GOP Convention Stuck With Convicted Felon As Nominee, With No Clear Path To Replace Trump

WASHINGTON ― Eight years after a credible effort to dump Donald Trump as their presidential nominee because of his vulgarity, Republicans today appear stuck with the newly convicted felon for November, with no realistic means of taking the nomination away from him at their convention next month, even if they wanted to.

“There will be no move to, no mechanism for and no interest in removing Trump at the convention,” said Richard Porter, a Republican National Committee member from Illinois.

To Fergus Cullen, a former RNC member as a onetime chair of the state party in New Hampshire, the key element of that analysis is “no interest in.”

“The residents of Jonestown chose suicide rather than leave,” he said, likening Trump to the infamous cult leader Jim Jones. “He has a death grip on the RNC and the delegates. Even if polls showed him losing 65-35, they would choose to go down with him.”

Trump campaign officials did not respond to HuffPost queries.

Republicans who vocally opposed the coup-attempting former president as the 2024 nominee often mentioned that his various criminal cases could put the party in the position of having a convicted felon at the top of the ticket on Nov. 5.

Not only has that warning come to pass, but there also is now the possibility that their nominee could even be staring down an actual jail sentence when RNC members and delegates meet in Milwaukee next month for the Republican National Convention.

The judge in Trump’s New York criminal case, Juan Merchan, has scheduled sentencing for July 11, just four days before the convention begins, after a jury convicted him on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an attempt to hide a hush-money payment to a porn actor to prevent her story from