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Trump’s former rivals split on his emergence as likely GOP presidential nominee

Donald Trump’s former presidential primary rivals reacted in very different ways after he cemented his status as the likely Republican presidential nominee on Tuesday night.

Trump emerged as the party’s probable standard bearer after a win in the Indiana primary that boosted his delegate total and led his final strong opponent, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to suspend his campaign.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who had run against Trump earlier in the year, blasted him on Twitter and predicted Trump’s victory would get the party “destroyed” in the general election.

“And we will deserve it,” Graham wrote.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is still running for president, issued multiple statements after Trump’s win. Kasich has no chance of winning enough delegates to secure the GOP nomination on the first ballot at the party’s convention. However, in one statement, his campaign said he still hopes there will be a contested convention whe-re he could be se-lected by Republican delegates.

“Tonight’s results are not going to al-ter Gov. Kasich’s campaign plans. Our strategy has been and continues to be one that involves winning the nomination at an open convention. The comments f-rom Trump, on the verge of winning in Indiana, heighten the differences between Governor Kasich and his positive, inclusive approach and the disrespectful ramblings f-rom Donald Trump,” the statement said.

Kasich also sent a pair of tweets. In one he praised Cruz, and in the other he said “now more than ever” the party has “two paths” going forward.

Former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who endorsed Trump after abandoning his own presidential bid, discussed the results in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News. Carson said Trump’s win showed voters do not want a brokered convention.

“The people themselves have just gotten disgusted with being manipulated and controlled. And what they recognize is that, if they just listened to what the pundits were saying and what everybody else was saying, that we were going to end up with a brokered convention … something that they didn’t want,” Carson said. “So they superseded the narrative and they themselves said, ‘We’re going to take this out of the hands of the convention.’ And I think that was a brilliant thing.”

Carson also declared that the evening’s results proved this is “the year of the outsider.”

Slideshow: Indiana primaries — Sanders, Trump win and Cruz d-rops out >>>

“Look what’s happened when we sent insiders and they just keep doing the same thing over and over — be they Republicans, be they Democrats, it doesn’t matter — and the people are absolutely tired of that,” said Carson. “But more importantly, they recognize that we’re on the precipice. If we go over, continuing down the same pathway, we have doomed our children and our grandchildren, and I think the people know that.”

Former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who suspended his campaign last November, also talked about Trump’s win with Hannity. Jindal referenced Republicans who have vowed not to support Trump. Jindal said refusing to back Trump would help Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

“I know a lot of my friends are in the ‘never Trump’ camp, and I understand that. Look, I was very critical of Donald Trump, but we need to be honest with ourselves. Today we have got two choices, it is either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton,” Jindal said. “I think anybody that says they cannot support Donald Trump needs to understand … one of the consequences is that will make it easier for Hillary Clinton to win, and I don’t think that we can accept that as a country.”

Jindal said he’s not entirely sold on Trump. However, he argued that Trump is far more likely to help conservatives achieve goals like repealing Obamacare and getting Supreme Court nominees who share their values.

“It would be, you know, false for me to simply sit here and say, all of a sudden, I think that overnight he has become this great conservative or that I take back everything I’ve said about him,” Jindal said of Trump. “I’m still critical of him, but I think he’s better than Hillary Clinton.”

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who left the White House race in February, addressed Trump’s win in a speech at the Reagan Ranch in California. The theme of Paul’s speech was moving “beyond partisan politics to unite America.” In it, he argued that the GOP needs to reach out to constituencies that don’t normally support it. He said Trump should take this approach.

“If I were to give advice to Donald Trump, he needs to go to the Urban League, he needs to go to the NAACP, he needs to speak to groups. He’s got Republican vote, he needs to go out and grab new vote,” Paul said. “He has excited new people, I just don’t know if it’s new people enough in these swing states for us to win. … He does have to do that and our party needs to do it, but I think the nominee becomes more the face of the party than the [Republican National Committee] chairman is.”

When Paul took questions f-rom the audience after his speech, a man asked what he would say to people who are considering “al-ternative options” and potentially third parties to avoid supporting Trump. Paul said he would encourage voters to look for solutions within the Republican Party.

“I was always a fan of Barry Goldwater. He didn’t do very well, and then Ronald Reagan sort of rose up out of those ashes. So you don’t know what happens, and I’m not saying that that’s what’s going to happen, but I am saying that the party goes on,” Paul said. “We’re a party of ideas and principles. My decision has always been to work through the party and not outside the party. … I’m a Republican. We’re not all the same, but I’m a Republican. You know? So I don’t go around advising people to choose another way.”

Paul also argued that Clinton, the likely Democratic frontrunner, will be “easy to beat.”

“I think the future is within the party. We’ll see what happens this go-around and, you know … The nomination I think is now done, but we’ll see what happens as we move forward and, you know, how the race shapes up. I mean, on the bright side, we are running against a crook,” Paul said.

The audience laughed and applauded Paul’s remark.

“We’re not recording this, are we?” he quipped.

Paul cited a book detailing allegations of corrupt business deals by Clinton and her husband, President Bill Clinton, as evidence of this. He also said Clinton “did not provide adequate security in Benghazi” when she was secretary of state and four people were killed in a 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in that Libyan city.

“They are crooked f-rom top to bottom, and they’re out for themselves,” Paul said of the Clintons. “They think they’re above the law, and they should be easy to beat. We need to talk about that.”


Author: Yahoo News

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