At a tense meeting of the state party’s executive committee, police removed pro-Trump protesters, and an already heightened sense of confrontation was exacerbated when Trump’s national director of social media tweeted out the personal cell phone of the state party chairman, Ryan Haynes.

“It was a bad day for the Republican Party in this state,” said Trump supporter Mark Winslow, who said he had been removed from a list of delegates agreed upon by Trump’s state director and Haynes on Wednesday, reclassified as an alternate and then removed altogether.

Trump’s backers maintain Haynes engineered the removal of several Trump supporters from a list of at-large Tennessee delegates and replaced with Republicans likely to support Trump’s rivals at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland — if the nomination fight takes more than two ballots to resolve. Tennessee’s delegates to the convention are bound to the results of the state primary — which Trump won — for the first two ballots.