Free Republic

Donald Trump has spent his entire presidential campaign warning against the dangers of Mexican immigrants stealing American jobs, raping women and hauling drugs across the border. Now, Mexico is fighting back. Mexican officials are pursuing a counteroffensive to Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, reaching out to U.S. business leaders, looking at ways to better use social media, and even encouraging qualified Mexicans to get U.S. citizenship. But they’re also trying to stay sensitive about taking more high-profile steps, such as running TV ads in an already overheated presidential race that promote Mexico as a friendly, vibrant neighbor and not a cesspool of...

On Wednesday morning, not even 24 hours after Donald Trump effectively clinched the Republican nomination, Paul Ryan convened his top advisers for a call. With Congress out of session, Ryan was bouncing between multiple states, raising the piles of money needed to keep House Republicans in the majority. But Donald Trump was on his mind. The speaker could not — at least at this point — support him. And he wanted to talk through how to proceed. Ryan never expected Trump to lock up the nomination so quickly. He didn't think Texas Sen. Ted Cruz would drop out of the...

The Club for Growth's PAC, after warning Republican candidates that backing Donald Trump could cost them the group's support, is giving conservatives a pass now that the business mogul has effectively locked up the nomination. Club for Growth Action, which has been spending millions to try and sink Trump, had told its preferred candidates and those vying for its support to stay away from Trump. But on Wednesday a spokesman for Club for Growth Action, said that with Ted Cruz and John Kasich out of the race, candidates are freed from those restrictions...

On a sunny day at the Oasis Diner in Plainfield, Indiana, roughly 20 miles west of Indianapolis, Ted Cruz breezed through a 1950s-era diner with a gleaming steel facade. One of the last diners of its kind, the Oasis sits along the Historic National Road, the iconic highway traversing the state that fancies itself the Crossroads of America. Here, four days before he named Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential pick, Cruz met a crowd of a few hundred supporters. He mugged for photos, noshed on a fried pickle offered to him by a customer, then shot straight behind the...

Donald Trump on Tuesday alleged that Ted Cruz’s father was with John F. Kennedy’s assassin shortly before he murdered the president, parroting a National Enquirer story claiming that Rafael Cruz was pictured with Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets in New Orleans in 1963. A Cruz campaign spokesperson told the Miami Herald, which pointed out numerous flaws in the Enquirer story, that it was “another garbage story in a tabloid full of garbage.” “His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump said Tuesday...

In the swing states that matter most in the presidential race, Donald Trump doesn’t have a prayer against Hillary Clinton in the general election. That's according to top operatives, strategists and activists in 10 battleground states who participated in this week's POLITICO Caucus. Nearly 90 percent of them said Clinton would defeat Trump in their home states in a November match-up. Republicans are only slightly more bullish on Trump’s prospects than Democrats: More than three-quarters of GOP insiders expect Clinton to best the Republican front-runner in a general-election contest in their respective states. Among Democrats, the belief is nearly universal:...

Donald Trump would be “a danger to the United States and to the world” if elected president, according to Indiana’s largest newspaper, The Indianapolis Star. In an editorial published on Thursday, the newspaper widely condemned the Republican front-runner’s “simplistic proposals,” arguing he is unfit to occupy the Oval Office. “Trump has demonstrated repeatedly during the months-long campaign that he is wholly unsuited to serve as president,” the editorial states. “He’s offered simplistic proposals on national security, job creation, immigration, international trade and foreign affairs. He has sounded off with appalling comments about women and others. He’s appealed to voters’ worst...

Sen. Lindsey Graham tore into Donald Trump’s speech on foreign policy, calling it “unnerving,” “pathetic” and “scary.” The South Carolina Republican former presidential candidate told WABC Radio on Wednesday that the speech was “nonsensical” and showed that Trump “has no understanding of the world and the role we play.” “This speech was unnerving. It was pathetic in its content, and it was scary in terms of its construct. If you had any doubt that Donald Trump is not fit to be commander in chief, this speech should’ve removed it,” Graham said. “It took every problem and fear I have with...

A member of the Republican National Committee rules panel accused his own party leadership of “institutional tyranny” on Monday, another escalation in the growing internal battle over the party’s arcane parliamentary procedures. Solomon Yue, the Oregon committeeman and member of the RNC’s Rules Committee, sent a more than 1,300-word email, obtained by POLITICO, to members of the rules panel on Monday morning, charging that RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and his allies had improperly tried to scuttle Yue’s proposal to change the underlying rulebook for what could be the party’s first contested convention in 40 years this summer. Yue is the...

Despite landslide victories on Tuesday, Donald Trump still needs to win Indiana — and he’s starting to act like it. The frugal Manhattan mogul has begun opening his wallet for the air war, spending more than $900,000 on TV and radio ads. He’s working the inside game, wooing Gov. Mike Pence one-on-one in what multiple Indiana insiders said appears to have been a successful effort to keep the governor on the endorsement sidelines. And Trump’s new campaign strategist Paul Manafort has been telling Republican officials, multiple people told POLITICO, that Trump is in the midst of doubling the ground team...

Donald Trump tailored his pitch to the citizens of Delaware on Friday, praising the tiny mid-Atlantic state’s status as a tax shelter and at one point sharing a story about calling his credit-card company to find out whether it employed people in India. "I know almost as much as the people in Delaware about banking," Trump boasted at a rally in Harrington, a small town south of the capital Dover, on Friday afternoon. Trump said he had 378 corporate entities registered in the state, "meaning I pay you a lot of money, folks. I don’t feel guilty." "I spend a...

After failing to secure a single delegate in Colorado nearly two weeks ago, angry Donald Trump supporters, reacting to the candidate’s claims of a ‘rigged’ nomination process, began taking matters into their own hands. This included issuing death threats to Colorado GOP chairman Steve House, who said he’s received emails warning him to hide his family and “pray” he makes it to the convention in Cleveland, as well as phone calls from people telling him to put a gun down his throat, and if he doesn’t they will come help him out. But it seems House hasn’t been the sole...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker now vows to support whoever the Republican Party puts forward as its nominee at July's convention in Cleveland, even if that person is Donald Trump. "I will support the Republican running against (Democratic front-runner) Hillary Clinton in the fall -- whoever that is," Walker told reporters Wednesday, according to a report from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The real estate mogul's final sprint for to lock down 1,237 delegates starts in New York. The billionaire is poised for a ringing victory that will take the edge off a brutal month of controversy and soaring unpopularity. It’s a chance for Trump to rewrite a campaign narrative that seemed to get away from him — and will likely be the first triumph in a cascade of victories across the northeast over the next week.

“Armed militants in Afghanistan staged a coordinated assault on a government security agency in the capital Tuesday morning, killing at least 28 people and wounding more than 320. The Taliban has claimed responsibility. The attack, including a suicide car bombing, appears to have targeted an agency similar to the U.S. Secret Service, providing personal protection for high-ranking government officials.

John Kasich apparently doesn’t like being asked why he's only won a single state in the Republican presidential primary. On Saturday, the Ohio governor — whose lone victory was in his home state — was talking up his chances when Demetri Sevastopulo, a reporter for the Financial Times, interrupted him. . . . "I'm answering the question the way I want to answer it," Kasich said. "You want to answer it?" Kasich then snatched Sevastopulo's voice recorder out of his hand and turned it toward him: "What do you think?"

President Barack Obama will drop in on three of America's most important allies this week, possibly for the last time. But he isn't expecting an adoring reception in any of them. The U.S. relationship with all three nations is distressed, and Obama will be doing more than a little damage control. In Saudi Arabia, where he lands on Wednesday, Obama will try to soothe anger over his nuclear deal with Iran and his increasingly public complaints about the Saudi kingdom. In London, he’ll make amends for comments about British foreign policy that rattled the teacups at 10 Downing Street. And...

Following a dramatic deterioration in official diplomatic channels between the US and Saudi Arabia when over the weekend the Saudis threatened the U.S. with dumping billions in Treasuries if Congress were to pass a bill probing into their alleged support of Sept 11 terrorists in the aftermath of last weekend's 60 Minutes report on the classified "28 pages" from the Septemeber 11 commission, moments ago the Obama administration made a stunning admission, when for the first time it revealed on the record that the Saudis were the original source of funding for Al Qaeda. As Politico reports, Obama's deputy national...

Why Trump may be costing Democrats millions for their convention The GOP is struggling to raise cash from corporate donors, and now Democrats are feeling the pinch. By Anna Palmer and Brianna Gurciullo 04/18/16 05:34 AM EDT Republicans have been struggling for months in the shadow of Donald Trump to get corporate sponsors to pony up for their convention. Now Democratic fundraisers are feeling their pain, too. Several Fortune 500 companies — including Bank of America, Duke Energy and Time Warner —are taking a pass on chipping in for the Democratic convention in Philadelphia or, with just 100 days to...

Donald Trump hasn't even been nominated yet but that hasn't kept Politico from engaging in wild speculation about what they claim could be his impending impeachment. The Politico fantasy takes us on a time travel trip to the summer of 2017 which goes into such detail, you have to wonder if author Darren Samuelsohn has been indulging in an overabundance of magic mushrooms. The funniest thing of all is that Samuelsohn concludes by pretty much stating Never Mind! See, it probably won't happen so why engage in all this impeachment speculation in the first place? So let us now watch Politico engage...