The Republican race is now down to Donald Trump and John Kasich — but as far as the Republican National Committee is concerned, Trump has already won. Here’s what RNC chair Reince Priebus had to say after Ted Cruz dropped out of the race Tuesday night:
The Republican National Committee just embraced Donald Trump as its presumptive nominee
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
Despite the misspelling of “presumptive” (since deleted and tweeted again by Priebus with the correct spelling), this is a deeply significant moment. The Republican Party is not resisting Trump. They are not holding out hope that Kasich could somehow deprive Trump of a delegate majority in the remaining five weeks of voting.
Instead, they are acknowledging the will of their voters, embracing Trump as the nominee, and attempting to unite the party so as to better defeat Hillary Clinton. Priebus even threw in a snarky rejoinder to the #NeverTrump movement by adding the hashtag #NeverClinton. The GOP is all in on Trump and Trumpism. What the consequences of this will be, no one yet knows for sure.
