Trump’s people are killing me.
They’ve been complaining for weeks about the way the Republican Party’s primary system works.
They claim that the elections are rigged because their hero won the most votes and delegates, but may not get the nomination anyway.
They argue that the matter is very plain: Trump is winning the most votes, so it will be fair if the person who receives the most votes wins the nomination.
As I wrote on Twitter earlier this week, if this is what Trump supporters think, then they should all support Al Gore.
In the 2000 election, Gore received 540,000 more votes than George W. Bush, but Bush won the White House because he won the most Electoral College votes.
The Founding Fathers and Framers knew what they were doing when they established the Electoral College to indirectly elect the president.
They did not want universal suffrage and they did not want Congress to choose the head of government.
And they certainly didn’t want a presidential candidate to be able to simply campaign in three or four massive states, get a huge number of votes, and then win.
The Founders intentionally set up the system so that each state received electoral votes in proportion to the number of its Representatives and Senators.
They wanted every part of the country to participate in the process of electing a president, not just one densely populated region or one sturdy faction of nutcases or extremists. (Not that Trump’s people were nutcases or extremists.)
The same principle of representation applies in the Republican Party’s primary system.
The Republican Party doesn’t want some guy to win the nomination by flying a Boeing 757 to a bunch of massive states like California, New York, Texas, Illinois, Ohio, and Florida, hosting campaign events for 20,000 people at the airport, and then flying home to Upper Upper Manhattan.
They want a candidate who will get out in the field, walk around the neighborhood, shake hands, and do the difficult grassroots work.
That’s what Ted Cruz did to win delegates while Trump gave TV interviews and traveled back and forth over Flyover Country.
Trump supporters may not like the primary election process because their hero is not winning, or they may believe there is fraud and manipulation.
But they have to understand that there is a process and it’s not about counting votes, it’s about counting delegates. That’s not that difficult to achieve.
Meanwhile, what worries me most these days is the way Trump is destroying his chances of uniting the Republican Party behind his candidacy in the fall, if he actually wins the nomination.
He spends parts of every speech and press conference announcing that he hopes his supporters won’t cause trouble if he doesn’t win. He hopes they won’t riot in the streets.
I’ve had enough of his veiled threats, because that’s what they are.
It’s time for Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to go to a press conference and tell Trump to back off.
Maybe threats and intimidation are part of Donald’s winning business strategy. But that’s not how it should work when you’re trying to win the Republican presidential nomination.
