Ben Carson threatens to leave Republicans

The timing of the meeting at a restaurant near Capitol Hill was significant. You know the couple; they just haven’t come down the stairs yet.

“I pray that the report in the Post this morning was incorrect”, Carson added.

Launching an independent campaign for president isn’t as simple as holding a press conference and coming up with a catchy name for your new political party – something like, the Make America Great Party. In this case the knockout is getting more than 50 percent of the delegates. In subsequent ballots, delegates would be free to switch their votes, or even to vote for someone outside the existing field of candidates, opening up a potentially chaotic arena for political scheming and horse-trading.

A brokered convention occurs in a situation in which no candidate has won enough delegates during the presidential primaries to win on the first ballot.

In a statement released on Friday, Carson warned GOP officials against trying to manipulate the process of selecting the Republican presidential nominee. The harsh winnowing process of losing primary votes has yet to begin.

“Brokered convention story has swallowed my day”, tweeted Geoffrey Skelley of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics on Friday.

Democrats in Washington have complained for years that there’s no single Republican Party anymore and that divisions between the establishment and the tea party Republicans has made legislative negotiations more hard than they already would be.

“The people, the Republican Party, have been – the people – have been phenomenal”, Trump said.

With Donald Trump soaring ever higher in the polls, the Republican Establishment is preparing to try to shoot him down over Cleveland.

There are many within the RNC leadership that are opposed to Trump’s controversial statements and the fear that he could cause lasting damage to the Republican Party.

It would be a shock to see anything less than the now-familiar and mundane gathering to choose a candidate, through the accumulation of delegates in state primaries and caucuses.

Carson blasted the secret meeting that took place this week. In other words, if a state has 10 delegates, and Candidate X, let’s call him Trump, wins 60 percent of the vote, Trump gets six delegates.

“Well, I say to Dr. Carson, don’t worry”.

In 2012, Republicans took extraordinary steps to reduce the influence of grassroots conservative activists by centralizing power with a few party bosses, at the expense of grassroots leaders, insurgent candidates and rank-and-file delegates. If this happens, Trump said he will not rule out a possible run as an independent should he fail to secure the Republican nomination.

If there were plans for a brokered convention, he said, “I assure you Donald Trump won’t be the only one leaving the party”. There was brief discussion of the logistical challenges of running a national convention without a presumptive nominee, the attendee said. More importantly, these insiders can’t control Trump for he is a billionaire who doesn’t need their money.