CLEVELAND — A top official with the Republican National Committee on Wednesday downplayed concerns that convention delegates opposed to Donald Trump could disrupt next week’s convention.
Sean Spicer, a senior adviser to RNC chairman Reince Priebus, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner’s “Examining Politics” podcast that he expects a smooth nomination process for Trump.
Spicer acknowledged the rebel delegates, who are moving in a Thursday rules committee hearing to amend the rules to make it easier to oust Trump as the nominee. But he predicted that the effort would fail.
Spicer also expressed little concern over the possibility of “Never Trump” delegates causing a ruckus on the floor of the convention and distracting from what is designed to be an event that unifies the party ahead of the fall campaign.
“They’re not going to do it. So I think they get a lot of media attention, they send a lot of tweets. That’s the extent of it,” Spicer said. “We know where we are, we’ve kept an eye on the delegates, we know where the support is.”
Privately, RNC officials are more concerned than Spicer let on.
The party has been actively lobbying delegates to stay in the Trump fold and defeat an motion to change the rules such that delegates would be unbound from the winner of their state’s primary and be free to vote their conscience on the convention floor.
The anti-Trump forces include a grassroots coalition of disaffected delegates, and an outside political group that set up shop in Cleveland on Sunday and has been doing much of the organizing.
