Trump campaign strives to shore up bid

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., second from left, accompanied by, from left, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, listen to a question during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, June 21, 2016, following their policy luncheon.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., second from left, accompanied by, from left, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, listen to a question during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, June 21, 2016, following their policy luncheon.

WASHINGTON -- Republicans are sprinting to shape up Donald Trump's presidential campaign before the party's national convention in three weeks, even as leading members of the party carry a deep antipathy or outright opposition to his claim on the GOP nomination.

His campaign chairman said Sunday that there's a hiring spree in 16 states and the campaign is working with the Republican National Committee to solidify other matters. Paul Manafort said Trump is not all that involved in the race to organize an offensive against Democrat Hillary Clinton and catch up to her fundraising advantage.

"The good thing is we have a candidate who doesn't need to figure out what's going on [inside the campaign] in order to say what he wants to do," Manafort said on NBC's Meet the Press. "We have our campaign plans in place. We have our budgets in place."

What Manafort described as a "new phase" for the campaign -- a shift from the primaries to the general election -- was a forced reshuffling of an effort hobbled for weeks by infighting, Trump's statements about a judge's ethnicity and a fundraising deficit to Clinton. Trump began June with $1.3 million in the bank, less campaign cash than many congressional candidates. The $3 million he collected in May donations is about one-tenth what Clinton raised.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday that Trump can't win the presidency unless he can compete with Clinton on the financial front.

"He needs to catch up, and catch up fast," the Kentucky Republican said on ABC's This Week.

Despite the stated support for Trump, antipathy toward him projected from the Sunday shows and beyond.

A few hundred delegates to the Republican National Convention are pushing to change the rules and make it possible for them to vote for someone other than Trump. The Cleveland gathering begins in three weeks.

Some rebellious delegates and other anti-Trump party operatives held a 40-minute conference call Sunday night that was monitored by The Associated Press in what was a combination pep talk and strategy review. A leader of the effort, Colorado convention delegate Regina Thomson, said about 2,000 people were on the call.

A participant in the call, James Lamb, a fundraiser for the presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said that he'd been with Rubio on Sunday, and while the two men didn't discuss the anti-Trump efforts, "Marco does have some concerns about the way that we're going" in the presidential race.

Another speaker, former Sen. Gordon Humphrey, R-N.H., supported the presidential effort of Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Humphrey called Trump "just about the worst candidate you could think of, for the country first and for the party second."

McConnell refused to say on Sunday whether Trump is qualified to be president. And he suggested that the GOP platform would not reflect Trump's ideas, including restrictions on Muslim immigration to the U.S.

"It's my expectation that the platform will be a traditional Republican platform, not all that different from the one we had four years ago," McConnell replied.

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are laboring to set up staff in what Manafort said were 16 states in which the campaign aims to compete heavily. He said the campaign will announce more about staffing this week, an effort to reassure people that Trump's unorthodox campaign is viable.

On Sunday, Manafort sought to calm the angst, describing a partnership between Trump's campaign operation and the Republican National Committee that goes beyond the committee's traditional role of raising money for the GOP nominee. He said the transition to the general election is complete -- but the details have not necessarily been made public.

McConnell and other Republicans said they got the first glimmers of reassurance this week when Trump fired former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in what Trump described as a change of direction from the GOP primaries to the general election. Lewandowski was at the center of the campaign's most corrosive internal battles, which Trump allowed to fester for months.

Clinton's ad

Clinton's campaign released a new national television ad on Sunday attacking Trump for his comments on the U.K's decision to leave the European Union.

The ad, which will begin airing this week, comes as the two spar over the meaning of the U.K. exit vote and seek to portray it as an argument bolstering their candidacies in the U.S.

Clinton, who had urged the U.K. not to leave, slammed the real estate investor for saying on Friday that his golf courses in Scotland would benefit from market turmoil that followed the vote, including an 8 percent decline in the British pound to the lowest level since 1985.

Trump has insisted that the combination of economic stagnation, anger at trade policies, and distrust of immigrants that helped propel the U.K. vote represents the same momentum that carried him to the Republican nomination and shows that Clinton is out of step with voters.

"Every president is tested by world events, but Donald Trump thinks about how his golf resort can profit from them," says Clinton's ad, which juxtaposes Trump's praise of the course with news reports of plummeting stock markets. "In a volatile world, the last thing we need is a volatile president."

A Clinton campaign announcement about the ad said Trump had cheered the U.K. vote to leave the EU and touted his potential profit from the decision "while markets plummeted and American families watched as their 401(k) accounts lose more than $100 billion in value in a day."

Trump hit back on social media on Sunday, calling it "disgraceful" that Clinton was "trying to wash away her bad judgment call on BREXIT with big dollar ads," referring to the U.K. vote to exit the EU.

Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who has been mentioned as a Clinton running mate, said the "Leave" vote response showed Trump was a "chaos candidate."

"Hillary Clinton is about we, Donald Trump is about me," Perez said on This Week. During the post-U.K.-vote chaos, Trump "talks about how great his sprinkler systems are," he added.

Later Sunday, Clinton chastised Republican lawmakers for a "paralyzed" Congress, saying they've fueled populist anger by refusing to "do their job."

Speaking to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Indianapolis, Clinton ticked off a list of items that GOP congressional leaders have refused to schedule for a vote. They include a proposed immigration overhaul, holding confirmation hearings to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, and strengthening background checks and banning firearms sales to people on the government no-fly list.

"Leaders in Congress refuse to act on a wide range of issues that really matter to American working families," Clinton said.

"I know we can respect the Second Amendment and make common-sense reforms," she said. "Yet Congress is paralyzed. Not a filibuster in the Senate, not a sit-in in the House could convince the leadership to move forward. I really believe the American people deserve better."

Clinton was referring to an effort by Democrats in the Senate and House to advance gun-control legislation in the aftermath of the deadly Orlando, Fla., nightclub shooting. The National Rifle Association opposed the measures. Senate Democrats held a 15-hour filibuster over the issue, while those in the House held a 25-hour sit-in that ground proceedings nearly to a halt last week.

Information for this article was contributed by Laurie Kellman and Alan Fram of The Associated Press and by Ben Brody of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 06/27/2016

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