Republican presidential candidate John Kasich on Thursday offered himself as an alternative to the fervent supporters of Donald Trump, who may have been put off by his recent controversial comments.
“For those people who have been fervent Trump supporters, their frustration, their expressions do not fall on deaf ears for me,” Kasich told reporters at the Sheraton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “In addition to being a candidate for president of the U.S. and being governor of the great state of Ohio, I am also a citizen, and I see what’s happening. I know it’s frustrating. But to the Trump voters, there is hope. We’ve done it before – putting a team together to improve people’s situation, including those who have lived in the shadows. And, secondly, we can do it again.
Issuing a call for the Trump voters to defect, the Republican presidential hopeful said, “While the person that you have favored continues to move in an unmoored, untethered fashion, I understand that, at times, he is the vessel for your frustration, and I want to offer myself up. There’s a new vessel that could actually understand your problems, and work aggressively to fix them.”
Kasich listed five examples – his most recent comments on abortion, Muslim profiling, NATO, nuclear proliferation, and SCOTUS choice – that continue to prove Trump is not prepared to be president of the U.S. and serve as commander-in-chief and the leader of the free world.
“You wonder about his hand or his thumb getting any close to the critical buttons the president is in charge of,” he remarked. “It takes judgement. It takes experience. Not wild-eye suggestions, and, basically, moving from one suggestion and the need to try and explain what you really meant when you realize that the suggestion you made confused or enraged people. That is not how you act as president of the United States. It shows that he is really not prepared to be president of the United States.”
Kasich acknowledged that he has no path to get to 1,237 delegates before the convention, but so doesn’t Ted Cruz have a viable path to prevent a contested convention. Touting recent national polls that continue to show him as the only Republican that could beat Hillary Clinton in the fall, Kasich expressed confidence that his electability pitch would win over delegates and the establishment at the convention.
A Quinnipiac poll published on Thursday showed Kasich trailing Hillary Clinton by only five percentage points in the State of New York.
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