Trump: Hey, Maybe I’ll Try To Get Rid Of Reince Priebus

It’s bad enough that Donald Trump incessantly lies; it’s compounded by his incessant whining. He really believed it when he said last August, “I keep whining and whining until I win,” and as Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro wrote almost two weeks ago, “the whining isn’t stopping anytime soon.” As Trump has been whining about the delegate selection process for weeks, it seems Shapiro was spot-on.

Now Trump is whining that he might try to replace RNC Chairman Reince Priebus at the GOP national convention. The Washington Post, interviewing Trump, reported, “Trump left open the possibility that he would seek to install his own allies at the RNC should he accrue the 1,237 delegates required to win the nomination by the time primary voting ends. Asked in the interview whether he would retain RNC Chairman Reince Priebus in that scenario, Trump replied: “I don’t know. I haven’t made the determination.”

Trump’s ostensible reason for ousting Priebus was that he felt the convention would be “showbiz” enough, asserting, “It’s very important to put some showbiz into a convention, otherwise people are going to fall asleep. We don’t have the people who know how to put showbiz into a convention.”

But as Ed Morrissey of HotAir points out:

Hold a floor vote that matters. Want it more exciting? Have multiple floor votes and put some real tension in the convention. That would eliminate the phoniness and lack of real risk that makes most of the conventions boring to those watching on television. However, since that scenario would spell disaster for Trump’s hopes of winning the nomination, it would seem odd that he’d wish for interesting times in Cleveland.

Since Priebus, as party chair, couldn’t be moved out before the election, Trump would be doing himself a disservice by removing him, as he could lend Trump support in the general election, which, according to polls, Trump would badly need.

Priebus studied the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign and decided that the lack of a ground game killed Romney’s chances; as a result, he helped create The Republican Leadership Initiative (RLI). As Priebus noted, The RLI “hire[s] people from the communities that we want to influence, from the community to stay in the community, to then meet metrics that we set.That means one-on-one meetings for that community, and that means not just necessarily sitting around talking about fracking and clean coal; it means having a pizza party, bringing a band in, once in a while giving hot dogs out and talking to people, and then going to community events.”

That structure that Priebus built would be of inestimable value to Trump, whose ground game is poor. As Allahpundit notes, “Who’s better positioned than Reince to squeeze money out of Republican billionaires who are lukewarm about Trump? Reince is his pipeline to establishment checkbooks. He’d be a fool to cut that pipeline when he’ll be desperate to raise money to keep pace with Hillary.”

Trump’s whining about the delegate system being unfair is particularly ironic, since his share of the popular vote is actually smaller than his share of delegates.

“Trump’s out of his f***ing mind.”

Elaine Kamarck, expert on primary system, commenting on Trump’s whining over the process

Yahoo News asked Elaine Kamarck, an expert in the primary process, her opinion of Trump’s whining that the system is “rigged” because it’s not a direct democracy that crowns plurality winners. She answered bluntly:

Trump’s out of his f***ing mind. Every single presidential candidate except for him knows what this system is. It’s not corrupt. It’s the system by which the parties pick their nominee. Parties are protected under the First Amendment’s freedom of assembly. No American is forced to participate.

Parties are institutions. They have an interest in preserving their brand. Coca-Cola doesn’t let Pepsi participate in their brand. Republicans don’t let Democrats participate in their brand. This is a party decision, and parties make these decisions based on their institutional health. Meaning, if you put someone at the top of the ticket that is so unpopular that you lose the House of Representatives, you’re not doing the right thing for your party.