What You Need to Know About the 'Rules' Donald Trump Is Complaining About
— -- Donald Trump has been questioning the deadlines set on the delegate acquisition rules, but Republican Party officials say they were set well before the nominating contests got underway earlier this year.
Trump has repeatedly blasted the Republican National Committee for using "the rules" to keep him from earning enough delegates to clinch the nomination. "I know the rules very well, but I know it's stacked against me by the establishment," Trump told CNN during Tuesday's Trump family town hall.
"They changed the rules a number of months ago," Trump added. "You know why they changed the rules? Because they saw how I was doing and they didn't like it."
However, the chairman of the RNC says that these complaints are coming far too late and that the rules have been the same since they were set last year.
RNC chairman Reince Priebus appeared to fire back at Trump following the town hall, posting two different messages on Twitter. "The rules were set last year," he wrote Tuesday. "Nothing mysterious --nothing new. The rules have not changed. The rules are the same. Nothing different."
He added today: "Nomination process known for a year + beyond. It's the responsibility of the campaigns to understand it. Complaints now? Give us all a break."
The rules in question are the state-level Republican Party rules that determine how each state's delegates are allotted.
Those rules were set on a state-by-state basis, so the terms of the allotments and the dates when they were set differ.
Colorado, where Sen. Ted Cruz won all of the state's delegates over the weekend, is one of the states that has been criticized by Trump. "How is it possible that the people of the great State of Colorado never got to vote in the Republican Primary? Great anger — totally unfair!" he tweeted Sunday.
Kyle Kohli, the communications director for the Colorado Republican Party, told ABC News that the group's executive committee finalized their rules in September and that they were made public for all candidates on Oct. 1.
As for general convention rules in July, those have not been set yet: Each convention sets its own rules every four years, so those rules will not be officially adopted until after the Convention Rules Committee, made up of 112 delegates, agrees to a set they develop a week before the convention.
