Ronna McDaniel promises Donald Trump will abide by the party’s endorsement: Much as was the case in the 2016 primaries, the chair of the Republican National Committee believes that Donald Trump will promise to abide by the party’s presidential nomination. There’s little reason to believe that’s actually true.
The GOP Has a Donald Trump Problem
Back in August of 2015, early on in Donald Trump’s quest for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump was the only candidate in the first Republican presidential debate to refuse to declare that he would support the eventual Republican nominee.
The fear at the time was that Donald Trump if denied the GOP nomination, would pursue an independent bid.
The following month, due to a push from then-RNC chairman Reince Priebus, Donald Trump agreed to sign a pledge promising to support the eventual nominee, even agreeing to hold up the signed pledge in a Trump Tower press conference.
“I will be totally pledging my allegiance to the Republican Party and the conservative principles for which it stands,” Donald Trump said in September 2015.
By the following March, Donald Trump had backed off that pledge to back the nominee.
“No, I don’t anymore,” Trump said in a CNN town hall hosted by Anderson Cooper, a time when the only remaining candidates were Trump, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz. “No, we’ll see who it is.”
The point later became moot, as Donald Trump himself won the nomination and the presidency.
Now, with Trump once again running for president in what is shaping up as a crowded Republican field, it appears the current RNC chair is hoping for a similar pledge from Trump – and believes that this time, he means it.
GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who was recently re-elected to the position after a contentious election, gave a CNN interview over the weekend in which she claimed, among other things, that Trump will accept the results of the Republican primary contest.
“We can’t be so vicious and vitriolic with each other that we don’t want to support each other in the end,” she said in the interview with Dana Bash.
“I’m already working to bring the committee together but I think this is a symbol of our party.”
McDaniel also claimed that all candidates will be required to endorse the eventual nominee, in order to be allowed on the debate stage.
“We’re not going to defeat Joe Biden if we get in this tit for tat of, ‘I’m not going to support this nominee or I’m not going to support this one.’ So that’s why we want to put this to bed early,” she said. The first GOP primary debate is set for this August, in Milwaukee.
Trump, in a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt last month, was asked whether he would back the party’s nominee and answered that it would depend on who that nominee was.
Furthermore, McDaniel also said in the CNN interview that the party would accept the results of the 2024 election- another thing that Trump isn’t exactly known for doing.
“I will say the path forward is a united Republican Party,” McDaniel told Bash. “We’ve got to find our way to be there.”
Of course, as was the case in 2015 and 2016, there’s absolutely nothing to stop Donald Trump from pledging prior to the debates to endorse the eventual nominee, and then reneging on that pledge in the future if, say, Ron DeSantis beats him for the nomination.
The other issue is that the pledge also goes the other way, in that anyone running for the nomination on a never-Trump line would have to pledge to support Trump should he become the nominee.
While Trump was often very brutal towards his 2016 opponents, most of them ultimately backed him in the general election.
Jeb Bush later announced that he would not vote for Trump in that election, although Cruz, Marco Rubio, and other former opponents endorsed him.
Some potential presidential candidates, like former Rep. Liz Cheney, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, have made opposition to Trump defining features of their political identities, so it’s hard to imagine them endorsing Trump.
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Expertise and Experience: Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
