Paul Ryan had a job to do at the convention. It was clear from the start that he wasn’t going to give a full-throated endorsement of Trump, but he needed to find something that at least looked like party unity. He needed to leave Cleveland with both Trump at the top of the ticket and something in hand for those still not ready to go full-fascist.
The speech part was easy. He simply contorted himself in his speech to sidestep any actual endorsement.
He said, ”Next time there’s a State of the Union address, I don’t know where Joe Biden and Barack Obama will be. But you’ll find me right there on the rostrum with Vice President Mike Pence and President Donald Trump.” That’s a prediction, not an endorsement.
But it was earlier in the day, during the roll count, where Ryan showed a painful degree of weakness and duplicity. In his role as the chair of the Republican National Convention, Ryan had a lot of say in how the rules were to be interpreted. As the roll count approached, state and party leaders had a meeting to discuss how things would go. Unlike some years when rules were enforced leaving only a single candidate as an option, Ryan made it clear that votes would be allowed for people other than Trump. It would not be overly draconian with only a single name on the ballot.
Now Ryan had just a couple of last-minute items. The first was that any state wishing to protest the vote would be be allowed to demand a count, but that count would be delayed until other votes were totaled. It was a tactic aimed directly at the last gasp of the Never Trump moment, who had hoped to issue such demands in several states, throwing off the evening’s schedule and allowing them to put delegate after delegate on air, if even for a moment. Ryan’s move infuriated but effectively neutralized the Never Trumpers (who were more than a little too vocal about their plans).
Ryan’s second announcement before he scuttled off to the sidelines was that the totals would be read by the states and recorded by the secretary based on the state delegate counts and the “rules of the convention.”
That seemed innocuous enough. But it was a trick.
In reading into the record the names of candidates to be placed into nomination, the committee entered only Donald Trump. Then they let the vote proceed. But from the very first state, it was clear that there was more to what Ryan had said.
The chair on stage read out Alaska’s vote as 28 votes, with 11 delegates bound.
The state chair, after giving the usual go-our-state rah-rah speech, read off the vote totals: 12 votes for Ted Cruz, 11 for Trump, 5 for Marco Rubio.
The secretary then read back the results: 28 votes for Donald Trump.
It happened again in D.C., where Trump received no delegates in the election, and was awarded 19 when totals were read—a result that only rubbed salt in the wound generated by a party platform which also includes language not just denying statehood for the capitall, but stripping away what little sovereignty its now allowed.
The altered votes also hammered two other states, both of which harbored known Never Trump members. In every case, the states found that no matter how small—or nonexistent—Trump’s delegate count may have been when announced from the floor, it was different on stage. He got everything.
At the end of the evening, Alaska protested the change in their announced vote totals, and the carefully-protected schedule took a small hit anyway as state and RNC officials huddled. The secret, which fell to Reince Priebus to reveal, was that Ryan had decided to use old, never-before-deployed rules in which, if only a single candidate is entered into nomination, any unbound delegate is automatically counted as going to that single candidate. Then the RNC went through all the state rules, looking for states where delegates were considered unbound after a candidate suspected his campaign.
The RNC ignored Alaska’s protest that they had suspended the rule about considering candidates unbound at their state convention. The count on the stage stood: Trump 28, Alaska Voters: 0.
The odd combination, in which some states were recorded as-read and others had their votes distorted out of recognition, came across as arbitrary and vindictive. Because it was. Ryan might have chosen to go with the blunt but straightforward rule that only Trump votes would be counted. He might have accepted the votes from all states as-read. But by implementing arcane rules that affected only a handful of states, he generated the impression that the RNC was both violating the rights of states and padding Trump’s lead.
Which was true.
It’s likely that Ryan chose to impose the odd combination of never-used rules expressly to cut off any effort of delegates to “vote their conscience.” Any delegate voting against their primary results might have been unbound and automatically tallied for Trump, no matter what name they declared. And in any case, yanking the votes from a few states helped pad out Trump’s lead, making his win appear more decisive and better able to withstand any last-minute rebellion.
But what it all made clear was that Ryan was willing to say anything, do anything, and twist any rule not to generate real party unity, but to create the semblance of unity, as well as to inform the delegates that they don’t count. That only the RNC counts.
And the RNC now belongs to Trump.