NC GOP delegate: ‘We need somebody to shake up Washington’

Jim Hastings has not only been aboard the Trump train, he helped drive it in North Carolina.

The Boone businessman and former state Republican chairman co-chaired Donald Trump’s campaign in the state. Now he’s a delegate to the GOP convention.

For him, Trump is the only guy to fix what he sees as a broken system.

“I’m disgusted with everybody in Washington,” says Hastings, 72. “It seems as if (President Barack) Obama’s rewriting the Constitution and governing by executive action. And apparently we don’t have anybody with gravitas to push back. We need somebody to shake up Washington.”

Hastings says he’s “tired of the same-old, same-old.” That includes entrenched Washington Republicans as well as Democrats.

He’s convinced that Trump, whom he met at a rally in Raleigh, would shake things up.

“Does Donald Trump have all the answers?” he says. “No. He told me that he knows he doesn’t have all the answers. But he told me he’s smart enough to surround himself with people who do know things.”

Hastings knows that, even at this late date, some delegates want another nominee. But like it or not, he says, Trump won the primaries with a record total of more than 13 million votes.

“It seems to me that a candidate who gets more Republican votes in the primaries than anybody in the history of this country, why would you want to stop him?” he says. “There’s a lot of people who want him to be president.”

For the “Dump Trump” delegates, he has two words: Hillary Clinton.

“They’ve had their chance,” Hastings says. “I just ask them all to consider the alternative.”

This story was originally published July 15, 2016 at 1:17 PM with the headline "NC GOP delegate: ‘We need somebody to shake up Washington’."