Free Republic

Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” the campaign chair for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump Paul Manafort said former 2012 GOP presidential candidate and former governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney was a “coward” for attacking Trump and the other Republican who ran for president because he chose to not run.

Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney can't bring himself to bear with the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump saying Saturday that the choices are breaking his heart. "Either choice is destructive," Romney said ... [Snip] The former Massachusetts governor has come out strongly against Trump. In an interview Friday, Romney said: "I don't want to see a president of the United States saying things which change the character of the generations of Americans that are following. Presidents have an impact on the nature of our nation, and trickle-down racism, trickle-down bigotry, trickle-down misogyny, all these things are extraordinarily...

Mitt Romney laid into the large and rambunctious group of 2016 Republican candidates here on Saturday, arguing that they deserved a share of blame for the rise of Donald Trump. During a question-and-answer session with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer before around 250 Republican donors gathered here for the Romney-hosted Experts and Enthusiasts summit, the former Massachusetts governor said this year’s group of primary candidates misplayed their hand. By spending months attacking each other and ignoring Trump, he argued, they made a severe tactical error that allowed Trump — who Romney has criticized as a "con man" and a "fraud" —...

The panty-wadding on the part of anti-Trump Republicans is reaching comic proportions. The latest example involves a fantasy based on a third-hand report. It all began when sportscaster Robert Costa gave a friend-of-a-friend third hand account in a tweet of something Donald Trump supposedly had said, off the record

Cry me a river. Failed 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney was reportedly in tears when he told attendees of his Summit, which has been described as a “safe space” for the “Never Trump” smart set, that seeing Trump as the Republican nomination was breaking his heart. One wonders if Romney is really sad that Trump’s candidacy has resonated with working Americans more than his inflexible and robotic campaign ever did. Romney also reportedly ripped Ted Cruz and John Kasich for not taking on Trump harsh enough from the outset. But where was “tough guy” Romney when Trump was rising...

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...