Republicans are sprinting to shape up Donald Trump’s presidential campaign before the party’s national convention in three weeks, even as leading members of the party carry a deep antipathy or outright opposition to his claim on the Republican Party nomination.
His campaign chairman on Sunday said there is a hiring spree in 16 states and the campaign is working with the Republican National Committee to solidify other matters.
Paul Manafort said Trump is not all that involved in the race to organize an offensive against Democrat hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton and catch up to her massive fundraising advantage.
“The good thing is we have a candidate who doesn’t need to figure out what’s going on [inside the campaign] in order to say what he wants to do,” Manafort said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “We have our campaign plans in place. We have our budgets in place.”
What he described as a “new phase” for the campaign — a shift from the primaries to the general election — was a forced reshuffling of an effort hobbled for weeks by infighting, Trump’s statements about a judge’s ethnicity and a massive fund raising deficit to Clinton’s cash-raising Goliath.
Trump began this month with US$1.3 million in the bank, less campaign cash than many congressional candidates. The US$3 million he collected last month in donations is about one-tenth what Clinton raised.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Sunday said that Trump cannot win the presidency unless he can compete with Clinton on the financial front.
“He needs to catch up, and catch up fast,” the Republican said on ABC’s This Week.
McConnell refused to say whether Trump is qualified to be president, and he suggested that the Republican Party platform would not reflect Trump’s ideas, including restrictions on Muslim immigration to the US.
A few hundred delegates to the Republican National Convention are pushing to change the rules and make it possible for them to vote for someone other than Trump. The Cleveland gathering begins in three weeks.
Some rebel delegates and other anti-Trump party operatives on Sunday night held a 40-minute conference call that was monitored by The Associated Press in what was a combination pep talk and strategy review.
However, the Trump campaign and many top Republican officials are working to defeat the anti-Trump forces, including lobbying delegates.
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