Donald Trump is marshaling a huge whip operation that includes up to a dozen paid staff members and more than 100 volunteers working to keep delegates in line. | AP Photo Anti-Trump 'advance team' to land in Cleveland this week

Anti-Donald Trump forces will be sending an “advance team” to Cleveland this week to begin preparing their effort to strip the Republican presidential nomination from Donald Trump.

In a Sunday night conference call with allies around the country, the leaders of the effort described a slow-building organization that would begin setting up a command center outside the arena where the Republican National Convention will be held next month.


“We’ve built a list of every delegate in the country,” said Steve Lonegan, former New Jersey director for Ted Cruz’s failed presidential campaign, who’s now leading the anti-Trump Courageous Conservatives PAC.

Lonegan said his group would identify three regional field directors and is in talks with “key people” to name an executive director for the effort.

The central focus of these anti-Trump activists is a push to “unbind” the delegates who will choose the GOP nominee at the convention. Many are subject to party rules and state laws that require them to vote based on the results of primaries and caucuses. Unbinding delegates would free them to vote their conscience at the convention at a time when Trump is mired in miserable poll numbers and facing a backlash from conservatives who don’t trust him.

Even as delegates on the call predicted victory in their uphill struggle, there were clear divisions. Lonegan emphasized that if Trump emerged from the convention as the GOP nominee, he’d work to help him ensure that Hillary Clinton isn’t elected president. He said he’d “denouce” Republicans who suggested otherwise.

But other participants described Trump’s ascendance in near-apocalyptic terms and made no pledge of support.

“Donald Trump is just about the worst candidate you can think of for the country first, and for the party second,” said Gordon Humphrey, a former New Hampshire senator and an ally of Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Steve Deace, a conservative Iowa radio host who joined the call, compared the moment to the Founding Fathers’ rejection of King George III.

“Everybody on this call ... is now in a position similar to theirs,” he said. “You may face the wrath of party bosses. That’s nothing like facing the wrath of a king.”

Leaders of the effort, largely spearheaded by Colorado delegates Kendal Unruh and Regina Thomson, also seemed caught between projecting optimism and acknowledging that anti-Trump delegates are terrified to reveal themselves.

“We don’t have enough time to be stealth anymore,” said Unruh, whose group Free the Delegates is advocating for unbinding delegates.

There are signs abound that anti-Trump delegates will be wildly outnumbered and outgunned at the convention. A POLITICO survey of the 112 delegates who will write the rules of the convention — and have the first word on efforts to unbind — revealed that more than half of the committee support Trump’s nomination. Several other delegates on the committee added their names to the list over the weekend.

“I absolutely will not support any effort and do not think anyone else from Hawaii will either,” said Nathan Paikai, one of two convention Rules Committee members from Hawaii, in an email. "This is clearly a desperate, selfish attempt at self-promotion by a very tiny minority of the national Republican delegates."

In addition, Trump is marshaling a huge whip operation that includes up to a dozen paid staff members and more than 100 volunteers working to keep delegates in line.

Unruh, who is also on the Rules Committee, described suggestions that the committee is stacked against her as “misinformation.”

There were also indications that delegates are struggling to understand the basics of the procedural maneuvers at their disposal in the effort to stop Trump.

One such strategy would occur during the presidential nomination vote, when each state casts ballots alphabetically and declares how many delegates will back Trump or his rivals. Delegates are free to object to the count delivered by the leaders of their state delegations and force a roll call, during which anti-Trump delegates could attempt to register their objections.

But many delegates are still unclear about how such an effort would play out in real time or what to do if their objections go unheeded.

the call, a delegate who identified himself as being from Maine, said he wasn’t sure how to proceed. “How would we do that in the heat of the moment on the floor?” he wondered.

Unruh the convention operates under the rules of the U.S. House of Representatives, and she said she’s been consulting with parliamentarians who understand the rules of the House.

“It would be just tragic if we advanced the ball this far down the field and were just sidelined,” she said.

There were also renewed signs, however, that the Trump campaign is paying attention to the anti-Trump efforts. One man who identified himself as a delegate on the call described being contacted by an official inside the Trump campaign and asked whether he’d heard from Free the Delegates.

“I explained to him that I was actually seeking them out myself,” he said.