FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) — His party in disarray, a surging Donald Trump called on mainstream Republicans to unify behind his candidacy on Wednesday as his White House rivals pursued their last best opportunity to block the billionaire businessman from building an insurmountable delegate lead in two key states.
The often-brash Trump softened his tone, at least temporarily, hours after securing three more primary victories, praising House Speaker Paul Ryan as a man he respects and encouraging Mitt Romney to promote party harmony. As for his own campaign, he said he’s poised to score a knockout in next week’s winner-take-all primaries in Florida and Ohio.
“If I win those two, I think it’s over,” he told CNN’s “Anderson Cooper’s 360.”
“Instead of fighting it, they should embrace it,” he added on Fox News Channel. “If we embrace what’s happening and if everybody came together … nobody could beat the Republican Party.”
Still, amid growing resistance to Trump’s insurgent campaign, a number of former GOP presidential hopefuls have re-emerged in support of his current rivals.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush planned to confer with all the candidates — save Trump — ahead of Thursday’s GOP debate. He was meeting privately with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio on Wednesday, and planned to meet with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Thursday, said Kristy Campbell, Bush’s former campaign spokeswoman. She provided no details.
Bush and Trump engaged in heated confrontations throughout Bush’s campaign, repeatedly referring to each other as a “loser.”
Rubio took Bush’s attacks a step further in recent weeks, poking fun at Trump’s tan, hair and hand size. Now, in the midst of a weeklong march through Florida to save his candidacy, Rubio concedes he made a mistake.
“My kids were embarrassed by it and if I had it to do over again I wouldn’t,” he said on MSNBC Wednesday night.
Cruz intensified his own bid to blunt Trump’s momentum with an endorsement from a former rival, retired business executive Carly Fiorina, who offers him an immediate dose of credibility with his party’s skeptical donor class.
Acknowledging many mainstream Republicans fear Cruz is too conservative, Fiorina told a Miami crowd that she’s “horrified” by Trump.
“The truth is that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are two sides of the same coin,” she charged. “It is time now to unite behind the one man who can beat Donald Trump, who can beat Hillary Clinton.”
As the competing calls for unity suggest, the Republican Party’s 2016 contest is far from settled a week before the high-stakes contests in Florida and Ohio that could finish off home-state candidates Rubio and John Kasich or resurrect their anemic candidacies.