As the disastrous weekend for the Republican Party continues, with Donald Trump threatening members of his own party, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus has apparently fled the deck of the Titanic, advising the members of his party to seek their own lifeboats:
That’s real leadership.
Of course, Priebus and the RNC were instrumental in blocking members of the party who wanted a votes on the rules at the RNC in the summer, a move that might have blocked Trump’s path to the nomination and opened the convention to another possible nominee. As stalwart conservative Senator Mike Lee commented bitterly at the time, “I have never in all my life, in six years in the Senate, seen anything like this. There’s no precedent for this in parliamentary procedure. Somebody owes us an explanation.”
And it was Priebus who was so afraid of Trump mounting an independent campaign that he refrained from slamming him after Trump’s proposed Muslim ban last year. Trump was so confident that Priebus was terrified of him that he tweeted this:
“Priebus cancels TV appearances, advises RNC staffers to ‘do what’s best for them.'”
Alex Baker
For Priebus to abandon steering the Republican ship would not be not surprising; he has never demonstrated his ability to confront Trump in any significant way, and caught between Trump’s desire to wreak vengeance on the party and any loyalty to those who still care about the principles that made the party great, it appears that he may be rowing away as fast as he can from the ship before it hits the iceberg.