The campaign chair and chief strategist of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign called the last Republican nominee a "coward" on Sunday.
In an interview with ABC’s "This Week," Paul Manafort ripped into Mitt Romney after the 2012 nominee said his heart was broken watching Trump’s campaign.
“I think they’re sitting in their little cocoon away from the reality of the world,” Manafort said of the group of donors Romney gathered at a confab in Utah this past week. Many of them expressed concern about Trump, and Romney himself criticized the other Republican candidates this year for not being able to take on Trump effectively.
“This is sore losers [sic],” Manafort said. “Romney wanted to run, chose not to. He is now attacking this past weekend all the other Republicans who ran for president as well, saying they should have done a better job. Well, if he feels that way, he should have run. He was a coward… He didn’t want to get into the race. He had an opportunity to get into the race and chose not to, and now he’s criticizing all those who Trump beat for not running a good campaign and he’s criticizing Trump who got over 3.5 million votes more than Romney got in the [2012] primaries.”
The conventional wisdom has held that Trump needs to consolidate his Republican base if he wants to win the general election. And he’s made a lot of progress on that front. But it’s clear that a certain segment of the GOP -- made up of a fair number of Republican elites -- will never support Trump and that Trump’s campaign couldn't care less.
Editor's note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims -- 1.6 billion members of an entire religion -- from entering the U.S.