Trump declares war on GOP, says ‘the shackles have been taken off’, by Sean Sullivan.

Donald Trump declared war on the Republican establishment Tuesday, lashing out at House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and other GOP elected officials as his supporters geared up to join the fight amid extraordinary turmoil within the party just four weeks before Election Day.

One day after Ryan announced he would no longer campaign on Trump’s behalf, the GOP nominee said as part of a barrage of tweets that the top-ranking Republican is “weak and ineffective” and is providing “zero support” for his candidacy. Trump also declared that “the shackles have been taken off” him, liberating him to “fight for America the way I want to.” …

In perhaps the most piercing insult, Trump said his party is harder to deal with than even Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, whom conservatives loathe. … “Disloyal R’s are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary,” he wrote for his more than 12 million followers on Twitter, his preferred platform for picking fights. …

But many others rallied around Trump, including the Republican National Committee. Its chairman, Reince Priebus, was in close touch all day with Trump advisers and RNC strategist Sean Spicer was at Trump Tower in Manhattan.

The Republican Party is dividing into pro- and anti- Trump camps.

Speaking on his radio show Tuesday, popular conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said: “The Republican Party has sided with its donors and its lobbyists, and this is why we’re where we are. The Republican Party is in a predicament that it made itself. It made its own bed, and now they don’t want to lay in it. Now they want to run from the bed that they made.”