Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican U.S. presidential nominee, is complaining that some Republicans are trying to thwart the official declaration of his nomination at next month's national party nomination convention.
Some delegates to the convention in the midwestern city of Cleveland, Ohio, say they want to change the party's rules to allow delegates to vote for someone other than the brash billionaire real estate mogul, who surged past 16 other Republican candidates in months of state-be-state party nominating contests to give him a majority of pledged delegates at the convention.
Unfavorable opinions
But Trump's opponents say the one-time television reality show host does not represent the Republicans' traditional conservative policy positions and that his intemperate comments about women, Muslims and Mexicans make him unacceptable as the Republican standard bearer.
Trump's detractors also point to recent national polls showing that big majorities of voters view him unfavorably and that the likely Democratic nominee, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is pulling further ahead of him five months before the November 8 election.
On Saturday, Trump characterized former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, one of his former presidential challengers, and a second one-time rival he did not name as "a couple of guys that were badly defeated and they're trying to organize maybe like a little bit of a delegate revolt."
Neither Bush nor Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Trump's closest rival before ending his presidential run in early May, has endorsed Trump, but he offered no evidence that Bush and Cruz were leading a convention delegate revolt.
"Who are they going to pick?" Trump asked supporters at a campaign rally in Nevada about an alternative to his candidacy. "I beat everybody. But I don't mean beat — I beat the hell out of them."
Trump, running for elected office for the first time, said, "It would be helpful if the Republicans could help us a little."
Trump on Sunday told CBS's Face the Nation that Republican lawmakers in Congress who have expressed doubts or outright opposition to his candidacy "should do their jobs... and let me run for president."
Opposition
Numerous Republican officials have voiced tepid support for his candidacy or rejected it outright, including the party's 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, who has been outspoken in his opposition to Trump's nomination.
Trump said that if Republicans don't unite to support his candidacy he would stop fundraising on behalf of his campaign and the national party. Instead, Trump said, he would resume self-funding much of his campaign as he did during the party nomination campaign.
Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, celebrated the arrival Saturday of their second grandchild as their daughter Chelsea gave birth to a boy, Aidan Clinton Mezvinsky. The happy grandparents said they were "all over the moon" and "grateful for our many blessings."
via Voice of America http://ift.tt/24ZaoXi
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