Ice Miller Lobbyist/GOP Committeeman Wants Trump Stopped

The Indianapolis Star's Washington columnist, Maureen Groppe, offers words of advice from John Hammond, an Ice Miller lobbyist and GOP National Committeeman for Indiana, on the prospects of Donald Trump becoming the nominee. Not surprisingly, Hammond thinks the record number of Republican voters who've gone to the polls to date in the early primary and caucus states and cast their votes for Trump are just stupid because he knows that Trump is "unfit" to be president.

In a Q&A with Groppe, Hammond says 64% of those voters in a crowded field cast their vote for a candidate other than Trump. He, of course, dismisses the point that Trump's share of the vote represents far more votes than were cast for either John McCain in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012 at this same point in the election process. Hammond says he cannot support Trump if he becomes the GOP nominee. "If everybody were jumping off a cliff, would you jump with them?" Hammond rhetorically asked. According to Hammond, Trump is destroying the Republican brand. I would argue the current Republican Party leadership has destroyed the brand by not standing behind the principles it professes to support.

Groppe asks Hammond about the party rules that have front-loaded the primary election process, giving unfair weight to states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina that are not representative of the country as a whole. That process narrows the field substantially, by design, so that the vast majority of the voters in this country have no real choice in their party's presidential nominee. Hammond defends those rules changes of which he was a part as "good." Hammond blames the "coarsening of our culture" for allowing Trump to become popular.

A word of disclosure, I once worked with Hammond at the same law firm many years ago. I know him quite well, and he's a great guy. I also know him not be much of an ideologue. In fact, I would go so far as to say his heart has never really been with the Republican Party. The very word "conservative" is not something with which he's very comfortable, and he's married to a liberal Democrat, Diana Hamilton, who makes large campaign contributions to Democratic candidates and has a female-owned business that gets her share of no-bid contracts in the area of public finance thanks to her and her husband's political participation.

Hammond wasn't a big fan of Ronald Reagan, who most party leaders like himself at the time believed was unelectable. His political involvement is an expedient necessity of his day job as a lobbyist. I've always had a problem with lobbyists holding party leadership positions because their views reflect those of their corporate clients as opposed to rank-and-file Republican voters. The reality, however, is that both political parties' leadership is completely dominated by lobbyists. The laws our elected officials enact too often reflect their values, not our's, which has a lot to do with the current anger felt by many voters regardless of political affiliation. Trump is popular because he's tapping into that anger in a somewhat different manner than Bernie Sanders is tapping into voter anger in the Democratic Party. Party leaders like Hammond have nobody but themselves to blame for that anger. Finally, I would note that Hammond would have argued that McCain and Romney were the most electable candidates in the past two elections. We see how well that turned out.

Breitbart obtained video of a secret meeting Marco Rubio's campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, had with Wall Street donors in Manhattan a week ago in which he openly discusses the plan of blowing up the system to ensure a brokered GOP convention where the party leaders like Hammond will be free to vote for their choice for president and discard the choice made by Republican voters this year. Many of the establishment power brokers now favor Rubio, who is perhaps the easiest candidate in the field to blackmail. He has a gay past from his younger years that he would like people not to hear about as he passes himself off as a happily-married straight man, and he acquired considerable wealth on the sly while serving as Florida's House Speaker. The Democrats have a long dossier on his financial dealings that will be laid bare if he becomes the GOP nominee. People forget that some details of this dossier got released four years ago when his name was mentioned as a 2012 vice-presidential choice. The unseemly matters revealed therein are explosive to say the least and have been ignored by the mainstream media, which allows him to live the life of a "boy in a bubble" as Gov. Chris Christie has derisively but aptly described the situation.