A Republican party torn by Trump's unstoppable rise struggles to find unity

Leaders fight to restore confidence in picking presidential nominee but CPAC attendees grow wary of any attempt to rig the nomination process

 ‘There is no way that the people are not going to decide,’ Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, told CPAC. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/A

House speaker Paul Ryan prepares to speak at the 43rd annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Dan Roberts and Ben Jacobsin Fort Washington, Maryland, and Sabrina Siddiqui in Detroit

Republican leaders fought to restore confidence in their process for picking a presidential nominee on Friday after an establishment backlash against Donald Trump and another insult-strewn television debate left the party facing unprecedented, and possibly existential, challenges to its unity.

“We are in territory that our party hasn’t seen,” conceded Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), at a meeting of conservative activists gathered outside Washington, when he was asked what would happen if there was no clear winner by the time of this summer’s GOP convention.

Priebus insisted the chances of the race needing to be decided by a so-called “brokered convention” – at which delegates would be freed from voting in line with state primary election results – were just 10-15%, but discussion of an apparent attempt by former nominee Mitt Romney to engineer such a scenario was met with loud boos from the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

 CPAC attendees put Donald Trump in his place (on our homemade spectrum)

Though strongly supportive of Texas senator Ted Cruz and mostly suspicious of Trump, the audience at CPAC appeared even more skeptical of any attempt to rig the nomination process by party leaders in Washington.

“There is no way that the people are not going to decide,” a defensive Priebus told CPAC. “Whoever the nominee is of our party, they are going to get the full backing and 100% support of the Republican party.”

Shortly after Priebus spoke, Trump announced he had pulled out of a planned appearance at CPAC on Saturday, something organizers claimed amounted to a “clear message to conservatives” and suggested the party was in actual fact now torn in three conflicting directions.

Romney’s dramatic intervention on Thursday – in which he attacked Trump as a “fraud” and urged Republicans to vote for whoever is closest to catching him in individual state primaries – is widely seen as an effort to ensure no candidate reaches the 1,237 delegates needed to secure a first-round victory.

If Marco Rubio is unable to rally enough establishment support to challenge Trump or Cruz, it is possible that Romney or his former running mate, House speaker Paul Ryan, could emerge as alternatives in the convention’s second round, when delegates are released from requirements to vote in accordance with the result of primary elections.

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