The wheels of Donald Trump’s campaign do not go round and round. Apparently, they don’t even work, or represent what an actual campaign looks like.
A number of warning signs during the past month since Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee do not bode well for the Republican Party as Trump begins preparing for an ugly general election fight.
Instead of backing down from his inflammatory, anti-immigrant rhetoric that he’s displayed on the campaign trail the past year, Trump instead re-intensified his proposed plans to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States following the vicious hate crime June 12 in Orlando, Florida. Trump also criticized an American judge, who is presiding over a lawsuit against Trump University, for his Mexican ancestry.
The campaign has also faced divisions internally. On Monday, he fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, after previously supporting Lewandowski when the former campaign manager was accused of assaulting a reporter from Breitbart News Service in March.
Trump’s campaign can’t even put a solid fundraising operation together. According to CNN, the campaign has $1.3 million in the bank, versus Clinton’s total of $42 million.
Additionally, a group of delegates to the Republican National Convention are plotting a last-ditch attempt to dump Trump from the ticket, which confirms many in the Republican Party are still hesitant to support Trump. According to Yahoo, delegates from Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana and Washington are attempting to rally delegates in their respective regions to vote their conscience and not follow the results of their state’s primary or caucus at the convention.
These events all point to the fact the Republican Party is in disarray, just a month or so before its national convention in July.
With Trump’s victory in the Indiana primary May 3, he gained enough momentum to become the party’s presumptive nominee. While Clinton had a commanding lead in delegates over Sen. Bernie Sanders, it wasn’t until the day before the California primary she began to fully campaign against Trump.
What did Trump do with the one month’s advantage he had over Clinton to begin preparing for November? Instead of pivoting toward the general election, he repeated his divisive rhetoric, failed to significantly fundraise for his campaign and could not unify dissenting voices from the party hesitant to support him.
Trump faces a far different electorate in November than he did earlier in the campaign cycle.
While Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims and his comparisons of Mexicans to rapists were enough to carry him through the Republican primary, they will not hold up in swing states like Florida, where Latinos make up 15 percent of the state’s vote, according to NBC News.
Many top Republican figures, including 2012 nominee Mitt Romney and former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, will not be attending the national convention next month.
It’s time Republicans take a hard look at Trump and decide for themselves whether they want to support their nominee.
