RNC plans for possibility Trump is imprisoned during the upcoming convention: chair

The Republican National Committee (RNC) is strategizing for a potential scenario where former President Trump, the presumptive nominee for the GOP, faces incarceration during the convention, as revealed by the party's chair on Tuesday, according to a report in The Hill.

Last week, Trump was convicted on all 34 felony charges in a case related to "hush money" payments. A New York jury found him guilty of manipulating business records to conceal an alleged extramarital affair during his 2016 presidential campaign. Judge Juan Merchan has scheduled his sentencing for July 11, just days before the commencement of the RNC convention.

In response to this development, Speaker Mike Johnson has urged the Supreme Court to intervene.

RNC Chair Michael Whatley has expressed confidence that Trump will be officially nominated at the party's mid-July convention in Milwaukee.

“Yeah, we’re working on that right now,” Whatley told Newsmax. “I’m actually going up to Milwaukee this week, and we’re going to have a series of conversations.”

“We expect that Donald Trump is going to be in Milwaukee and he’s going to be able to accept that nomination and if not, we will make whatever contingency planning we need to make for it. But the fact is, he’s going to be our nominee, and he’s going to be the 47th president of the United States,” Whatley said. 

“We’ll cross that bridge but you sort of have to go into this stuff, as we certainly will be planning on it,” Whatley continued. “We’ll be thinking about it, and we’re working on that right now. But what we want to do is we want to have a show that is going to roll out Donald Trump and his vision for America, which is going to set up this election cycle.”

Speaking to CNN's State of the Union, RNC co-chair Lara Trump said “We have to make plans as they happen, and we’re going to have several contingency plans. The truth is, it really doesn’t matter whether it’s from Trump Tower in Manhattan, whether it’s from Mar-a-Lago, whether it’s from our convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We will nominate Donald Trump as our Republican nominee, and that’s what ultimately matters.”