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As Joseph Heller famously wrote in Catch-22, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” On today’s Morning Joe, Mark Halperin reported that GOP elites are indeed trying to “orchestrate” a “grassroots, organic” revolt against the presumptive nominee. An “orchestrated grassroots, organic” revolt? Oxymoron, anyone? Halperin went on to state “Trump is right: there are people plotting against him.” View the video here.

Pressure for one last attempt to dump Donald Trump built among Republicans on Sunday, as the party’s leader appeared to encourage a possible revolt that could still see an alternative nominee chosen at next month’s national convention. After a week in which the presumptive nominee appalled many colleagues with his reaction to a shooting massacre in Orlando, House speaker Paul Ryan made clear he would not try to obstruct any rebellion against Trump by delegates in Cleveland. “They write the rules, they make the decisions,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press. “All I want to make sure is to make...

Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” when asked about his support for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in light of talks over delegate revolts, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said no one could predict the outcome of the GOP nomination process, adding, “I think things remain reasonably uncertain.” Johnson said, “Nobody can really predict what’s going to be the outcome of our nomination process. I know there’s a number of movements afoot. I’m not part of that process. I have my own race here in Wisconsin, I’m going to concentrate on the areas of agreement, growing our economy, strengthening...

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has been quietly having conversations with state party leaders to discuss the latest push by convention delegates to nominate anyone other than Donald Trump. Priebus has spoken with GOP party chairmen in multiple states in recent days in part to get a better sense of how large the anti-Trump faction is among their convention delegations, according to two people familiar with the conversations. While Priebus has made clear in these conversations that he is not spearheading the latest push for a coup, his involvement sends a signal that the RNC is taking this effort...

Donald Trump on Saturday accused Jeb Bush of mounting a convention coup against him, after reports that Republican delegates who don't personally support Trump are looking for ways to avoid voting for him this summer. "By the way, Jeb is working on the movement, just so you understand," Trump said to supporters at a rally in Las Vegas. "Jeb is one of the people that's working — and the other one should be obvious," he said, though he didn't elaborate further. Earlier at the rally, however, Trump echoed the Republican National Committee and said the reports were a media hoax....

Donald Trump railed Saturday against efforts by some frustrated Republicans planning a last-ditch effort to try to thwart him from becoming the party’s nominee, threatening at one point to stop fundraising if Republicans don’t rally around him. Speaking at a theater at the Treasure Island hotel on the Las Vegas strip, Trump referred to “an insurgent group” trying to deny him delegates at the party’s July convention.

A coalition of Republican delegates is mounting a last-ditch effort to block Donald Trump from obtaining the GOP nomination by pushing for a "conscience clause" that would allow delegates to vote against the presumptive nominee. Kendal Unruh, a Colorado delegate, organized a call with dozens of other delegates Thursday night to discuss ways to block Trump at the convention. The group, Unruh says, marks the coalescing of disparate "pockets of resistance" -- including backers of Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Marco Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich -- which had been opposing Trump with little success.

At least 30 delegates are mounting a longshot attempt to deny Donald Trump the GOP presidential nomination on the convention floor, The Washington Post reported Friday. The delegates hope to change party rules next month to take away delegates who are pledged to the presumptive nominee but who may not actually support him. The attempt comes on the heels of a tough stretch for Trump, who has seen his favorability plummet and any lead over Democrat Hillary Clinton evaporate over his attacks on a Hispanic federal judge, comments this week about banning Muslims and other controversies. http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/283912-several-gop-delegates-working-to-block-trumps-nomination

Dozens of Republican convention delegates are hatching a new plan to block Donald Trump at this summer’s party meetings, in what has become the most organized effort so far to stop the businessman from becoming the GOP nominee. The delegates are angered by Trump’s recent comments on gun control, his racial attacks on a federal judge and his sinking poll numbers. They are convinced that Trump is an insufficiently conservative candidate and believe they will find enough like-minded Republicans within the next month to change party rules and allow delegates to vote for whomever they want, regardless of who won...

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) has made clear he doesn't agree with a proposal put forward by Donald Trump -- whom Ryan has endorsed -- to ban Muslim immigration into the United States, but in an interview with the Huffington Post Thursday, Ryan floated taking a President Trump to court if he tried to implement such a ban or some of his other controversial proposals unilaterally. “I would sue any president that exceeds his or her powers,” Ryan said in a back-and-forth about Trump's claims that he could implement a Muslim ban or build a Mexican border wall without congressional...

When in his 1964 GOP acceptance speech Barry Goldwater declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” a reporter sitting near journalist/historian Theodore White famously exclaimed: “My God, he’s going to run as Barry Goldwater!” Six weeks into Donald Trump’s general election campaign, Republicans are discovering that he indeed intends to run as Donald Trump. He has boasted that he could turn “presidential” — respectful, respectable, reticent, reserved bordering on boring — at will. Apparently, he can’t. GOP leaders who fell in line behind Trump after he clinched the nomination expected, or at least hoped, that he...

At a Fort Pierce home owned by members of the Mateen family, Seddique Mateen — father of the Orlando massacre shooter Omar Mateen — said Omar's wife Noor Salman is "no longer here" and that she was no longer in the area. He would not say where she had gone.

But the fact is that the attacks by Romney and others not only do not harm Trump’s chances of winning. They enhance them. Rather than seek to heal the split, he should try to widen it. A political leader is particularly credible when he speaks ill of members of his own party, particularly after the primary season has ended. While we treat as boiler plate criticism of Democrats by Republicans and vice versa, we take seriously derogatory comments about members of one’s own party (hence the media’s interest in intraparty criticism of Trump). If Trump can criticize the Romney wing...

A nearly 15-hour filibuster led by Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut ended early Thursday morning after Republicans agreed to hold votes on gun control measures. The Senate will vote on a measure banning gun sales to people on the terrorist watch list and a provision requiring background checks at shows and over the internet. Republicans may also offer their own gun control measures. The filibuster comes just days after a shooting in Orlando that killed 49 people and wounded dozens others. Murphy, joined by most of his Democratic colleagues, recalled his own state’s loss of 27 people during the 2012...

Ohio Governor John Kasich insists he is not interested in being Donald Trump's running mate, or in launching a potential third-party bid for the White House — but that doesn't mean that he hasn't been strongly urged to consider it.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) ended a blockade of the Senate floor after nearly 15 hours Thursday, announcing that Republican leaders agreed to hold votes on Democrat-backed measures to expand background checks and prevent suspected terrorists from acquiring guns. Democrats were angling for votes on the two gun-control measures, which they are presenting as amendments to a pending spending bill and demanding that it was the least the Senate could do to respond to the Orlando massacre that killed 49 over the weekend. “We still have to get from here to there, but we did not have that commitment when we...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) attended a confidential dinner with more than 20 top conservatives on Tuesday night to plan his comeback as a movement leader in the mold of Ronald Reagan. The dinner was at the Virginia home of conservative activist Brent Bozell, and the agenda was to plot Cruz’s future and the future of the conservative movement. The undertone of the dinner was about how to position Cruz for a future tilt at the presidency and to spearhead the conservative movement from his seat in the Senate, those in attendance said. Dining with Cruz and his chief of staff,...

House Speaker Paul Ryan told a room of Republican donors and elites in Park City, Utah last weekend that he endorsed Donald Trump to keep the Republican Party together. That explanation implied that if the highest ranking Republican didn't support the top of the ticket and went against the legitimate winner of the primary electoral process that the Republican Party would limp forward as a divided party with no chance of electoral success. The Speaker suggested that he put party above personal preference for the sake of unity. Just days later, party unity appears even more fragile. Since wrapping up...

Ryan and like-minded establishment Republicans have struggled to reconcile their desire to unify the party in advance of a tough fight against Democrat Hillary Clinton while at the same time separating themselves from some of the positions and rhetoric of Trump, who defeated 16 rivals to win the presidential nomination Ryan said "the smarter way to go" would be to have a "security test" for Middle Eastern immigrants to ensure proper security screening. He noted that the House passed legislation to tighten visa restrictions that President Barack Obama signed into law, but that the Senate had blocked another measure that...

Main points of the story: Delegates won’t be legally ‘bound’ going into the convention. Although 20 states have passed laws that purport to bind delegates, these statutes can’t be legally enforced. This year the Rules Committee will be packed with supporters of Sen. Ted Cruz, who has not endorsed Mr. Trump. A political party is a private association whose members join together to further their shared beliefs through electoral politics, and they have a right to choose their representatives. Treating parties like mini-democracies reduces choice in the general election by crowding out the features that give each party its unique...