The Republican National Committee is "working on" contingency plans should former President Donald Trump be sentenced to jail in the days before the national convention in Milwaukee, but no matter what, he will be the nominee, RNC Chair Michael Whatley said on Newsmax on Tuesday.
"I'm actually going up to Milwaukee this week, and we're going to have a series of conversations," Whatley told Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "But look, we expect that Donald Trump is going to be in Milwaukee, and he's going to be able to accept that nomination, and if not, we will make whatever contingency planning we need to make for it."
But at the end of the day, Trump will be the nominee, and "he's going to be the 47th president of the United States," Whatley said.
Trump's sentencing date is July 11, after his conviction in New York City last week on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Whatley wouldn't comment on the contingency plans but said the convention will be Trump's opportunity to roll out his vision for the United States.
Meanwhile, Whatley said he would not go into hypotheticals about the potential that Trump could be sentenced to jail or prison, or if the sentence could involve probation.
"We'll cross that bridge but you sort of have to go into this stuff, as we certainly will be planning on it," he said. "We'll be thinking about it, and we're working on that right now. But what we want to do is we want to have a show that is going to roll out Donald Trump and his vision for America, which is going to set up this election cycle."
Whatley added that "everything is being thought about" in case Trump would be behind bars, including his recording a speech that could be played during the convention.
"We will have to wait and see what the courts present us with the opportunity to do, but look, Donald Trump will communicate directly with the American voters the way that he always does," he said.
Meanwhile, Politico has reported that President Joe Biden's advisers are pushing to make the 2024 Democratic National Convention a hybrid production, such as the one that took place in 2020, considering fear of protests in Chicago, but Whatley said he thinks the DNC is more concerned about having him on the air for an extended period of time.
"They want to try and hide him," he said. "That's their entire campaign plan, is they're going back to the basement like they did in 2020. He just is not able to communicate directly with the American people, so they're going to do it as a studio production."
Whatley also commented on the news that the Trump campaign raised $141 million in May, and said that the campaign is getting where it needs to be.
"The Trump campaign knows that Joe Biden is going to have a ton of money," he said. "We need to have the resources that we need. We are getting the resources that we need."
He added that a large amount of the donations came through 2 million new donors, giving an average of $70 each.
"What we're seeing is an enthusiasm for the president that is totally organic," Whatley said. "It's something that we've never seen in the history of politics in America before."
The ground game, meanwhile, is to get out the vote and protect the ballot, he added.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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