After months of insisting that he wasn’t ready to rule out a third-party run, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has signed a pledge promising to support the party’s eventual nominee. Thursday afternoon, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus met with Trump at his headquarters in New York City to finally get the pledge that had eluded party officials for so long. Trump emerged as well to explain his decision.
“The best way for the Republicans to win is if I win the nomination and go directly against whoever they happen to put up. And for that reason, I have signed the pledge,” Trump told reporters. “So I will be totally pledging my allegiance to the Republican Party and for the conservative principles for which it stands.”
There is, of course, nothing legally binding about the pledge. If Trump loses the nomination, he could easily decide to go back on his word. Even so, an independent run seemed unlikely even before and Trump has insisted from the beginning that he would vastly prefer to run on the Republican ticket. Many insiders suspect he held out so long merely to gain leverage over the RNC establishment, the majority of which is ashamed and disappointed in his rise to the top of the polls.
In an appearance on Good Morning America Thursday morning, Trump’s chief primary opposition – the once-inevitable Jeb Bush – said that despite his differences with Trump, he too would support him as the nominee. “We need to be unified,” said Bush. “We need to win.”
A Rogue No More
A good part of Trump’s appeal, unfortunately, is his outsider persona. He has been nearly as critical of the Republican Party as he has of Hillary and Obama, a position that has won him favor with conservative voters fed up with the same old, same old. Can he maintain that momentum now that he’s pledged himself to the party? Or is this the first step toward a Donald Trump who’s less like Ann Coulter and more like John Boehner?
More likely than not, it won’t make any difference whatsoever. Trump’s campaign is about reaching those conservatives who have been left behind. They don’t care about the RNC, they care about undoing the liberalism that has wrecked the country for eight long years. If anything, this removes a major distraction that was keeping Trump and other candidates from focusing on what’s important. The sooner we can get beyond the trivial party politics, the sooner we can get back to the most important issue at hand: defeating the Democrats and restoring honor and integrity to the United States.
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