This article is from the source 'independent' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-is-now-officially-the-republican-nominee-a7050291.html
The article has changed 4 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| Donald Trump becomes 'official Republican presidential nominee' | |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| Donald Trump has officially done it, quietly moving past the magic number of delegates needed to ensure he is crowned Republican nominee for the White House in 2016. | |
| According to the delegate count kept by the Associated Press, Mr Trump, the brash New York billionaire who has been unopposed since his last two rivals dropped out of the contest in early May, made it to the vaunted 1,237 threshold - and just beyond - on Thursday. | |
| The passing of the milestone should finally dispose of any lingering sense of disbelief about the political potency of the world’s most boastful property baron and reality television entrepreneur. | |
| It was a moment as profoundly significant - for him, for his party and possibly for the world - as it was oddly anticlimactic. For all the intense drama that had come before it, the announcement that he had finally made it was essentially little more than an electoral accounting update. | |
| There wasn’t even some thundering primary win to push him over the top. The most recent was in Washington state on Tuesday which gave him 40 new delegates, taking him to within a whisper of the required tally. What did it, AP said, was a few so-called unbound delegates reporting their decisions to swing behind him. | |
| The storming of the Republican bastion by Mr Trump was predicted by few. When he declared in the gold and marble confines of Trump Tower last June and uttered his now famous smears about Mexican migrants, he was widely dismissed as a noisy, impossibly offensive freak show. | |
| Then as he began gradually to barge his rivals from the road one by one - Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie were among his earliest victims - and it was down essentially to him and Senator Ted Cruz (with straggler John Kasich declining to give up) the conversation changed. | |
| That was then, when everything rested on Mr Trump wining the two big states at the very end of the primary marathon, California and New Jersey, both set to vote on 7 June. The anti-Trump movement had one last hope: that he would arrive at the party convention in Cleveland in July just shy of the number of delegates he needed to clinch the crown. | |
| Barring some dramatic rebellion or boycott by delegates still unnerved by the notion of a former reality star taking their party’s helm - and some are still agitating for exactly that - there will be no contested convention. Mr Trump will run the show. And a show it promises to be. | |
| If anything, it is the Democrat convention in Philadelphia that now has the potential to erupt into chaos with supporters of Bernie Sanders of Hillary Clinton potentially clashing. | |
| Those grappling with the reality of Mr Trump’s ascent to Republican Party nominee including the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations, as told at least by President Barack Obama during a press conference at this week’s Group of Seven summit in Japan. | |
| “They are not sure how seriously to take some of his pronouncements, but they’re rattled by him, and for good reason,” he said of his colleagues around the summit table, before offering his sharpest criticism yet of Mr Trump’s past pronouncements on foreign policy. | |
| Those comments, the President averred, “display either ignorance over world affairs, or a cavalier attitude, or an interest in getting tweets and headlines instead of actually thinking through what’s required to keep America safe and secure and prosperous”. |