A Republican National Committee member Thursday issued a call to fellow committee members to stand firm against a certain GOP presidential candidate — taking care not to mention Donald Trump by name — who is leaving party members "almost terrorized" into supporting him.
"You can argue with me, but we're almost terrorized as members of our party," the committeeman, Holland Redfield, told Chairman Reince Priebus and other members at a breakfast meeting in South Carolina,
reports Politico, after Redfield sent the website a recorded video of his five-minute speech.
"'Shut up. Toe the line, embrace each other, and let's go forward,'" Redfield said the candidate is saying. "I understand that. But there is a limit to loyalty. I am loyal to this party by speaking out on these very issues."
Redfield has lived in St. Croix, Virgin Islands for more than 40 years, but was born in Syracuse, NY in 1943. He served as National Committeeman and Chairman of both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush campaigns for the Virgin Islands, was a GOP senator in the Virgin Islands legislature for six terms, and is now a radio show host.
As a party, Redfield told the committee members at the private breakfast, "we owe it to ourselves to speak up, and not let the tail wag the dog, and not let someone say, all of a sudden, 'If you don't play my game, then I'm running as an independent.'"
Such discussion by "these candidates" is "reducing our label," he argued, as is the "the disrespect in many cases for ethnic minorities in the United States, but also religious factions in the United States. We have to draw the line. Because sooner or later, somebody has to pick up the pieces."
"You've got a situation here," he continued, "that when someone is listening to this, either a conservative or a Democrat, or a Republican, or an independent, there are things that are said on that stage and in the media, that if your child was doing that, you'd put that child over your knee and spank them. You know it, and I know it."
He described the Republicans' message as a "wonderful one," not the divisive words that are being spoken, pointing out that the party is the one of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln.
Redfield spoke uninterrupted for about five minutes, saying that gridlock and the two-party system have made the way for "certain candidates who are sucking it up and changing our label."
"Good God, many of you have been in this room for years," Redfield told the members. "working in the trenches, and all of sudden someone's going to tell you it ain't one of them? It's our party, the people's party, and not the candidates', and I've had it."
He also warned that letting anger that Trump has tapped into could consume the party.
"You always hear the argument, 'Well, this is what people are thinking,'" he said. "So, if this is what people are thinking in this party, as far as I'm concerned, we're going in the wrong direction."
He further noted that the Virgin Islands, which he represents, has a large minority population, and that he can't imagine running someone on the Republican ticket and winning such areas, as "a good politician is pragmatic — they have to be to succeed."
Priebus and the RNC have not responded to Redfield's call for action, but he told Politico later in the day that fellow members gave him a warm response, and that he felt the need to speak "because it needed to be said."
However, just last week,
Priebus told Time Magazine that he sees no reason for Trump's candidacy to worry Republicans.
"Look at our debates. We're blowing the doors off these debates," he said. "They're becoming like World Series–type events that we could never have predicted. And that will be a good thing for our party, we have to break into the culture of America and we're doing it."
Further, Priebus called Trump a "varsity" candidate and said he believes Trump will hold himself well in a general election.
"I think that we've got sort of the varsity team of candidates out there," Priebus said of the 12-person field, and he thinks "any one of our candidates can plug into what we're building and win a cultural vote in this country."