Last month, Donald Trump told CNN that if he lost the GOP nomination at a contested convention, “I think you’d have riots.” On Monday, Trump’s longtime ally Roger Stone clarified the front-runner’s remarks: It seems that instead of “I think,” Trump really meant, “I promise,” and by “you’d have riots,” he intended to say, “my supporters will accost delegates in their hotel rooms.”
“We’re going to have protests, demonstrations. We will disclose the hotels and the room numbers of those delegates who are directly involved in the steal,” Stone said Monday in an interview with Stefan Molyneux on Freedomain Radio, as he lamented the Establishment’s twisted plot to prevent America from becoming great again. Specifically, Stone threatened to direct angry Trump supporters to the room of any delegate pledged to Trump who decides to change his or her vote after the first ballot.
“If you’re from Pennsylvania, we’ll tell you who the culprits are,” Stone said. “We urge you to visit their hotel and find them. You have a right to discuss this, if you voted in the Pennsylvania primary, for example, and your votes are being disallowed.”
To be clear: If Trump doesn’t secure a majority on the first ballot, all delegates pledged to him have the right to switch their votes. Them’s the rules. Even from the standpoint of “honoring democracy,” if Trump doesn’t win a majority before the convention, then he probably won less than half of the primaries’ popular vote.
And anyway, the whole point of having a system of delegates – intermediaries between the presidency and the popular will – is to prevent the kind of demagogue who’d wield his supporters as a weapon from ever gaining power.
