Who Says Trump Will Be the Nominee?
If Trump is convicted of any of the charges he’s currently facing in the New York ‘hush money’ trial, politically speaking he’s really dead. After all, he can continue to make the argument all he wants about how the Biden gang is using the trial to subvert the upcoming election, but how do you apply that argument to the 12 men and women sitting on the jury who will ultimately vote him either thumbs up or thumbs down? You don’t.
So, this is going to leave the GOP in a bit of quandary, because what has been a sort of behind-the-scenes rumble about Trump’s presence on the national ticket pulling down everyone else on the red team, the noise could become a lot louder when all the delegates and everyone else gets together on July 15 in Milwaukee to choose the electoral slate.
Under the current rules, just about all the delegates won by Donald Trump in the primaries are pledged to vote for him at least once. Now in fact, at this point most of the voters who always vote the red team say they will vote for Trump no matter what. But it’s not the Paty loyalists on either side who will determine the identity of the President in 2024. It’s the so-called ‘independent’ voters who appear increasingly skeptical of voting for a guy who might be leading the country from a jailhouse cell.
It also needs to be pointed out, and this is a point I never seem to hear from any of the so-called pundit experts who will really start shooting their mouths off when the campaign gets into high gear, that even though most of the delegates coming to Milwaukee are pledged to vote on the first nominating ballot for Trump, the committee which makes the rules covering the nominating process can change the whole definition of ‘pledged’ versus ‘unpledged’ delegates at any time.
Before you draw in a breath because you don’t believe what I just said, indulge me for a moment while I explain some basic facts about how politics and political parties exist and function in the good old United States.
Our two national parties (and all the other national political parties, for that matter) are not single organizations playing by one set of rules. In fact, the GOP and for that matter the Democrat(ic) Party are actually confederations of state organizations who set all the rules for how their party operates in each particular state.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking for one minute that the Republican National Committee has any real control, over say, the GOP state committee in Alaska, or Guam, or anywhere else.
In fact, at the beginning of each convention the delegates are asked to vote and approve the rules. Except what is somehow never mentioned is that the rules which are approved happen to cover only the activities of that particular convention itself. Once the convention ends and everyone goes home, effectively there are no rules governing how the party does anything until the next time it meets.
What does the RNC (and the DNC) do in those four years between national elections? They raise money which is given out to candidates running in off-year and national elections chosen by each party which operates in a single state.
The national committees also are clearing houses for people who want to work or volunteer for political campaigns, and they also send out daily messaging to the media outlets which promote their cause. Rush Limbaugh designed every, single daily radio show based on the list of ‘suggested’ topics he received by fax from the RNC.
So, the point of all this is that stacking up a mountain of so-called ‘bound’ delegates is almost a guarantee that the individual who shows up at the convention with a majority of delegates pledged to his candidacy is going to walk away from the convention with the grand prize.
But when was the last time that either major party nominated or even considered nominating a guy who has been charged with committing almost 100 felonies over the last ten years?
