Donald Trump said Sunday Republicans once made plans for a “second convention in August.”
The presumptive GOP presidential nominee made the claim during the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
“You know I was supposed to be going to Cleveland and July, and it was going to be a big fight,” he said. “And they didn’t know if I could win then. They were going to have even — they even talked about having a second convention in August. Stuff that nobody even heard about.”
“And look what happened! I won — we won,” Trump said.
Trump was referring to a period in the Republican presidential primary in which anti-Trump figures sought to block him from amassing the 1,237 delegates necessary to claim the party’s nomination on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July.
If no candidate claimed the nomination on the first ballot, the RNC could have become chaotic — with candidate frantically working to usher suddenly-unbound delegates into their own camps.
But there was no public talk from GOP officials of leaving the party’s nomination undecided until a second convention in August.
It’s not the first time Trump has made the claim. He said the same thing several times last week, including at a press conference in North Dakota last week.
Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Trump was referring to an idea that some political pundits were kicking around several months ago when a contested convention was the talk of the town.
“It was a narrative that some of the pundits were talking about earlier in the year when they didn’t think they could have a nominee at the convention,” Lewandowski said.
Lewandowski said it’s an idea that was kicked around in “roundtables” on the Sunday shows where pundits suggested “if we can’t have a nominee, maybe we’ll have a second convention.”
