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Throngs of left-wing activists converged on Trump Tower on Saturday to protest the billionaire’s so-called “fascist” policies and “white supremacy.” Cosmopolitan Anti-fascists cast a wide net on its Facebook page earlier in the week for “New Yorkers from different backgrounds” to protest the presidential hopeful, but all it got was different shades of liberalism. Roughly 5,000 people pledged to attend the event, but fewer than 1,000 showed up.

There is an old axiom in marketing: Good advertising makes a bad product fail faster. If you doubt that, may I submit Exhibit A: The 2016 campaign for the Republican nomination for President of Jeb Bush. It now joins the likes of the Ford Edsel and Coca-Cola's "New Coke" as a bona-fide marketing flop of an enormous magnitude. In each case, be it Edsel, New Coke or Jeb!, logic dictated a winner. Research for all three concluded a marketplace that was theirs for the taking. All three were rooted in strong family brand equity and even carried the brand name...

KABUL, Afghanistan — At least a dozen Islamic State militants accidentally blew themselves up in eastern Afghanistan Sunday during a botched operation to plant a bomb, a local official said. “They were attempting to move an IED (improvised explosive device) to a crowded area of Achin, but it went off before they reached the planned place,” said Attaullah Khogyani, spokesman for Nangarhar province’s provincial governor. Twenty-one other militants were wounded, Khogyani said. There were no civilian casualties. In recent months, Afghan security forces have been battling Islamic State loyalists in Nangarhar’s Achin district on the border with Pakistan. On Saturday,...

Right to Rise, the super PAC political committee supporting Jeb Bush is preparing to refund about $12 million in unspent money to donors who gave at least $1,000. -snip- It touts, "No open ended commissions. All vendor contracts included fee caps," though cynics about how the money was spent will note that contractors and vendors built their compensation directly into the prices they charged.

Mitt Romney recorded robocalls for Sen. Marco Rubio's presidential campaign that are going out in all four states voting on Tuesday, CNN has confirmed. It's part of an escalating effort by Romney to block Donald Trump from securing the Republican presidential nomination. First reported by The New York Times, the robocalls do not represent an outright endorsement of Rubio, and a spokesperson for Romney indicated the 2008 GOP nominee would be willing to help Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. John Kasich as well. "Gov. Romney has offered and is glad to help Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz, and Gov....

Mitt Romney said Friday he will not make an 11th-hour presidential run to try to stop Donald Trump from winning the Republican nomination, the day after sharply attacking the real estate mogul's candidacy. "I won't run for president," Romney told host Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today" show. Lauer asked the 2012 GOP presidential nominee three times about his 2016 ambitions, pressing for an "unambiguous" response after Romney appeared to leave the door to a bid slightly open.

Mitt Romney is back, offering to share the sage political wisdom that won him the White House in 2012. Oh, wait. President Obama beat him — despite a sagging economy and terrible approval ratings. Indeed, Obama became the first guy ever to win a second term in the White House despite drawing fewer votes than the first time round. More than 3 million fewer — while Mitt added only 1 million to John McCain’s disastrous 2008 total.

A MSNBC correspondent on Tuesday decided to do a live report from a gun range. As one could guess, it didn’t go well. Reporter Kerry Sanders pointed at the gun-rights fans and began, "There are lots of folks here who believe that Second Amendment in this country is under attack.” Seconds later, the shooting started. The Second Amendment afficionados drowned Sanders out. He sounded like this: “A short distance away later today [BLAM] Donald Trump [BLAM] — protect the Second Amendment.” He soldiered on, shifting to other topics. But it came across as this: “Talking about [BLAM] Ted Cruz has...

Karl Rove believes there is still time for Republicans who don't want Donald Trump to be the 2016 GOP nominee to get behind a candidate - but it's running out. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal out Wednesday night, the former senior adviser to President George W. Bush took stock of Trump's recent string of victories. -snip- Before the op-ed was published on Wednesday, Trump was already going after Rove on his favorite medium of attack. "Big defeat last night in Nevada for Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. @KarlRove on @FoxNews is working hard to belittle my victory....

Jeb Bush and key members of his national finance team addressed top donors on Wednesday in a conciliatory conference call in which he expressed dismay over the outcome of the race. "I'm sorry that it didn't turn out the way that I intended when I launched the campaign," Bush said. The former Florida governor said he saw a path to win the nomination running as a "reform-minded conservative," but acknowledged that wasn't what the electorate was looking for in 2016. -snip- Also addressing donors on Wednesday's conference call were Bush national finance chairman Woody Johnson, who owns the New York...

A tired-sounding Jeb Bush apologized to his major financial backers in a brief conference call on Wednesday afternoon, saying he never expected his presidential campaign to end so early, and in such disappointment. "I'm sorry that it didn't turn out the way that I intended," Mr. Bush said, according to an audio recording of the call. "When I launched the campaign in front of three or four thousand people in Miami, I anticipated a different result."

On what turned out to be the last full day of Jeb Bush's presidential campaign, a man with a distinctively English accent stood to ask him a question. "Can you vote?" Bush interrupted with amusement. "I don't think so," the man responded. "I've had the privilege of reporting for the Times of London - " "Oh, you're a reporter, too!" Bush cut in again. (The man was a columnist.) And then, there in Greenville, South Carolina, Bush said something that left no doubt he was still Miami Jeb: "This is going from Guatemala to Guate-peor!" I laughed, but few others...

The Last Days with Jeb Bush: "Like a Funeral" (Video) NBC News Campaign Embed Jordan Frasier has been following the Bush campaign for seven months.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush dropped out of the Republican presidential primary two days ago, prompting campaign officials and supporters to look for a scapegoat for the debacle. They may have settled on a pricey one, indeed. Political strategist Mike Murphy, head of the pro-Bush super PAC Right to Rise USA, is under fire for allegedly giving himself a salary and compensation package that totals $14 million. "He made minimum of $14 million," a Bush campaign bundler told CNN.

When Donald Trump pointed the finger at Jeb Bush at the last debate and claimed he's got nothing to show for the millions his campaign has spent, he wasn't kidding. A review of how Bush and his allies spent over $125 million in his failed campaign shows the main thing to come out of it was a lot of consultants and local TV stations made a lot of money. A Washington Post review of Bush spending shows more than 95 percent of the advertising budget - from his campaign and the separate super PAC, Right to Rise - went to...

Mirroring the donor-backlash against Karl Rove after his American Crossroad/Crossroads GPS super PACs raised upwards of $300 million and produced a dismal 2012 success rate, Mike Murphy, the man in charge of the Jeb Bush Right to Rise USA super PAC is now in the crosshairs. Right to Rise's dismal results became painfully obvious when Bush dropped out of the race Saturday night after only three primary contests. CNN reports that donors are not happy: In the armchair quarterbacking following Bush's departure from the race Saturday night, Murphy is facing countless questions about the efficacy of the PAC spending tens...

One byproduct of Jeb Bush's long, agonizing slide out of the 2016 presidential race is that, by the time he finally packed it in this weekend, plenty of postmortems had almost certainly been prewritten. -snip- as donor grumbling became loud enough to penetrate even the most insular campaign, the guy handling all of Jeb's money, Right to Rise super-pac director and alleged strategic genius Mike Murphy, granted an unusual two-part interview to Bloomberg's Sasha Issenberg. It was designed to shame into silence anyone who'd been stupid enough to pay attention to anything that had happened thus far. Murphy described Donald...

After disappointing finishes in presidential nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Jeb Bush suspended his campaign for president Saturday night. It was the end of a run that had seemed doomed for months: countless gaffes, merciless attacks from the likes of Donald Trump, seemingly limitless spending from a superPAC he couldn't control with horrible returns from those investments and perhaps above all, a candidate who seemed uncomfortable on the trail at best, and at worst, frustrated and unhappy. Already, the post-mortems are almost writing themselves.

With apologies to Winston Churchill, the tale of the Jeb Bush campaign might be summarized as "Never before have so few spent so much to achieve so little." -snip- Although the vast majority of this money - more than $100 million - went to purchase air time on local television stations, the advertising barrage probably generated several million dollars in consulting fees and commissions Why did Bush spend so much on ads, especially given how little it seemed to help his ill-fated campaign? One reason may be because the super PAC Right to Rise was run by Mike Murphy, a...

One Bush bundler told CNN's Dana Bash that when it came to Murphy, "strong knives are out." "He made minimum of $14 million," the bundler said, requesting anonymity to speak freely about campaign strategy. The details of Murphy's compensation package at Right to Rise are not publicly known.