By Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin, New York Times Published 7:32 pm, Saturday, February 27, 2016
The scenario Karl Rove outlined was bleak.
Addressing a luncheon of Republican governors and donors in Washington on Feb. 19, he warned that Donald Trump's increasingly likely nomination would be catastrophic, dooming the party in November. But Rove, the master strategist of George W. Bush's campaigns, insisted it was not too late for them to stop Trump, according to three people present.
Since then, Trump has only gotten stronger, winning two more state contests and collecting the endorsement of Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.
Elected officials, political strategists and donors described a frantic, last-ditch campaign to block Trump — and the agonizing reasons that many of them have become convinced it will fail. Behind the scenes, a desperate mission to save the party sputtered and stalled at every turn.
Despite all the forces arrayed against Trump, interviews show the party has been gripped by a nearly incapacitating leadership vacuum and a paralytic sense of indecision and despair, as he has won smashing victories in South Carolina and Nevada. Elected officials have balked at attacking him out of concern that they might unintentionally fuel his populist revolt. And Republicans have lacked someone from outside the presidential race who could help set the terms of debate from afar.
The endorsement by Christie, a not unblemished but still highly regarded figure within the party's elite — he is a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association — landed Friday with crippling force. It was by far the most important defection to Trump's insurgency: Christie may give cover to other Republicans tempted to join Trump rather than trying to beat him.
Should Trump clinch the presidential nomination, it would represent a rout of historic proportions for the institutional Republican Party, and could set off an internal rift unseen in either party for a half-century, since white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party en masse during the civil rights movement.
Former Gov. Michael O. Leavitt of Utah, a top adviser to Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, said the party was unable to come up with a united front to quash Trump's campaign.
"There is no mechanism," Leavitt said. "There is no smoke-filled room. If there is, I've never seen it, nor do I know anyone who has. This is going to play out in the way that it will."
Republicans have ruefully acknowledged that they came to this dire pass in no small part because of their own passivity. There were ample opportunities to battle Trump earlier; more than one plan was drawn up only to be rejected. Rivals who attacked him early, like Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal, the former governors of Texas and Louisiana, received little backup and quickly faded.
Late in the fall, strategists Alex Castellanos and Gail Gitcho, both presidential campaign veterans, reached out to dozens of the party's leading donors, including casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, with a plan to create a super PAC that would take down Trump.
In a confidential memo, the strategists laid out the mission of a group they called "ProtectUS."
"We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval Office, with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips," they wrote in the previously unreported memo. Castellanos even produced ads portraying Trump as unfit for the presidency.
The two strategists, who declined to comment, proposed to attack Trump in New Hampshire over his business failures and past liberal positions, and emphasized the urgency of their project. A Trump nomination would not only cause Republicans to lose the presidency, they wrote, "but we also lose the Senate, competitive gubernatorial elections and moderate House Republicans."
No major donors committed to the project, and it was abandoned. No other sustained Stop Trump effort sprang up in its place.
Resistance to Trump still runs deep. The party's biggest benefactors remain totally opposed to him. At a recent presentation hosted by billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch, the country's most prolific conservative donors, their political advisers characterized Trump's record as utterly unacceptable.
The Kochs, like Adelson, have shown no appetite to intervene directly in the primary with force.
The American Future Fund, a conservative group that does not disclose its donors, announced plans Friday to run ads blasting Trump for his role in an educational company that is alleged to have defrauded students. But there is only limited time for the commercials to sink in before some of the country's biggest states award their delegates in early March.
Instead, Trump's challengers are staking their hopes on a set of guerrilla tactics and long-shot possibilities, racing to line up mainstream voters and interest groups against his increasingly formidable campaign, but perhaps too late.
Speaking to political donors in Manhattan on Wednesday evening, Marco Rubio's campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, noted that most delegates are bound to a candidate only on the first ballot.
Many of them, moreover, are likely to be party regulars who may not support Trump over multiple rounds of balloting, he added, according to a person present for Sullivan's presentation, which was first reported by CNN.
While still hopeful that Rubio might prevail, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election.
McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Trump's loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.
Already, a handful of senior party leaders have struck a conciliatory tone toward Trump. Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader, said on television that he believed he could work with him as president.
Fred Malek, finance chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said the party's mainstream had simply run up against the limits of its influence.
"There's no single leader and no single institution that can bring a diverse group called the Republican Party together, behind a single candidate," Malek said. "It just doesn't exist."
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