Of course, those were the people in the hall, committed Republicans all. They weren’t the millions of general-election voters watching on TV. But their reactions, along with a lot of other signs, suggested at the least that whatever Republican disunity existed going into the convention had disappeared going out.
“Everybody has a come-to-Trump moment,” a southern politico who originally did not support Trump explained not long after Trump formally won the Republican nomination Tuesday night. The GOP’s get-on-board moment came later this year than in recent presidential elections, but it finally arrived at Quicken Loans on Thursday.
In a backhanded way, the previous night’s Ted Cruz debacle helped make it happen. What the widely negative reaction to Cruz showed was that the delegates and Republican activists gathered here no longer have any appetite for the conflicts of the GOP primary season. Those conflicts officially ended when the 1,237th delegate cast a vote for Trump, making him the party’s nominee. Cruz tried to extend the fight; it didn’t work.
In conversation after conversation over four days, delegates and other attendees said something like this: Donald Trump wasn’t my first choice. But he’s the nominee. The primaries are over. It’s time to get behind him.
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