Trump supporters at RNC embrace their candidate's moment
CLEVELAND - A former truck driver, Randy Bishop got into politics by listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on satellite radio during 11-hour drives.
CLEVELAND - A former truck driver, Randy Bishop got into politics by listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on satellite radio during 11-hour drives.
Now Bishop is a conservative radio host himself - and tuned into a new voice, along with thousands of others who descended on Cleveland this week ahead of the expected nomination of Donald Trump as the GOP's candidate for president.
"He speaks the truth, and I'm sick and tired of political correctness in America," said Bishop, 58, of Torch Lake, Mich., who was attending a state GOP breakfast Monday in nearby Cuyahoga Falls.
The convention is his first. "Donald Trump is changing the Republican Party," Bishop said. "And I want to witness it firsthand."
Many GOP officeholders and former leaders may be sitting the convention out, but the Republican vanguard arrived undaunted Monday in Cleveland, ready to support a candidate who many said appealed to them with his positions on such issues as immigration, jobs, and security - but also as the bearer of promised change.
"We've had too much of the same," said Roger Sandt, 72, a former owner of a paper converter business. who drove from Lancaster, Pa., in the hope of snagging a ticket to the convention.
Sandt hopes the "somewhat outlandish" candidate will transform a Washington he sees as a "playground for lobbyists and legislators."
Sandt doesn't see a reason for his party not to support the presumptive nominee. "I don't know what can be so bad not to support him," he said.
Among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, 38 percent are satisfied with Trump as their nominee, compared with 54 percent of Democrats satisfied with Clinton, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released last weekend.
Though Trump has intense support from his base, "the GOP establishment, which controls much of the money, is decidedly anti-Trump" - even if "endorsing Trump in a pro forma way," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
"Many of the elites think they have more to gain by Trump losing than winning," Sabato said. "The grassroots can't do anything about that."
Dissatisfaction with party leaders was on display at a Pennsylvania GOP breakfast Monday in Westlake, where House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin touted a traditional GOP menu of economic policies, such as cutting taxes and regulations on corporations to spur growth.
He barely mentioned Trump.
"It was the same old issues - absolutely absurd and off-the-mark," said Marc Scaringi, a lawyer and enthusiastic Trump delegate from Pennsylvania.
"There are a few stragglers who don't want to give up their strong hand on the Republican Party, who are for open borders and trade deals that ship jobs to Mexico and China," Scaringi said. "Paul Ryan is their champion."
At a Michigan delegation breakfast at a hotel in Cuyahoga Falls, Gov. Christie took aim at party leaders who hadn't thrown their support to Trump, calling it "unacceptable" that any former GOP candidate who signed a pledge to support the party's nominee would now hesitate to do so.
"I am tired of being dictated to by people in Washington, D.C., who think they know better than the millions of people in this country," said Christie, who backed Trump after ending his own presidential campaign in February and who was passed over last week for the role of vice president.
In the hotel lobby after the breakfast, Andrew Richner said he was "all in" with Trump, despite having been a delegate for Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
Trump "won fair and square," said Richner, a lawyer who works in Detroit. "It's time to let bygones be bygones. It's our only chance of winning."
Also throwing his support to Trump in recent months is Paul Henderson, a former supporter of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. A 53-year-old farm owner and operator in northeast North Dakota, Henderson decided to back Trump earlier this year because of the candidate's positions on immigration and opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Asked whether either issue affected him personally, Henderson said, "Not really." But he's seen manufacturing jobs leave the country, he said, and he blames free trade.
He also appreciates Trump more after listening to his speeches, rather than through "the filter of the media." And Henderson, who was wearing a T-shirt that said "Obama You're Fired," doesn't think Trump is too unfiltered, as he's been labeled: "There's a lot of people out here that obviously are just kind of yelling at the TV: 'Finally, somebody who's not afraid.' "
A more recent conversion was Drinda Randall, 47, of Plano, Texas, who became a Trump backer "about a day ago."
While Randall, an alternate delegate, had supported Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, "I didn't want to disappoint the rest of America, because they all spoke," she said. A mother of three, including a son in the Army, Randall credited Trump with raising "great" children and believed he would support the military and "stop this nonsense . . . this war on our cops."
Mary Kay Phelan, a GOP county chair from Borger, Texas, has become a Trump supporter since Cruz lost. "I can't say he's my illusion of what a presidential candidate would be," she said, after referring to Trump as "hotheaded."
But having an illusion of a candidate is "part of the problem," Phelan said. "I'm ready for a change."
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Staff writer Thomas Fitzgerald contributed to this article.