Last night some of us were ‘treated,’ if that is the right word, to a sudden and hysterical (in the ‘kind of shrill’ sense) email from the Tennessee Trump campaign shouting about how the TN GOP was planning to STEAL THEIR DELEGATES at a meeting today. To speak dispassionately on the subject: at issue here is the slate of 14 at-large delegates that will be picked today. The Trump campaign is claiming that they had an existing understanding that seven of their delegates would be picked; the state GOP is saying that there wasn’t any sort of deal, and there won’t be one now, given that a person on the Trump campaign in Tennessee allegedly ‘spoke dismissively‘ of both the process and a female member of the TN GOP. The Tennessee Trump campaign called for a bunch of people to show up at the executive committee meeting today; by all accounts, they’re going to have to sit through at least two hours of various committee reports first, which is kind of funny right there.

Is any of this important? Yes, actually. – Or it’s at least relevant. As of right now, the TN Trump campaign is watching as the TN GOP is removing the number of Trump partisans in the at-large delegates shrink from allegedly seven out of fourteen to allegedly four out of fourteen. And, reading between the lines, it’s apparently because somebody in the TN Trump campaign threw his (almost certainly a ‘his’) weight around and said something rude enough to give the TN GOP an excuse to stand on its prerogatives. Complicating matters for the TN Trump campaign is that all Tennessee delegates are bound to the candidates for two votes at the convention, not one: strictly speaking, the delegates picked and assigned today are more bound to the candidates than the average.

Which suggests that more and more people are assuming that the Republican convention will be contested. Including people on the Trump campaign. Especially people on the Trump campaign, given that they’re right now fighting over three delegates in Tennessee. Gonna be interesting to see what the final score there is going to be…

Moe Lane

PS: Actually, the moral of the story maybe should be Play nice, even when you don’t think that you have to. And Know the rules. But never mind me.

UPDATE: Pandemonium and chaos going on right now! I have no idea how it’s going to end up, except acrimoniously.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Voting is done, and I’m pretty sure that the TN Trump campaign got the screws put to them. Guess that dude shouldn’t have allegedly said that thing to that woman, huh?

ONE MORE UPDATE: Just to clarify, nothing that happened today will have any effect on the first or second ballots: the candidates all kept the same number of bound delegates that they had going in. However, starting on the third ballot the at-large delegates will be unbound, which would make no difference if a Trump delegate was genuinely supportive of the candidate. But if he or she was merely obligated to vote Trump, well…