought to restore confidence in their process for picking a presidential nominee on Friday after an establishment backlash against Donald Trump and another insult-strewn television debate left the party facing unprecedented, and possibly existential, challenges to its unity.
“We are in territory that our party hasn’t seen,” conceded Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), at a meeting of conservative activists gathered outside Washington, when he was asked what would happen if there was no clear winner by the time of this summer’s GOP convention.
Priebus insisted the chances of the race needing to be decided by a so-called “brokered convention” – at which delegates would be freed from voting in line with state primary election results – were just 10-15%, but discussion of an apparent attempt by former nominee Mitt Romney to engineer such a scenario was met with loud boos from the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
Though strongly supportive of Texas senator Ted Cruz and mostly suspicious of Trump, the audience at CPAC appeared even more skeptical of any attempt to rig the nomination process by party leaders in Washington.
“There is no way that the people are not going to decide,” a defensive Priebus told CPAC. “Whoever the nominee is of our party, they are going to get the full backing and 100% support of the Republican party.”
Shortly after Priebus spoke, Trump announced he had pulled out of a planned appearance at CPAC on Saturday, something organizers claimed amounted to a “clear message to conservatives” and suggested the party was in actual fact now torn in three conflicting directions.
Romney’s dramatic intervention on Thursday – in which he attacked Trump as a “fraud” and urged Republicans to vote for whoever is closest to catching him in individual state primaries – is widely seen as an effort to ensure no candidate reaches the 1,237 delegates needed to secure a first-round victory.
If Marco Rubio is unable to rally enough establishment support to challenge Trump or Cruz, it is possible that Romney or his former running mate, House speaker Paul Ryan, could emerge as alternatives in the convention’s second round, when delegates are released from requirements to vote in accordance with the result of primary elections.
Under party rules, which have changed considerably since Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford last fought in a brokered convention in 1976, a nominee must receive majority support from at least eight states to be considered, but can gather up delegates from other candidates once this second round is reached.
The bitter back-room maneuvering was mirrored on Thursday by another debate in which all three leading candidates resorted to personal attacks and Trump was left defending the size of his penis on national television.
Rubio and Cruz ganged up for a second time in a row on the brash billionaire over his immigration stance, business record and overall temperament, but Trump swatted them away by condescendingly branding them “Little Marco” and “Lying Ted”.
In return, his rivals treated Trump like a belligerent child. At one point Cruz chastised his rival: “Count to 10, Donald. Count to 10.”
The debate in Detroit was, in many ways, emblematic of the Republican party’s core struggle, with time running short for the party establishment to blunt Trump’s path to the nomination.
The tone of schoolyard taunts rather than substantive discussion was set no more than 10 minutes after the candidates took the stage at the Fox Theatre, with Trump referencing the size of his genitalia during an exchange with Rubio over his hands.
Responding to personal attacks Rubio recently made on the campaign trail, in which the Florida senator mocked his opponent as having small hands, Trump held out his arms and exclaimed: “Look at those hands. Are those small?”
He went on to note that Rubio had used his hands as part of a metaphor for another part of his body, an argument Trump dismissed: “I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee.”
It marked the bleak beginning to an evening that vacillated between a shouting match and occasional discussion of more meaningful affairs, such as the hiring of foreign workers and the war against the Islamic State. Much of the debate focused on Trump, as the presumptive nominee, and the lawsuits against his now-defunct eponymous university as well as his sincerity on immigration.
Yet for all the viciousness and personal attacks, all the Republicans agreed to support whoever eventually becomes the nominee and fights the general election in November.
Rubio, whose campaign had pushed the “#nevertrump” hashtag and attacked Trump as “a con artist”, firmly committed for the first time to support the frontrunner if – as seems likely – he becomes the Republican party’s candidate. The Florida senator said of the two Democratic alternatives Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, “one is a socialist and the other is under investigation”, a reference to the ongoing controversy over the former secretary of state’s private email server. Both Ohio governor John Kasich and Cruz agreed with Rubio that they would back Trump if he was the nominee.
Rubio’s campaign later sought to downplay the significance of the senator’s pledge to support Trump if he were the nominee, insisting such a scenario simply wouldn’t become a reality.
“We continue to believe Donald Trump will not be the nominee,” Todd Harris, a senior adviser to Rubio, told the Guardian in the “spin room”.
“If Santa Claus were to appear in my house tonight, I would welcome him in and give him some milk and cookies. But it’s probably not going to happen.”
The only interruption to the bickering were sporadic interventions by Ohio governor John Kasich, who in the absence of Jeb Bush assumed the role of party elder. But his repeated attempts to stay above the fray rang largely incongruous throughout the event, despite his being joined by Cruz, who appealed to the audience at home: “Is this the debate you want playing out in the general election?”
While not as aggressive as Rubio in his attacks on Trump, Cruz did, however, team up with his Senate colleague to portray the reality TV star as essentially putting on a show on his signature issue: immigration and border security.
The two senators repeatedly criticized Trump over reports that he had said he was “flexible” on the issue of illegal immigration during an off-the-record discussion with the New York Times.
The frontrunner, who has made building a wall along the Mexican border and making Mexico pay for it a cornerstone of his campaign, insisted it was unfair to reveal what was discussed in an off-the-record setting.
“I think being off the record is a very important thing. I think it’s a very, very powerful thing,” said Trump, who has forcefully called for new libel laws to sue media companies.
But the businessman made clear there was room for compromise in a future Trump administration. “I will say, though, in terms of immigration – and almost anything else – there always has to be some, you know, tug and pull and deal,” Trump said. “I’ve never seen a very successful person who wasn’t flexible ... You have to be flexible, because you learn.”
Fox News’s moderators gave Trump’s policy positions even more scrutiny than in the past. Chris Wallace displayed a graphic which showed the frontrunner’s fuzzy mathematics on his proposals to reduce the federal budget and Megyn Kelly quizzed him on his flip flops on increasing H-1B visas for highly educated workers.
“I’m changing. I’m changing,” the frontrunner told Kelly in response. “We need highly skilled people in this country, and if we can’t do it, we’ll get them in.”
The statement not only contradicted a policy paper on his website, which states an increase in the visas “would decimate women and minorities”, but also the long held policy positions of Senator Jeff Sessions, who was named on Thursday as the chairman of Trump’s National Security Campaign Advisory Commission.
Despite their best efforts, it remained unclear whether either Rubio or Cruz had managed to make a dent in Trump’s candidacy. They at times faded into the background, and in other moments struck a patronising tone.
“Breathe, breathe, breathe,” Cruz told Trump at one point. “I know it’s hard.”
Rubio appeared to get beneath Trump’s skin with his relentless takedown of Trump University, highlighting the stories of students who he said had been victims of a scam, and a preference for foreign workers over Americans.
“You’re making your clothes overseas, and you’re hiring your workers overseas,” Rubio said.
A visibly angry Trump charged back by belittling his opponent, referring to Rubio as “this little guy” and dubbing him an absentee senator – but seldom responding to the essence of the charge.
Next milestones in the US presidential race
- Saturday 5 March: On Saturday, the Democrats hold contests in Kansas, Louisiana, and Nebraska, while the Republicans tussle over Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and Maine.
- Sunday 6 March: One day later, the Democrats hit Maine, while the Republicans hold a primary in Puerto Rico. That night Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will hold a primary debate in Flint, Michigan, where water in some homes has been found to contain dangerous amounts of lead, causing a national scandal.
- Tuesday 8 March: On Tuesday, the Democrats will caucus in Hawaii and hold a primary in Idaho, and both parties will hold primaries in Michigan and Mississippi.
- Wednesday 9 March: Then the Democrats head to Miami for a debate ahead of the all-important Florida primary the following week.
- Thursday 10 March: The Republicans follow them for a debate of their own the next night.
- Tuesday 15 March: As it often does in presidential elections, Florida is likely prove decisive this year, with Clinton hoping to make Sanders’s campaign seem untenable and Donald Trump eager to force Marco Rubio out of the race with a win in his home state. As the contest for delegates enters partial a winner-takes-all stage on the Republican side, Trump and Clinton could come out of 15 March with unassailable leads, setting up a final showdown in November. – Paul Owen in New York
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