Donald Trump on Sunday accused the Colorado Republican Party of changing the rules of its nomination process because of his campaign.
Speaking in Staten Island, N.Y., the businessman and GOP front-runner noted that he announced his campaign on June 16, 2015. Trump said that it was two months later, in August, when the Colorado GOP’s executive committee decided to give the power to delegates, not the voters, to decide whom they would support.
Last weekend Texas Sen. Ted Cruz completed a sweep of all the state’s 34 delegates.
“Just so you understand. They keep saying ‘we didn’t change the rules’ … they totally did,” Trump said Sunday. “I came out in June, they saw I was going to win Colorado easily with the voters, which is most important, so they changed the rules and they took the voters out of it and they had the party bosses make the selection.”
Trump previously condemned the GOP nomination process as “rigged.”
In response, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus made the rounds on Sunday shows to deflect the front-runner’s accusations.
“Nomination process known for a year + beyond. It’s the responsibility of the campaigns to understand it. Complaints now? Give us all a break,” Priebus tweeted.
In Colorado as well as Wyoming, where he also lost to Cruz this weekend, Trump hinted that he was aware of the rules, but that he did not want to “play that game.”
“We didn’t play in Colorado because I heard that it was going to be for the bosses, for the RNC,” Trump said. “So we didn’t play there. We didn’t play in Wyoming because the game was rigged. And I don’t want to go six-seven months before, because that’s what you have to do: Take them on trips, put them in hotel rooms. Do the whole thing. I don’t want to play that game. I’m winning with the voters.”
Trump in fact is courting Nevada delegates by paying their hotel and travel costs.
Colorado and Wyoming weren’t the only places where party bosses were allowed to sway the outcome of an election. In Florida, he said he got “lucky,” because the party bosses there changed the rules so that the state’s delegates would be taken in a winner-take-all fashion when they thought former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush would win.
Bush dropped out of the race before the Sunshine State’s primary, and Trump beat out Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to win all 99 delegates.
