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WASHINGTON, June 22 (Xinhua) -- Two-thirds of Republican voters believe that their party leaders do not want GOP's presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump to get elected, a new survey said on Wednesday.
According to the latest Rasmussen Reports survey, 66 percent of likely Republican voters are convinced that the majority of top GOP leaders do not want Trump to win the White House, with only 20 percent saying otherwise.
In addition, almost two in three GOP voters say the continued criticism against Trump by party leaders is bad for the party.
The survey came at a time when Trump was bogged down in controversies which had caused further distance between him and GOP leadership.
Early this month, Trump raised eyebrows among the GOP leaders after he repeatedly accused U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the Indiana-born jurist overseeing a civil fraud suit in California involving Trump University, of being unfit for the case because he was of "Mexican heritage."
Trump implied that Curiel, the Hispanic-American judge, was biased against him because of Trump's proclamation that he would build a wall along the border between America and Mexico to halt illegal immigration.
Later, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan doubled down on his criticism of Trump, calling Trump's comments on Curiel because of the judge's ethnic background "textbook" racism.
After the nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida on June 12, Trump revived his call for a ban on foreign Muslims entering the United States and said the federal government should consider racial profiling of Muslims in America.
Trump also implied that U.S. President Barack Obama may have sympathized with the radicalized gunman of the Orlando carnage, a claim flatly denounced by both Democratic and Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress.
As the Trump campaign is heading towards the general election, the rift between the New York billionaire developer and GOP leaders appears to be growing.
After the latest Federal Election Commission filings showed early this week that the Trump campaign currently had only 1.3 million U.S. dollars on hand, compared with Hillary Clinton's 42 million dollars, Senate Majority Leader on Tuesday reportedly refuse to answer questions about the Trump campaign.
According to the U.S. daily Politico, McConnel had refused to talk about Trump for two straight weeks.
Meanwhile, Politico quoted an aide in House Speaker Ryan's political operation as saying that Ryan had no fundraisers planned on behalf of Trump.
According to Politico, Ryan had since last October raised more than 30 million dollars for the GOP, the majority of which was focused on supporting congressional Republicans for re-election. Enditem
