Free Republic

Foreign policy gaffe prompts a familiar strategy: Don’t apologize, strike back at questioner. Donald Trump’s enemies have been waiting for his Sarah Palin moment. On Thursday night, they thought they had it. Trump whiffed on a foreign policy query about the leaders of major terrorist organizations and of Iran’s Quds Force. His ignorance of General Qasem Soleimani and his inability to distinguish between the “Quds Force” and the Kurdish people immediately became the focus of the national conversation. But then the event took a distinctly Trumpian turn: The candidate not only didn’t apologize or express any regret, he launched an...

He pleased fans with his blustery defiance, but others saw anger and ego.Much like the past two months of the presidential campaign, the first Republican debate on Thursday night featured all the hallmarks of a Donald Trump production. But after two hours of blustery denunciation and defiance from the former “Apprentice” star, voters may be inching closer to changing the channel. From the opening bell, the Fox News moderators and his Republican rivals made Trump the center of attention, hammering him with contentious questions — which he would complain afterward were “not nice” — and frontal attacks. So far, the...

BIRCH RUN, Mich. — It was not a typical Lincoln Day dinner when Donald Trump came to town. The Trump show drew thousands of screaming supporters to a nondescript expo center in central Michigan for a local GOP fundraiser on Tuesday, creating the region’s biggest political draw in recent memory, even as the businessman’s campaign settled into the closest thing it has achieved so far to a sense of normalcy. “We have to build a wall,” he said, provoking a thunderous standing ovation and chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump!” “The wall will be big,” Trump declared. “It will be...

As the controversies pile up, Trump’s favorability soars. At this point, Carney said, those that have been fuming at Trump ought to have realized that their outrage has little bearing on Republican primary voters. “If the Washington elite wants to hurt Donald Trump, they should endorse him.”

Washington (CNN)Donald Trump's campaign is tired of being a punch line. In recent weeks, Trump's team has been plagued by staff infighting, inappropriate remarks and, of course, firings. Now that Trump, the billionaire businessman at the center of it all, has dismissed longtime aides and elevated a new flock of political operatives, his camp is trying to start a new phase. "If we're going to run a different campaign, we don't need advice from people who know how campaigns were run two years ago, eight years ago, 20 years ago," said Chuck Laudner, Trump's Iowa state director. "We don't need...

After Republicans sent mixed signals on immigration in their two official rebuttals to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus struggled to explain the disparity on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Wednesday. Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s State of the Union rebuttal made no mention of the topic, but the Spanish-language version of the rebuttal, delivered by Florida Rep. Carlos Curbelo, said Republicans wanted to work with Obama to fix the immigration system. (SNIP) When pressed further on how that explained the disparity, Priebus said, “I think we’ve been talking about this executive amnesty action that...

When Donald Trump derided John McCain’s war hero status on Saturday and set off a media firestorm, many in the Republican establishment thought he had finally self-destructed. They can keep dreaming. Trump’s partisans are disappointed. But they’re disappointed in McCain, the media and the party establishment, not Trump. Interviews with his supporters in New Hampshire and the first drips of polling data suggest the mogul’s core constituency has no intention of abandoning him over the dust-up. “I don’t like McCain anyways, to be perfectly frank with you,” said Jerry DeLemus, a Marine Corps veteran and Republican activist in New Hampshire....

The man behind Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has a knack for spectacle, an eye toward making money and a proven willingness to defy the Republican Party. In other words, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is a lot like his new boss. Lewandowski, who has been advising Trump since January and managing his improbable — and, for many Republicans, headache-inducing — run to the top of the GOP primary field in national polls has spent the past decade and a half drifting away from the party establishment. He left a short stint at the Republican National Committee in 2001 to manage...

John Bolton, former ambassador to the United Nations, will announce Thursday around noon whether he will run for president. Bolton plans to reveal his intentions in a video to be posted to Facebook and will then hold a conference call with media, according to a spokesman for John Bolton PAC.

Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that the United States should offer more financial and military aid to the Ukrainian government as it fights Russian-backed separatists, dismissing the idea that Kiev couldn’t be trusted with the money.

Last weekend, Donald Trump added to his long list of bold claims by declaring himself the champion of a new “silent majority” of Americans. While 17 percent of Republican voters isn’t a majority, and the 4,000 raucous supporters cheering him in Arizona were anything but silent, Trump has hurtled to the top of several recent GOP primary polls. Apparently, he speaks for some Americans. So who are they and where did they come from? As it turns out, the Trump coalition looks a lot like the rest of the Republican Party. Other than a spike in support in the Northeast,...

Despite pouring resources into scores of voter-registration events in the last week alone, a Boston Globe analysis found that the Obama campaign has failed to significantly swell the rolls of Democratic voters in battleground states. In five battleground states the for which the Globe was able to analyze registration data, Democratic registration increased by 39,580 voters, while Republican registration increased by 145,085. The Obama campaign says that its successful registration efforts in 2008 largely exhausted the pool of unregistered Democrats, while the Republican primaries earlier this year provided a registration opportunity that Democrats were not afforded. The Globe cited a...

Job openings soared to a fresh all-time high in July, evidence that the labor market continues to heat up. But employers aren't ready to close the deal to fill those positions with fatter pay packets. The Labor Department's Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey out last week showed that actual hires fell 4% to 5 million — 770,000 lower than openings. That's a notable jolt for the "JOLTS" survey. In the seven years before the recession began in 2007, there were an average of 1.2 million more hires than openings per month. July marked the sixth-straight month in which that...

For eons, all manner of animals have lived their lives according to the cycles of the Earth’s rotation on its axis, the moon’s orbit around the Earth, and the Earth’s orbit around the sun. But why do we observe the week? The pattern of living on a seven-day cycle—with one or two of those days set aside for rest—is a relative novelty. Only in the past few centuries, with Western colonization of most of the world, have the majority of human societies adopted it. The case for the week was never airtight. It’s now weak and getting weaker. Most Westerners...

s the press guilty of inflating Donald Trump’s political fortunes? Or, from the beginning, did the press seek to undermine his candidacy? The answer to both questions is “yes.” As our friends in academia like to remind us, voters don’t wake from a deep sleep one morning and tell pollsters that they’ve decided that a novice politician like Trump should be the next president. Voters rely on the press to keep tabs on the entry of new candidates into races, and the press obliged them in its coverage of Trump. Boy, did they oblige them. The fullness of the media’s...

Responding to what she called a “quiet epidemic” of heroin and prescription opiate abuse, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed a $10 billion plan Wednesday to treat addicts and curb incarceration for nonviolent drug offenses. The program, much of which would be funded by the federal government, would also help get a life-saving rescue drug into the hands of more emergency responders to improve the odds for overdose victims. The plan, announced in an op-ed in the Manchester, N.H., Union Leader newspaper, grew out of months of discussion of national drug addiction at Clinton campaign events in New Hampshire,...

Trump takes incendiary immigration views to GOP faithful: Tycoon says he would fine 'cunning' Mexico $100,000 for every illegal immigrant who crosses border in order to 'take back our country' At the second address in Phoenix, Trump unveiled his plan, under which he would hold the government responsible for those who crossed the border, and charge them a fee for each person. He said: 'Every time Mexico - really intelligently - sends people over we charge Mexico $100,000 for every person they send over. Republican frontrunner spoke at events in Las Vegas and Phoenix, Arizona Railed against government of Mexico...

The GOP pack leader promises to stay in the 2016 race because he ‘NEVER gives up.’ But his business deals show a knack for spotting a coming decline. After sending mixed signals about what might drive him to withdraw from the presidential race, Donald Trump settled on a definitive answer last month: “I’m never dropping out.” The next day, he tweeted, “I’m leading big in every poll and we are going to WIN! Remember, Trump NEVER gives up!” But, like many successful businessmen, the real estate developer and GOP pack leader—who often espouses his disdain for “losers”—does not see every...

Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee will officially enter the presidential race on June 3, a source with knowledge of his plans told POLITICO. He’ll make the announcement in a speech he’s scheduled to deliver next Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. at the George Mason Center for Politics & Foreign Relations in Arlington, Virginia. Following the announcement, Chafee will travel to New Hampshire on June 4 for a previously scheduled event with local Democrats in Grafton County.