Meg Whitman, the CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, on Friday railed against US Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump at a closed-door meeting of Republicans in Park City, Utah, comparing him to demagogues like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Whitman’s comments came at former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s annual retreat of Republican donors, leaders and business executives, and were confirmed by three attendees who heard her remarks, but declined to be identified, because the meetings were private.
The comments first were reported by the Washington Post.
Trump’s candidacy and the divisions it is causing among leading Republicans was an undercurrent of the gathering. At the same retreat, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown moderated a panel with US House Speaker Paul Ryan and pressed him on his decision to support Trump, according to a fourth attendee.
Whitman, according to one of the people present, did not stop at comparing Trump with the Axis leaders. She also warned the gathering that if Republicans compromise on their principles this one time to win an important election, they would be entering fraught territory.
“What happens next time?” Whitman asked, implying it could lead to more compromises and more candidates like Trump.
A representative for Whitman did not respond early on Saturday to a request for an interview about her remarks at the retreat.
Whitman, who ran for governor of California in 2010 and was Romney’s 2012 finance cochairwoman, was part of a group of major donors who mounted an effort to stop Trump during the primaries through paid advertising.
She has been explicit about her disdain for him.
“I won’t be voting for Donald Trump,” she told CNBC in March. “Look at the comments he’s made about women, about Muslims, about reporters. It’s just repugnant.”
The group at the retreat represented a mix of Republicans, divided between those who have said they cannot support Trump, like Romney, and those who have grudgingly endorsed him, like Ryan, who was Romney’s running mate in 2012.
In an e-mailed statement, Trump dismissed Whitman’s comments.
“I never met Meg Whitman, but the job she is doing at Hewlett Packard is not a very good one,” Trump said. “Based on the disastrous campaign she ran in California, and the tens of millions of dollars she wasted, I have learned a lot from her. I do not want her support.”
Whitman spent US$140 million of her own money in her unsuccessful campaign for governor.
Speaking at a rally on Saturday in Tampa, Florida, Trump also attacked Romney, calling him “a choker” and saying he “didn’t work like he should have worked” when he was the nominee in 2012.
Once Romney lost, Trump added, he should have gone “off into the sunset.”
“You don’t sit there jealous and sick to your stomach,” he said.
Dan Scavino, the social media director and senior adviser on the Trump campaign, on Saturday also criticized Ryan on Twitter, linking to an article on a conservative Web site that accuses the speaker of harming his own party, complete with the headline “Paul Ryan is the reason the GOP is losing America.”
If the attendees were mixed on Trump, they were decidedly bullish on the party’s 2012 ticket. The two largest applause lines were statements that “Mitt Romney should have been president” and that “Paul Ryan should run for president,” one of them said.
For those unwilling to support Trump, there was talk of writing in Romney, simply not voting in the presidential race or even supporting Gary Johnson, the US Libertarian Party’s nominee.
Brown, who now runs an education Web site, is married to Dan Senor, who was an adviser to Ryan, and their two sons know the Republican leader. Turning to him at the panel discussion, Brown told Ryan that one morning, one of her sons had asked why he had endorsed Trump, expressing his disappointment.
What was she supposed to tell her child, she asked Ryan.
The attendee present for the exchange said Ryan appeared slightly rattled, but handled the question well.
He said Ryan had explained that while he understood the disagreement among Republicans, he believed that his decision to support Trump would be better for the Republican Party in the long term.
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