Free Republic

Donald Trump can be an effective president, and he’s going to win with you or without you, Republican Chairman Reince Priebus told several hundred of the party’s top donors and strategists Saturday. Trump is setting a dangerous example for Americans by promoting “trickle-down racism,” and the party must look beyond this presidential election to find its future, the 2012 nominee Mitt Romney told the same group later that morning. Delivered within moments of each other at Romney’s annual business and politics summit at a five-star ski resort, those opposite messages were enough to cause whiplash. That’s a hazard of being...

On Friday afternoon, at an exclusive Republican donor retreat here hosted by Mitt Romney, frustration boiled over. During an off-the-record question-and-answer session with House Speaker Paul Ryan, Meg Whitman, the billionaire Hewlett Packard chief executive officer, confronted the speaker over his endorsement of Trump. Whitman, a major GOP giver who ran for California governor in 2010, compared Trump to historical demagogues like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and wanted to know how the speaker could get behind him. At another discussion session during the day, which featured top Romney alumni Stuart Stevens and Matt Rhoades, Ana Navarro, a Republican contributor...

The Weekly Standard published “An Open Letter to Mitt Romney” on Tuesday night, begging the former Republican presidential nominee to launch a third-party bid. “[T]hese are extraordinary times, and your nation still has need of your service. I respectfully implore you to run for president as an independent candidate in 2016,” Jay Cost wrote. Cost slams presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s “Nixonian paranoia” of “enemies” and calls her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump, “a sympathizer with the nativist ‘alt-right.’ ” “They do not see Americans as Americans,” the letter continues. “They see each of us as potential allies or foes,...

Editor's note: The following video was produced by journalist Lee Stranahan and exposes the coordinated campaign between Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the media to conceal the truth about the Benghazi terrorist attack until after the 2012 presidential election. The video sequence is featured in Stranahan's film "The Caliphate."

Yikes. I’m probably as surprised as anyone else to hear myself saying it, but the producers might want to start cranking up the music and offer a subtle hint to Mitt Romney that it’s time to get off the stage. We’re busy getting ready for the convention in Cleveland and the pieces are pretty much set up on the board, yet it seems that the winner of the 2012 GOP primary can’t bring himself to step back and let somebody else get on message. This pattern of behavior was on display yet again this week when Mitt let everyone know...

Newt Gingrich on Monday panned Mitt Romney’s campaign against Donald Trump as a weak effort that had not hurt the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee. “It’s pathetic,” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "I don’t know what happened to Mitt, but it is weird; it is bizarre. Having a guy like that go berserk in public makes you wonder what his problems are." Romney has emerged as one of the biggest critics of Trump, and earier this year gave a speech that excorciated him. “Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud,” he said on March 3 at...

Mitt Romney may be the #NeverTrump movement’s last chance for a third party bid. Anti-Trump conservatives have so far been unsuccessful in recruiting a candidate to mount a third party run against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Gen. James Mattis said no thanks. Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse said he is too busy raising his children to run for president. Former Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn said he is not interested.

It was two weeks before Election Day when Mitt Romney's political director signed a memo that all but ridiculed the notion that the Republican presidential nominee, with his better ground game could lose the key state of Ohio or the election. The race is “unmistakably moving in Mitt Romney's direction, the memo said. But the claims proved wildly off the mark, a fact embarrassingly underscored when the high-tech voter turnout system that Romney himself called “state of the art” crashed at the worst moment, on Election Day. To this day, Romney’s aides wonder how it all went so wrong...

Some prominent moderate establishment Republicans in Utah are plotting to target conservative icon Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) with a primary challenge in 2016. Lee’s offense? He didn’t drink the Washington Kool-aid and see the D.C. cesspool as a jacuzzi after he ousted incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT), who had supported the TARP bailouts, in 2010. When Lee prevailed over Bennett, he gave other conservatives across the country hope that they could also defeat entrenched incumbents who cared more about preserving the status quo above all else. Once Lee arrived in Washington, he didn’t turn his back on the base, which...

Establishment Republicans are reportedly trying to convince former Utah Governor and failed 2012 presidential candidate Jon Huntsman to oust Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) in 2016. CNN’s John King said on Inside Politics that national establishment leaders in the business community will join state establishment leaders to try to convince President Barack Obama’s former Ambassador to China to challenge Lee. King noted that Huntsman’s deep-pocketed dad (Huntsman Sr., though, did pony up funds to his son’s campaign down the stretch–perhaps because he saw the writing on the wall.) does not like Lee (Huntsman Sr. is reportedly upset his cancer institute did...

Mitt Romney has been one of the de-facto leaders of the entire #NeverTrump movement, which sought to ensure that presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump never made it into the White House at all costs. However, the movement is likely all but over after Romney released a devastating announcement on Wednesday. While the rest of us knew that the never Trump movement was pretty much a lost cause, those who were a part of it truly believed they could win the White House on a third-party run, even though Trump had received more votes than any candidate in GOP primary history....

Billionaire businessman and philanthropist David Koch has pledged “tens of millions of dollars” to help bankroll the campaign of Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, according to a source within Johnson’s campaign. Koch’s money will be made available should Johnson, a former two-term Republican governor of New Mexico, secure his second consecutive Libertarian Party presidential nomination, the source said. The Libertarians will select their presidential ticket during the party’s national convention later this month in Orlando.

Billionaire David Koch will bankroll Libertarian candidate and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson’s third party presidential run with tens of millions of dollars, according to a report. The eight-figure sum may help Johnson win the Libertarian Party nomination and break into the mainstream. Johnson also ran for president in 2012 as a third party candidate and won some 1.275 millon votes, 0.99 percent of the popular vote. Libertarian candidates may have cost the GOP several congressional race victories that year. (David Koch himself was the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nominee in 1980 when he and Ed Clark set the...

David and Charles Koch, the wealthy brothers whose donor network has given hundreds of millions to Republican causes and candidates in the past, aren't going to pour cash into the third-party bid of Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson – and reportedly won't spend a dime on GOP candidates in 2016. A spokesman for the Kochs on Thursday contradicted a report by The Daily Caller – citing a source within the Johnson campaign – that they planned to spend "tens of millions of dollars" to support Johnson, who is all but assured to win the Libertarian presidential nomination.

As if there are any more reasons to show that Ron Paul should not be the GOP Presidential candidate, there is this bit from 2008 in which Paul endorses four(!) candidates for President, including the Marxist whack-job Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader. How unhinged to you have to be, intellectually, to endorse not only four people, but four whom also hold diametrically opposing views on the role of government. This alone shows that Ron Paul is not a serious thinker. In fact it shows him to be a reactionary flame thrower, willing to completely abandon principles when he doesn't get...

Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson has agreed to join forces with former Massachusetts Governor William Weld for the Libertarian Party's nomination. Weld will run for the party's vice presidential slot, possibly bolstering the third party's appeal to general election voters. Weld was a popular governor in the 1990s with crossover appeal and could boost the legitimacy of a third-party option for voters disgruntled by presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. "It brings an enormous amount of credibility to what it is I'm doing," Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, said in a statement....

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Mitt Romney ends recruiting efforts for an independent candidate By Eric Bradner and Jim Acosta, CNN Updated 3:01 PM ET, Wed May 18, 2016 Washington (CNN)Mitt Romney won't launch a third-party presidential campaign of his own and has stopped trying to recruit somebody else to do it. The 2012 Republican nominee had attempted to recruit a challenger to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But prospects like Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse said no, and Romney is now dropping his efforts, a source familiar with Romney's thinking told CNN. The news was first reported by Yahoo News.

Ted Cruz and his allies are preparing for the coming National GOP Convention. According to NBC News, Cruz who recently attended a GOP convention in Texas told his supporters that the days ahead will be "challenging" for the Republican Party. He, however, expressed hope that those who remain loyal to him and the party "will be the remnant, will be the core of pulling this country back from the abyss." Aside from this pronouncement, [he] has remained mum about whether he will throw his support for presumptive nominee Donald Trump. According to the NBC report, the support of Cruz and...

Did you see my email below? The Massachusetts Legislature is debating multiple bills to bring the state into compliance with the “Real ID Act of 2005”. . . But it should be called “Dangerous ID.”; Dangerous ID establishes a federal database of all American citizens and forces them to carry a government-approved ID containing “biometric features.”; Gun ownership, health records, purchasing habits, religious beliefs – virtually anything you could dream up could all be added to this massive, Dangerous ID database. It violates the privacy of every Massachusetts citizen, putting your identity and liberty at extreme risk. House Republicans added...