http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/282524-mcconnell-to-trump-get-on-messageBy Alexander Bolton - 06/07/16 02:45 PM EDT
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called on his party's presumptive nominee Donald Trump to "get on message" in order to win the White House.
"We have plenty of issues," McConnell told reporters. "And my advice to our nominee would be to start talking about the issues that the American people care about and to start doing it now.
“In addition to that, it’s time to quit attacking various people that you competed with or with various minority groups in the country and get on message,” he said. “This election is eminently winnable.”
McConnell was barraged by questions about Trump's recent attacks on a federal judge's impartiality in a lawsuit against Trump University because of his Mexican-American heritage.
McConnell reiterated that he "disapproved" of Trump's remarks but declined to condemn them as racist; Speaker Paul Ryan, on the other hand, described Trump's comments as "textbook" racism earlier Tuesday.
“In a number of interviews on the subject of our nominee and his comments, I expressed my disapproval over and over and over again,” McConnell said. “I was asked about every incident last week. I’ve already said that I’ve disapproved of them."
McConnell repeated his warning, first issued last week, that Trump risks turning off Latino voters from the GOP as Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, alienated African-American voters from his party for decades.
“I was worried that we would do to the Latino vote what was done to the African-American vote by defining our party in such a way that we could not reach out what has become the nation’s largest minority group,” he said. “I am worried about that. I said that last week and I’ll say it again today.”
