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EXCLUSIVE — A group of 12 prominent conservatives, including a former governor, media executives, and a former U.S. attorney general, have issued a letter calling for Nikki Haley to drop out of the race for president. The former U.N. ambassador is the last remaining GOP opponent in former President Donald Trump‘s quest to win a nonconsecutive second term in the White House. She has vowed to remain in the race and is continuing to raise money, but the group argues she is only damaging her party. “While you have waged a spirited campaign for the 2024 Republican Party nomination, it...

The titanic political contest in 1980 between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan is well known. It was a struggle between two very different men with two very different views of America and the world. One believed in bigger government and one believed in smaller government. One believed we could work and coexist with the Soviets and one said he would "consign it to the ash heap of history." One believed in the individual and the other led a party whose platform said government was the principal creator of jobs. During the campaign, Reagan often zinged Carter by saying, "Recession is...

The treatment of Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., by her fellow House Republican leaders and colleagues "simply for having a contrary opinion" on former President Donald Trump is appalling, and late President Ronald Reagan would never have approved, presidential historian Craig Shirley wrote in a new opinion piece. "Cheney's only crime of course is her belief that the GOP needs to wash its hands of Donald Trump," Shirley, a biographer for late President Ronald Reagan, wrote for Townhall. "Otherwise, she's a tried and true conservative. And our movement is big enough to accommodate personal opinions.

Continuing the liberal media’s insistence that they can diagnose someone as mentally or physically ill, Monday’s Deadline: White House on MSNBC featured detestable liberal Republicans Nicolle Wallace and David Jolly asserting that Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer’s while president to the point that he may have been unfit for office.  Reagan came up during a segment about the likelihood that there’s something wrong mentally or physically wrong with President Trump (which the show insinuated was a yes).  Disgusting MSNBC Republicans: Reagan Definitely Had Alzheimer’s While President   Wallace used the late Michael Deaver (and YouTube videos) as her main sources for claims Reagan having...

This is a year of important anniversaries for Ronald Reagan and his legacy. It is the tenth anniversary of his passing; it has been 25 years since he left the White House and 50 years since his groundbreaking speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964. It is also 30 years since his monumental reelection of 1984, ratifying the Reagan Revolution. The election of 1980 would have been meaningless, a detour in history, without 1984 legitimizing it. The Reagan Library, Eureka College, and the Reagan Ranch have taken various steps to commemorate these important anniversaries. And the effort to name...

That plummeting sound you hear is the fall of the House of Bush. Unfortunately for the family, it is not falling silently into the woods and there are plenty of people to hear it and witness it and, in time, kick over the dead embers of Bushism.

Craig Shirley has already written two terrific history books about Ronald Reagan, chronicling the 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns. Now he has delivered the trifecta: "Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan." Some years ago we were given the book "Lee: The Last Years," detailing the iconic figure's final five years, after the Civil War. After the Civil War? How could that be of any possible interest? How ironic, then, that this is possibly one of the greatest books ever written about this titan of history; to see how he lived in the shadows after the...

It is hard to describe just how bad things are for the Republican Party. Each day it looks more and more like the Bates Motel from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Psycho. More precisely, the GOP is actually most like the central character who owns the motel: Norman Bates and his alter ego, “Mother,” a.k.a. Norma. Norman appears to be a polite, sincere young man, if strongly dominated by Mother. But so what if he’s idiosyncratic, even eccentric, with a mother fixation? As a private individual, he has the right to be odd. Mother, meanwhile, wants absolute control over her son....

On Friday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) went on the Tonight Show and said Ronald Reagan would feel at home in today's conservative movement, comparing the grassroots revolution that has powered his rise with that of the 1970s that Reagan led.  When host Jay Leno suggested Reagan would not fit in today's conservative movement, Cruz said, "I don't think that's right at all."Cruz told Leno that "Reagan led a grassroots revolution," and the country's economic situation now is awfully like the late 1970s when there was "economic stagnation" and people were "hurting because government policies under Jimmy Carter weren't working."He noted...

February 8, 2013 Nuclear war over Rove's claims to work for Reagan; Gipper biographer says no Paul Bedard The war of words between conservatives and former Bush advisor Karl Rove has gone nuclear, this time over Rove's claim that he worked for Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign and on a Reagan advisory board. The bottom line: While Rove told The O'Reilly Factor Thursday that he worked for the Gipper, Reagan's acclaimed biographer Craig Shirley says there's no evidence to back Rove up. Worse: In an email Shirley is sending to conservative leaders, he reveals that Rove backed former President Ford in...

-snip- Although Fehrnstrom is one of Romney’s longest-serving aides, he, like his boss, has no roots in the conservative movement. Fehrnstrom started out as a reporter covering alderman meetings in Boston and lives in liberal Brookline, Mass. His work as a GOP operative has been confined to New England — a region, as he often notes, that’s “pretty rocky terrain for Republicans.” To some influential conservatives, Fehrnstrom is an enigma. It’s not that conservatives don’t trust him. It’s that some don’t even know him. “I’ve never heard of him. I’ve been going to conservative meetings since I was knee-high to...

John McCain's campaign asked a prominent Republican consultant, Craig Shirley, to leave his official campaign role Thursday after a Politico inquiry about Shirley's dual role consulting for the campaign and for an independent "527" group opposing the Democratic presidential candidates. The campaign also released a new conflict of interest policy barring such arrangements. Shirley, a conservative public relations veteran, doubled as a consultant to McCain and to the group Stop Her Now, a 527 group barred from coordinating its activities with presidential campaigns. He is not currently on the McCain campaign’s payroll, but would also step down from his role...

Craig Shirley’s highly acclaimed new book, "Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign that Started It All" [Nelson Current, January 2005], details the story of Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for the presidency in 1976 against incumbent Gerald Ford. The historic campaign, although ultimately unsuccessful, united a dying party following Watergate and proved to be launch pad for the modern-day Conservative Movement. Today, the Democratic Party finds itself in a similar situation following Sen. John Kerry’s loss in 2004. Although the Democrats do not have a Watergate on their hands, they are suffering from a similar lack of leadership and...

Craig Shirley learned two things when writing his book about Ronald Reagan's unsuccessful 1976 campaign to take the Republican nomination away from Gerald Ford: Mr. Reagan's explosive temper in private, and the depth of his self-confidence -- his "utter belief in his abilities."