Pointing fingers

Republicans point fingers: Who let Trump get this far?

With less than a week to go before Iowa, the GOP's blame game has already begun.

By Alex Isenstadt

With time running out until the first primary votes are cast, establishment Republicans have begun a ferocious round of finger-pointing over who is to blame for the party’s failure to stop Donald Trump.

The chiding, once limited to private conversations, is now erupting in public view — with campaigns, operatives, donors, party officials and conservative intellectuals arguing over why something hasn’t been done to stop the man who has been leading nearly every state and national poll since August. Trump, many in the GOP’s upper ranks are convinced, would lead the Republican Party to an epic defeat in November, with consequences all the way down the ballot.

“This whole thing is a disaster,” said Curt Anderson, a former Republican National Committee political director and veteran operative. “I think I’ll write a book about it.”

Receiving much of the blame is Right to Rise, the cash-flush super PAC that broke records when it announced last year that it had raised more than $100 million in support of Jeb Bush. The group has directed relatively little of that sum toward attacking Trump — instead focusing its efforts on taking down Bush’s establishment rivals, above all Marco Rubio. To date, the group has spent about $5 million on TV commercials going after Trump, while dropping four times as much in negative ads against Rubio. The latest spot, which came Tuesday, hammered Rubio over his messy financial history.

Right to Rise, with its nearly limitless resources, had the best chance to wage a concerted campaign to take down the real estate mogul, many are convinced — and they blame Mike Murphy, the group’s chief strategist, for missing the opportunity. While Bush often personally went after Trump on the campaign trail and in debates — even calling him a “jerk” and then cutting an ad about it — his super PAC usually hasn’t.

In recent days, those once-quiet complaints have become a roar. Stephen Hayes, an influential Weekly Standard columnist, blasted Right to Rise for a strategy that effectively “cleared the way for Trump.” Katie Packer, who served as Mitt Romney’s deputy campaign manager during the 2012 election and has been trying to orchestrate an anti-Trump effort, lamented that just 10 percent of the super PAC’s $100 million “could have had a significant impact.”

“Right to Rise has done more to advance the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump than they ever did for Jeb Bush,” said Joe Pounder, a senior Rubio adviser. “Donald Trump doesn’t need a super PAC. He's got Jeb’s.” (“I’m willing to bet we’ve spent more than any other Republican campaign or organization has to date,” Paul Lindsay, a Right to Rise spokesman, shot back.)

Yet others say it’s unfair to solely blame Bush — and that Rubio is just as culpable. Despite winning the support of an array of deep-pocketed donors, including hedge fund manager Paul Singer and tech titan Larry Ellison, Rubio has and his allies have done little to attack Trump. Of the $33 million that Rubio and the super PACs supporting him have spent on television ads, none of it has been against Trump. He rarely tweets about Trump, and when asked about him in interviews, Rubio tends to dodge the question.

“He has been afraid to criticize Trump for fear of being attacked unless directly put on the spot by a reporter,” said Tim Miller, a Bush spokesman.

Still others fault Ted Cruz, who spent months cuddling up to Trump in hopes of scooping up his supporters. Only this week, as he saw his lead slipping away in Iowa, did Cruz and several of his super PACs launch hard-hitting TV ads castigating the Manhattan billionaire as a New York liberal who couldn’t be trusted on hot-button social issues like abortion.

The anti-Trump barrage may be too little, too late, many Republicans fear.

“Cruz's crew should’ve done it. It was incredibly shortsighted. The longer [Trump] goes, the harder he is to kill,” said Brad Todd, a veteran Republican strategist who until recently worked for a super PAC that supported Bobby Jindal’s presidential campaign. “Now they are locked in a death match with a short clock, and their money is worth less than it would be when the air was clear and Trump's fans were just flirting.”

But it’s not just campaigns that are coming under fire — it’s also donors, many of whom were presented with the opportunity to go after Trump but didn’t pull the trigger. Among those pushing to launch a serious anti-Trump campaign was Alex Castellanos, a veteran GOP strategist who was a top adviser to Mitt Romney. Last year, Castellanos visited a number of top GOP donors, operatives and lobbyists in an attempt to find financial support for a proposed TV ad campaign that was to cost in the eight-figure range.

Often a carrying a personal laptop into meetings, Castellanos laid out a detailed plan for a negative ad blitz against Trump, casting him as a flawed strongman. Yet those familiar with the effort say Castellanos, who spent hours venturing into New York and Washington offices, was met with disinterest from donors, who gave a variety of reasons for not wanting to open their checkbooks. Some predicted that Trump would collapse by the sheer weight of political gravity. Others said they had business interests with the front-runner, or expressed fear of retribution.

“Some donors are wonderful, but others have been saps during this entire process,” said Anderson. “If you want to know how to lose elections, the first people who you should talk to are the Republican Party’s major donors.”

Much frustration has been directed at the RNC, which some believe has been pushed around by the party’s surprise poll-leader. Last year, many cringed when RNC Chairman Reince Priebus traveled to New York City to meet with Trump when he signed a pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee. And when the RNC dropped National Review last week as a sponsor for a forthcoming debate, fans of the magazine’s anti-Trump special issue saw fear at work.

“My sense is that most rational RNC members hope Trump is not our nominee but do not want to upset him in case he is the GOP nominee,” said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party and American Conservative Union chairman who supports Bush. “The challenge is that while the RNC and others play this strategy out, the odds improve that Trump will be the nominee without an organized opposition to his candidacy beyond his rivals in the primary.”

An RNC spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

There are worries among top Republicans, too, that the RNC is abandoning its post-2012 "autopsy," which urged the GOP to reach out to minority groups or risk decades in the political wilderness.

Sally Bradshaw, a longtime top Bush adviser who helped write the report, blamed a "lack of courage in our party" for the failure to take on Trump, as Bush has. She called Trump a “bigot” and said he “couldn’t unite our party and bring women, Hispanics and independent voters into the fold.”

“We won’t beat Hillary Clinton with Donald Trump as the nominee,” she added. “It doesn’t take a whiz-bang political data scientist to figure that out."

In some instances, anger has begun boil to over. Earlier this month, during the RNC’s winter meeting, Holland Redfield, a party committeeman from the Virgin Islands, rose during a private breakfast to vent to Priebus about Trump. During the impromptu speech, Redfield complained of the pressures to not speak out, saying, “We’re almost terrorized as members of our party.”

In an interview, Redfield said that other RNC members had privately applauded him since his speech became public. But he predicted that, if Trump becomes the nominee, the party would face an intense battle between those who were going along with his candidacy and those who aren’t.

“It will be a major internal fight,” he said. “I feel the party has been hijacked.”