Donald Trump will likely make a backroom deal with John Kasich or Ted Cruz if he falls short of the 1,237 delegates needed to win the GOP presidential nomination, veteran conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan says.
Such a deal would put the Republican front-runner over the top and crush any plan the GOP establishment is cooking up to oust him at its upcoming convention, Buchanan said Thursday to Newsmax TV's Steve Malzberg.
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"Before you get to convention, Trump could talk to Kasich and offer him the vice presidency for all his delegates if he's a bit short," he said.
"If he's a really short, he might turn around and say to Ted Cruz, 'Ted, you want to have these fellas try to take this nomination away from us, who have done all this work? Or do you want to run with me on a Trump-Cruz ticket?'
"The key thing is, look, you can win this election this November if this party will unite the Cruz and Trump people and Rubio and Kasich people and maybe everybody doesn't like each other but they can win the White House, they can win the Congress, they can win the court."
But that can only happen only if the party puts aside its differences and unites, says Buchanan, a two-time GOP presidential candidate and adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald Ford.
"If you can keep all of those people inside the tent without them engaging in what Mr. Trump called a riot, you can do it," he said.
Buchanan said there's no way House Speaker Paul Ryan or other name-brand conservatives could waltz in at the bitter end to seize the nomination as some old-guard Republicans would like to see happen.
"I think it's a lot of Beltway talk, basically. Many of these folks have never been out there. I tried that myself and we did get a party on 50 state ballots back in 1999, 2000 and we got wiped out," Buchanan said.
"But it took a tremendous effort. You've got to have a horse. They don't have a candidate who can go out there and do that. I don't know what party identification they're going to have, how they get them on the ballot, and these are not folks who are used to being out there in the primaries.
"They're very much creatures of the Beltway and I think that's what it all is, a lot of Beltway talk up on Capitol Hill at the Capitol Grille … Paul Ryan's not going to be drafted at the convention. This nomination is going to go to probably Donald Trump."
Buchanan is the author of
"The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority," published by Crown Forum.