National Republican leaders have a message for Donald Trump: Stop complaining. The rules are the rules.

The Republican front-runner, scrambling to regain ground and momentum as Ted Cruz cuts into his delegate count at party conventions across the country, has taken to charging that the GOP system is “rigged,” “totally unfair” and corrupted by “phony politicians.”


But he has found little sympathy among those who enforce the rules.

“I didn’t hear Donald Trump complaining when he got 100 percent of the delegates in Florida but only about 40 percent of the vote,” said Henry Barbour, an influential Republican National Committee member from Mississippi, referencing Florida’s winner-take-all delegate allocation rules. “So when the system works to his advantage, he’s a winner. When he loses, it’s a rigged system, the party’s corrupt. This is not how to unite a party.”

A representative for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

The issue came to a head over the weekend, when Cruz, whose team has been skilled at navigating arcane delegate rules to run up his totals headed into an increasingly likely contested convention, swept the delegates that were up for grabs in Colorado on Saturday. Trump notched none.

On the same day in South Carolina, where Trump won the primary in a landslide in February, Trump lost five of the six delegate slots available in two congressional district delegate contests held that day, missing out on an opportunity to ensure loyal support should the convention go to a second ballot.

Similar dynamics have played out in other states as the candidates look ahead to how much strength they could count on in later rounds of balloting at a contested convention, when many delegates would no longer be required to vote in a way that reflected their state’s choice, per varying state rules.

Ryan Call, the former chairman of the Republican Party of Colorado, has been a vocal critic of his state party’s decision to use a complicated caucus process, saying he would have personally preferred a primary. But, he said in an interview, the rules were hardly a mystery — and there’s nothing rigged about them.

“To claim the rules were somehow changed, the system was somehow rigged or corrupt, is absolutely false, and it’s classic Donald Trump,” he said. “Failure to take responsibility for not building the kind of campaign organization in a caucus state like Colorado, or failure to take the time to understand the rules and develop relationships on the ground that lead to victory in Colorado, Donald Trump has no one to blame but himself.”

“Nomination process known for a year + beyond. It’s the responsibility of the campaigns to understand it. Complaints now? Give us all a break,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus tweeted Tuesday.

Rob Witwer, a former state representative from Colorado who supports Cruz, pointed to Trump’s tweets that referred to the Colorado process as a “primary.” In fact, the state held no primaries at all, instead holding caucuses at the precinct level in March to narrow the delegate selection process, and selected its national delegates at a convention on Saturday. Witwer took the tweet as evidence that Trump is out of his depth.

“It’s one thing to make a mistake, to screw up, to not campaign in Colorado, but to turn around and blame other people and say it’s a conspiracy, not only calls into question his team’s competence, but their veracity as well,” Witwer said.

Colorado did adjust its state rules to eliminate a presidential preference poll in August, but that was when few expected at the time that the remaining candidates in the race would be Trump, Cruz and Kasich, so party insiders there argue that the rules were not altered to serve as a Trump corrective.





“How on earth are you going to defeat ISIS if you can't figure out the @cologop convention?” tweeted Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, one of a series of tweaks mocking Trump for his complaints.

At the national level, Trump has found some politicians who are inclined to agree that the rules are stacked against an insurgent candidate, but the “rigged” accusation, they say, still goes too far.

“Rigged would mean that it was illegal, it was somehow shady,” Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a former presidential candidate — who benefited from Kentucky rule changes that allowed him to run for both president and senator — said in an interview. “No, it’s done somewhat in the open, but they are biased in favor of the establishment.”

Certainly, there were a variety of changes made to Republican National Committee rules in 2012 that at the time were perceived by some to be more favorable to the establishment candidate, especially as the party sought to guard against the insurgent Ron Paul, the Kentucky senator’s father.

But Steve Munisteri, a former chairman of the Texas Republican Party who served on an RNC Rules subcommittee on the presidential primaries — and previously aided the younger Paul’s presidential campaign — said several of the tweaks have actually redounded to Trump’s benefit this cycle.

“A very good argument can be made that the beneficiary of almost all the rule changes is Mr. Trump,” Munisteri said, pointing, for example, to the shortened GOP primary calendar, something that is likely to benefit the candidate with the highest name ID — who, in this cycle, is Donald Trump.

But delegate rules aside, there is the potential for massive unrest from Trump supporters — many of them new to the political process — should he head into the convention as the delegate leader, only to lose later in the convention as delegates, increasingly unbound from backing their states’ choices, align with other candidates, especially Cruz, as the result of complex delegate rules.

Party veterans, however, stress that delegates, not direct votes or national tallies, have been the key to securing the nomination since the inception of the Republican Party, and one cannot become the nominee until 1,237 delegates are procured.

“It’s not a technicality; this is not horseshoes,” said Ron Kaufman, the RNC member from Massachusetts. “The rules are very clear.”

That’s a message Trump’s chief rival, Cruz — himself a conservative firebrand with a rocky history with party leadership — has seized on, routinely jabbing Trump this week for “whining.”

“You know what? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” Cruz told reporters last week in Madison, Wisconsin, noting RNC changes from 2012 that, in his view, were designed to help the establishment, but which he is also now successfully maneuvering. “The rules are the rules.”

Kaufman said he understood that the process might seem confusing to anyone who is not a “student of the rules,” and said it is the responsibility of the RNC to ensure that voters and reporters were very clear on the requirements. And Munisteri, who will be working with delegates on behalf of the RNC at the convention, noted that TV networks have for months been displaying delegate counts. “It’s not been a secret,” he added.

Kaufman continued, “Believe me, I understand the rules are so different in every state, I can understand how people may not like the process, feel this should be a national primary. But it’s not.”





Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.

