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Former Romney Adviser on Trump Alternative: ‘Until Donald Trump Has the Nomination…All Things Are Possible’ By NOAH FITZGEREL Jun 24, 2016, 5:01 AM ET There remain deep rumblings inside the establishment of the Republican Party about presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. This week’s episode of ABC’s "Powerhouse Politics" podcast paints a picture in which the Republican National Committee may focus its efforts on down-ticket races to hedge the risk of losing the White House in November to presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, leaving a Trump operation with little infrastructure of its own scrambling to catch up. Noting the frustration...

Brad Thor dropped a major bomb-shell on Glenn’s radio program Thursday, saying he’s committed to running for president of the United States. Glenn introduced his friend by reminding listeners about the author’s courage in the face of controversy. “I believe Brad is one of the most courageous people out there. Because — he is in business. You’re selling a book. And what you said — I shouldn’t say what you said — because what you said was not controversial,” Glenn said. Some may recall the flak Glenn received following Thor’s fiery remarks about Donald Trump in his previous interview on...

Utah is certainly not turning out to be friendly territory for Donald Trump. A new UtahPolicy.com survey gives the presumptive GOP nominee a 9-point lead over Democratic foe Hillary Clinton. The survey, conducted by Dan Jones & Associates, finds Trump with 36% of the vote in Utah. Clinton would get 27%. Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson has 10%, while Green Party nominee Jill Stein pulls in 2%. 18% said they would prefer another candidate while 2% were undecided. Trump's share of the vote is virtually unchanged from a recent Salt Lake Tribune poll that showed Trump and Clinton tied at...

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has been quietly having conversations with state party leaders to discuss the latest push by convention delegates to nominate anyone other than Donald Trump. Priebus has spoken with GOP party chairmen in multiple states in recent days in part to get a better sense of how large the anti-Trump faction is among their convention delegations, according to two people familiar with the conversations. While Priebus has made clear in these conversations that he is not spearheading the latest push for a coup, his involvement sends a signal that the RNC is taking this effort...

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus tapped former congressman Enid Mickelsen to chair the all-important rules committee during the convention. Just two weeks ago, Enid had this to say about the presidential race: Ryan Struyk @ryanstruyk Enid Mickelsen just named chair of GOP convention rules panel. Here's what she told Salt Lake Tribune two weeks ago. She has also spoken approvingly of the idea that the rules could be changed to allow delegates to vote for someone other than a candidate they are bound to by result of primary or caucus. It's unkown if Trump was consulted about the choice.

A former Republican senator is endorsing Hillary Clinton for president after the mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., citing her support for gun control. Former Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.) called for universal background checks on all gun sales and an assault weapons ban Monday in the wake of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. “I can’t believe I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, but I am,” said Pressler, who spoke with The Hill on Monday after endorsing Clinton in a statement issued over the weekend. “This morning, I woke up and told my wife, ‘Did I really do that?’” he...

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...