"He will argue until his death that he actually is the rightful GOP nominee but that the RNC pulled some rules run-around on him to deny him his crown."

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COMMENTS: 
*  Exit strategy? I would think he'd just go back to bankrupting companies.
*  The republican party has been in total disarray for years, no one can say they have put forth any solutions to any problems the country or the world has in the last 20 years... health care...nope ...SS...nope...defense...nope...middle east...nope...it's bomb and cut taxes...just for the rich... infrastructure....nope....the debates were a complete joke...not one time did they even talk policy or solutions to problems facing the average American...just hurled insults at each other...Trump is just the messenger...Cruz is his backup...
*  Most of the posters here must be very young, or just have short memories. The Republican Party in America has always been a hot mess. They fight progress, badmouth any policy that actually helps people, predict doom and gloom, and whine endlessly. Then, when they actually get in office, they do nothing, nada, zip. as if they're holding the line against "commies". They're basically useless.
*  And Trump got 100% of the delegates in Florida even though he only won 46% of the vote. Fair? Not if you apply Trump's logic. So far, Trump has won 37% of all votes cast in primaries, but he has 45% of all delegates (a 22% advantage in delegates vs. votes). Fair? Trump needs to stop crying and take responsibility for his campaign failures.
*  The spoiled bully boy will never allow himself to be voted down. His ego will not allow it. Since birth he has been told by family, flunkies how wonderful he is, how smart, how great. Now in the real world he see how many despise and dislike him and its a wakeup call. He knows he can't win so I am sure somehow the pressure of business or family will be at least part of the excuse he gives when pulling out. There will be a lot of hand wringing, yelling, accusations about rigging and people "not respecting"him. He gives no respect, he gets no respect simple as that. No one wants the New York Nazi to get anywhere near the WH.
*   A huge part of Trump's candidacy platform is built on the idea that he will hire the best minds on the various subject to get the best results on behalf of America. Meanwhile, the minds behind his campaign couldn't figure out how to get delegates in Colorado, nor how to not get crushed in Wisconsin. If the primary in Colorado was simply "too complicated" are we supposed to believe world trade and geopolitics are simpler, and therefore something Trump and team can handle?
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Donald Trump is planning his exit strategy in case he loses the GOP nomination
By Jim Newell, April 16, 2016

One of the reasons that so many incorrect political observers (including myself) assumed Donald Trump wouldn’t actually run for president was that he wouldn’t be able to cope with certain loss.

Early last year when he was considering a run, he was registering nothing in the polls and his favorability ratings were comically poor among Republicans and the general population alike.

Since he was going to lose everything, and by a lot, what would be his exit strategy from the race? Wouldn’t he have to quit by, say, December, after getting some good publicity but before real voting commenced, so he could lie about how he could have won the presidency but didn’t feel like it?

As I was saying: incorrect. Trump will almost certainly finish primary season with the most votes, states won, and delegates to his name. But he has not won anything since Arizona’s primary on March 22 and, in the meantime, he has lost the Wisconsin primary and has been outhustled on the ground by Sen. Ted Cruz in Colorado’s convention delegate hunt.

His disorganization in selecting loyal convention delegates from the states he’s already won means he has little chance of winning the nomination if it extends beyond a first convention ballot, and winning on the first ballot will likely rest on his ability to woo some not-insignificant number of scattered unbound delegates to his corner.

Though the next stretch of contests are favorable to Trump, the possibility that he does not become the nominee despite having the most votes, states won, and delegates to his name has emerged, setting up the likelihood of a lively Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

After all that, it returns us to that original question: How would Donald Trump cope with a loss, or as he might call it were anyone else in his shoes at this point, a “choking?” How would he spin such a convention defeat to prevent his brand and his legacy—because he has earned himself a sizable legacy in modern American political history, regardless of what happens next—from forever being associated not just with defeat, but with an inability to close out the greatest deal of his life?

This eventuality is what he seems to be planning for, consciously or subconsciously, if you read anything into his recent bromides against the “rigged” system of delegate selection, formalized Thursday in an extremely ghostwritten column for the Wall Street Journal. In it, he attacks the idiosyncratic Colorado delegate selection process. Republican insiders have treated this as nothing more than whining.

The rules were put in place last year, they say; if he didn’t prepare, then he has no grounds on which to take issue. To his supporters, though, these complaints ring quite true. And they have a point. Why couldn’t Colorado have just held a primary instead of skipping straight to district and state conventions that allow in-the-know types to dominate? Was 34 delegates for Ted Cruz, however impressive a feat of organization, really the most accurate representation of Colorado Republicans’ political preferences?

Trump is cleverly trying to spin his apparent lack of organization into a virtue of his candidacy: that the rules are complicated by design to prevent an outsider from succeeding. “In recent days, something all too predictable has happened: Politicians furiously defended the system,” the writer writing under the name of “Donald J. Trump” explains in the Journal.  “ ‘These are the rules,’ we were told over and over again.

If the ‘rules’ can be used to block Coloradans from voting on whether they want better trade deals, or stronger borders, or an end to special-interest vote-buying in Congress—well, that’s just the system and we should embrace it.”

“Let me ask America a question,” the writer continues. “How has the ‘system’ been working out for you and your family?”

The column goes on to introduce a new campaign promise. If president, Trump will “work closely with the chairman of the Republican National Committee and top GOP officials to reform our election policies. Together, we will restore the faith—and the franchise—of the American people.” (Presumably there are few plans within either the Trump camp or RNC to cease real disenfranchisement efforts, but that’s another story.)

It’s useful to read this column and listen to the rest of his ravings about the flawed process as him articulating his contingency plan in the event of a loss. In such an event, he would argue that the party used every trick it could muster to stop him, the people’s choice, from winning the nomination.

In this, he would be right and wrong. The party will have used every trick it had to stop him. But that he has gotten as far as he has demonstrates the dearth of tricks available to the party, since winner-take-all or winner-take-most rules frequently allowed him to turn his narrow pluralities into majority delegate pickups.

Trump may be denied the nomination, but that won’t stop him from saying he won it anyway. He will argue until his death that he actually is the rightful GOP nominee but that the RNC pulled some rules run-around on him to deny him his crown.

Trump should be able to successfully spin that to his need, and his need is simply to avoid being labeled a choker every place he goes for the rest of his life. What it doesn’t mean, though, is that he would be a gracious loser in defeat (not that anyone is expecting this), or urge his supporters to move on and to back the eventual nominee. That would not help his brand, and the brand comes first.
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