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Without Priebus, Trump Is a Man Without a Party
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/30/trump-priebus-unbound-215440
By ousting Reince Priebus, the president is severing one of his few remaining ties to the GOP.
Reince Priebus looked battered. It was Monday, October 10—the morning after the final presidential debate—and our eyes met as I boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from St. Louis to Washington, D.C. It had been an extraordinary weekend: On Friday night, the biggest bombshell of the 2016 campaign dropped when the Washington Post published a decade-old audio recording on which Donald Trump made lewd comments about groping women. Speaker Paul Ryan disinvited Trump from a unity event in Wisconsin scheduled for the following day, and Priebus, then the chairman of the Republican National Committee, quietly made the case to Trump and his associates that he should quit the race. Trump refused. The Sunday debate, 48 hours after the tape’s release, was dominated by discussion of Trump’s history with women. He dismissed his recorded remarks—“grab them by the pussy,” Trump had said, boasting that his celebrity status allowed him to get away with aggressive advances on the opposite sex—as “locker room talk.”
Priebus occupied a window seat, a pair of staffers to his left. The chair behind him sat empty; my instinct was to grab it and start firing questions through the slit at his left shoulder. But after studying Priebus—the slouched posture, the uncharacteristically rumpled suit, the groaning bags under his eyes—I decided it might backfire. Whether it was pity or strategy, or a bit of both, I settled in two rows back, deciding it would be better to talk upon landing in Washington.
It was an eventful flight: Ryan, while we were at 30,000 feet, had told House Republicans on a conference call that he wouldn’t be defending the president anymore—and urged them to do whatever was necessary to survive in their districts. Meanwhile, there were reports Priebus would hold his own call with RNC members to discuss ousting Trump. Priebus was understandably not keen to discuss any of these developments. But he seemed to appreciate my earlier gesture. When I greeted him, just beyond the entrance to the jet bridge, his staffers tried to shut down any interview. Priebus told them to back off. “It’s OK,” he said, offering the sort of forced half-smile you see at hospital visitations. “Go ahead. Shoot.” We walked out of the terminal and past the baggage claim, covering all of it: the tape, the debate, Ryan, the RNC and what (if anything) it could do at this point. Priebus asked twice to speak off the record, which I allowed. But his most telling comment—in retrospect—came at the end of our conversation, after he explained that the RNC had no mechanism to remove Trump as its nominee.
“Look,” he said, stepping into the sunlight outside Reagan National Airport, his staffers loading up an idling black Chevrolet Suburban. “We don’t get to pick the nominee. And we don’t get to just walk away from him, either.”
By ousting Reince Priebus, the president is severing one of his few remaining ties to the GOP.
Reince Priebus looked battered. It was Monday, October 10—the morning after the final presidential debate—and our eyes met as I boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from St. Louis to Washington, D.C. It had been an extraordinary weekend: On Friday night, the biggest bombshell of the 2016 campaign dropped when the Washington Post published a decade-old audio recording on which Donald Trump made lewd comments about groping women. Speaker Paul Ryan disinvited Trump from a unity event in Wisconsin scheduled for the following day, and Priebus, then the chairman of the Republican National Committee, quietly made the case to Trump and his associates that he should quit the race. Trump refused. The Sunday debate, 48 hours after the tape’s release, was dominated by discussion of Trump’s history with women. He dismissed his recorded remarks—“grab them by the pussy,” Trump had said, boasting that his celebrity status allowed him to get away with aggressive advances on the opposite sex—as “locker room talk.”
Priebus occupied a window seat, a pair of staffers to his left. The chair behind him sat empty; my instinct was to grab it and start firing questions through the slit at his left shoulder. But after studying Priebus—the slouched posture, the uncharacteristically rumpled suit, the groaning bags under his eyes—I decided it might backfire. Whether it was pity or strategy, or a bit of both, I settled in two rows back, deciding it would be better to talk upon landing in Washington.
It was an eventful flight: Ryan, while we were at 30,000 feet, had told House Republicans on a conference call that he wouldn’t be defending the president anymore—and urged them to do whatever was necessary to survive in their districts. Meanwhile, there were reports Priebus would hold his own call with RNC members to discuss ousting Trump. Priebus was understandably not keen to discuss any of these developments. But he seemed to appreciate my earlier gesture. When I greeted him, just beyond the entrance to the jet bridge, his staffers tried to shut down any interview. Priebus told them to back off. “It’s OK,” he said, offering the sort of forced half-smile you see at hospital visitations. “Go ahead. Shoot.” We walked out of the terminal and past the baggage claim, covering all of it: the tape, the debate, Ryan, the RNC and what (if anything) it could do at this point. Priebus asked twice to speak off the record, which I allowed. But his most telling comment—in retrospect—came at the end of our conversation, after he explained that the RNC had no mechanism to remove Trump as its nominee.
“Look,” he said, stepping into the sunlight outside Reagan National Airport, his staffers loading up an idling black Chevrolet Suburban. “We don’t get to pick the nominee. And we don’t get to just walk away from him, either.”
There's still hope that eventually more Republicans will turn against him. Due to his Putin-related shenanigans, I'd like to see him become a man without a country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Without_a_Country
10 replies
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