Trump takes ‘rigged system’ rant to the Wall Street Journal
Donald Trump took his tirade against the Republican Party’s delegate selection process to the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page Friday.
In an op-ed titled “Let Me Ask America a Question,” Trump continued to rail, as he has for the past week, against the “rigged” system that he argues unfairly allowed rival Ted Cruz to nab all of Colorado’s 34 Republican delegates last weekend.
“I, for one, am not interested in defending a system that for decades has served the interest of political parties at the expense of the people,” Trump wrote, slamming the decision made by the state’s Republican leaders last August to forgo the party’s typical primary vote in favor of more of a convention-style delegate selection. “Members of the club — the consultants, the pollsters, the politicians, the pundits and the special interests — grow rich and powerful while the American people grow poorer and more isolated.”
Despite Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus’ insistence that Colorado’s chosen system was “perfectly OK,” Trump dismissed Cruz’s “voterless victory in Colorado” as proof that the Texas senator is simply an establishment stooge to Trump’s man of the people.
“For a man who styles himself as a warrior against the establishment (you wouldn’t know it from his list of donors and endorsers), you’d think he would be demanding a vote for Coloradans,” he wrote. “Instead, Mr. Cruz is celebrating their disenfranchisement.”
The op-ed elaborates on complaints the Republican presidential frontrunner made earlier in the week via Twitter and Fox News about Colorado’s closed convention, which he claims was a deliberate attempt by party insiders to stifle his supporters.
“Let us make Colorado a rallying cry on behalf of all the forgotten people whose desperate pleas have for decades fallen on the deaf ears and closed eyes of our rulers in Washington, D.C.,” he wrote. “The political insiders have had their way for a long time. Let 2016 be remembered as the year the American people finally got theirs.”
Encouraged by Trump, disgruntled supporters plan to protest the results of last weekend’s convention at the Colorado Capitol in Denver on Friday.
