By Arun Kumar
Washington, May 12 (IANS) As a triumphant Donald Trump comes to Washington to meet House speaker Paul Ryan, rank-and file House Republicans are pressing the latter to fall behind the party's presumptive presidential nominee.
Ryan's resistance to endorsing Trump could lead to the party fracturing as "It makes it harder to unite," said Raul Labrador, a leader of conservative House Freedom Caucus ahead of the Thursday meeting between the speaker and the party's new standard-bearer.
Commenting on Ryan's remark that "it's Donald Trump's duty to unite the party," another member asked at a meeting of House Republicans Wednesday, "So Mr. Speaker, what's your job regarding unity?"
"To pretend we are unified without actually unifying means we go into the fall at half-strength," said Ryan, "This election is too important to go into an election at half-strength."
Many House Republicans members, according to CNN shared some of Ryan's concerns about the controversial billionaire, but after his lengthy string of convincing primary victories, they are resigned to lining up behind Trump.
Ryan ha also suggested he hoped Trump would show an openness to change on both substance and tone when they meet on Thursday, but Trump believes he has the "mandate" to be himself and has no intention of reinventing himself for the presidential poll.
Meanwhile, Trump's candidacy is said have sparked 'a surge' in citizenship, voter applications among Latinos primarily motivated by Trump's plans to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants and building a wall on the US-Mexico border, the Washington Post reported.
On the Democratic side, a group of staffers and volunteers of Bernie Sanders, who is giving a tough fight to frontrunner Hillary Clinton, are pressing him to get out of the presidential race after the Democratic primaries and concentrate on building a national progressive organization to stop Donald Trump.
With Sanders unlikely to get enough delegates to beat Clinton, they want him to launch an independent political group far larger than any other recent post-campaign political operations, such as those started by Howard Dean or Barack Obama, the Politico reported.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
