Iowa GOP leader offers “gentle push” for Trump support

URBANDALE - Iowa's top GOP official says he sees the party coming together behind a Donald Trump candidacy despite continued efforts from a 'tiny little selfish sliver” of delegates with a large, media-fueled megaphone seeking to derail a Trump presidential nomination at next week's national convention in Cleveland.

'I think there are people who need gentle pushes to look at this from a 30,000-foot level and actually get past our personal preferences and get past who it is that we wanted to win,” Republican Party of Iowa chairman Jeff Kaufmann told a conservative group Wednesday. He said that 'big picture” look includes future control of the U.S. Supreme Court, reducing national debt and control of the White House.

Kaufmann said he's aware there are Republicans who are 'not quite there” in embracing a Trump presidential bid, but he sees that coalescing as they weigh the alternative of continued Democratic control of the presidency under Hillary Clinton and the prospects that not voting or supporting a third-party candidate in essence would be a vote for her.

However, he said the process of uniting the party is getting waylaid by 'this Never Trump nonsense” or other GOP dissidents who are trying to change the rules with a bid for an open convention that 'don't have a prayer of doing what they think they're going to do.”

'There is a huge difference between people who are having an internal conversation and trying to get there, and people that are having that conversation in front of microphones and as paid people that are the head of PACs that are trying to derail something,” he told the Westside Conservative Club. 'I see that as a rather superficial, ego-centric way to derail the Republican Party and change the rules in the ninth inning. I don't have a lot of respect for that.”

Kaufmann joined Republican Gov. Terry Branstad in expressing concern the 'dump Trump” effort could jeopardize Iowa's hopes of maintaining its lead-off position in the presidential nominating process.

However, Cecil Stinemetz, a Republican national convention delegate from Urbandale who is involved in the 'Free the Delegates” movement, said he believes party members should be free to vote their conscience in Cleveland next week and not be intimidated by GOP leaders try to 'tamp down” the effort.

'My job as a delegate is not to protect our first in the nation status and it's not to protect the Republican Party. My job is to pick a nominee who is willing and able and wants to defeat Hillary Clinton and who has the capability of doing this job,” he said in an interview.

'I am assured that that person is not Donald Trump,” Stinemetz added. 'Jeff Kaufmann has made it clear that this delegation is going to be united behind Trump and I can assure him that this delegation is not going to be united behind Trump.”

Kaufmann also had harsh words Wednesday for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a vanquished 2016 GOP presidential candidate who announced this week that he did not intend to vote for Trump or Clinton in this fall's general election.

'It was sad. I just sat there and shook my head and said: ‘Shame on you,'” Kaufmann said of comments Bush made during an MSNBC interview this week, noting that Republicans would be advocating for Bush had he landed the most delegates in the 2016 nominating process.

'The reason he has the ability to say: ‘I'm going to tell you who I'm not going to endorse,' and cameras show up is because his family has served this country well,” Kaufmann said. 'His family is who they are because of Republicans rallying around them not once, not twice, but three times.”