The Never Trump movement is once again calling for the Republican Party to dump Donald Trump at its convention in Cleveland.
Republican lawmakers say that is ridiculous.
“I think that’s a pipe dream,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told TPM on Thursday.
Prominent Republicans have been distancing themselves from Trump all week after he suggested that U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel was biased against him in a case involving Trump University because the judge was “Mexican.” The statement forced House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) to call the comment “racist” during his roll out of a GOP poverty plan Tuesday and brought Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) to rescind his support of the Republican nominee.
But, as they have throughout Trump’s rise, Republican senators are beyond skeptical that anything can be done now to stop Trump despite the calls from conservative pundits like Erick Erickson and Hugh Hewitt. After a spring of contested convention chatter that never materialized, most lawmakers–even those at risk of losing their re-elections because of Trump– have finally accepted their 2016 election fate.
“People need to wake up and realize, he got more votes than any Republican in any primary in history, that the last big vote day .. .he won five East Coast states and he won every county in those states. There may be individuals that would prefer a different candidate. Voters are who have made Donald Trump our nominee, and we need to respect that,” Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) told TPM.
Burr faces re-election in 2016 in a state that Mitt Romney won by only two points in 2012.
“The people have spoken,” Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA), another member up for re-election, told TPM. “It’s not the politicians’ party … For a bunch of elected people to decide they know better would be a mistake for the party’s future.”
But conservatives pushing to get rid of Trump argue that having the businessman on the top of the ticket imperils the party’s future in an even greater way. Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote in the Washington Post Thursday that “it is dawning on Republican candidates and elected officials that condemning racist remarks while supporting the racist candidate requires an unsustainable level of cognitive dissonance.”
Trump wants to ban Muslims from the country, he’s attacked a federal judge on the basis of race, and would seek to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, all in an election year when Republican officials had hoped to make inroads with one of the country’s fastest growing minority populations.
At one point, conservatives hung their hopes on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the leader of the 2013 shutdown over Obamacare and a tea party hero, to challenge Trump. On Thursday, even Cruz wouldn’t comment on if he’d be willing to try and wrestle the nomination from Trump at the convention now.
“I will leave political punditry to those who get paid for doing that,” Cruz said.
Most Republican senators doubted the rules allowed dumping Trump as the nominee at this stage in the game.
“The delegates decide that,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). “It doesn’t seem like that is practical because the delegates have been named.”
Those who have never supported Trump, say there is only one strategy left: containment.
“I don’t see how that works,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) “We’ve made our bed. Now, we’re gonna have to lie in it.”
