Free Republic

Curly Haugland loves the rules..... North Dakota’s top Republican gadfly, its rule-mongering crank, its official state pain in the ass. On the national GOP’s standing rules committee, he’s been the pedantic curmudgeon, the stubborn speed bump who for years has raised points of order only to watch establishment Republicans stampede over him. ... Haugland has become one of the most dangerous men in politics: He’s the mainstream GOP’s last hope to deny Donald Trump the Republican nomination in Cleveland. It would take a miracle—and almost certainly lead to a historic split in the party—but there is still a way, buried...

Ted Cruz is taking some time off from the Senate to recover from a brutal presidential campaign. After returning to Washington last week to work on a defense policy bill, the Texas senator is spending this week back home. He'll miss votes on Zika funding legislation as well as appropriations bills...

The New York Times' article published Saturday with the headline "Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private" begins with an anecdote from a woman named Rowanne Brewer Lane, who as a 26-year-old model was asked by the businessman to put on a swimsuit during their first meeting at a Mar-a-Lago pool party. "But the 1990 episode at Mar-a-Lago that Ms. Brewer Lane described was different: a debasing face-to-face encounter between Mr. Trump and a young woman he hardly knew. This is the private treatment of some women by Mr. Trump, the up-close and more intimate encounters,"...

"The fact of the matter is knowledge about Donald Trump is a mile wide and an inch deep," Guy Cecil says. The coming ad assault against Donald Trump from pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC Priorities USA Action is likely to drill a three-pronged message deep into the minds of swing state voters, if the group’s leaders have their way. The three central tenets of the message will be that the real estate investor is a divisive character, that he’s too dangerous to vote for, and that he’s a con man, Priorities’ chief strategist Guy Cecil explained to POLITICO on Monday —...

Candidates’ aides and allies want anti-Trump vendors barred from lucrative general-election contracts. Donald Trump’s campaign is considering hitting his Republican enemies where it hurts: Their wallets. As Trump moves to work in closer concert with the Republican National Committee apparatus, some campaign aides and allies are pushing him to block lucrative party contracts from consultants who worked to keep him from winning the nomination, according to four sources familiar with the discussions. “The Never Trump vendors and supporters shouldn’t be in striking distance of the RNC, any of its committees or anyone working on behalf of Donald Trump,” said a...

Republican elites are begrudgingly embracing Ted Cruz—and hanging Marco Rubio out to dry. Panicked at Donald Trump's dominance and dismayed by Rubio's continued inability to do anything about it, some top Republican power brokers are turning to Cruz, putting aside their policy and personal misgivings to back the candidate they now openly label as their best hope to stop Trump's GOP takeover. "He seems to be the only guy who's got some momentum, and is probably the best situated if there is anybody out there to beat Trump," said Austin Barbour, a prominent Mississippi-based GOP operative. "That's why there are...

Anti-Donald Trump forces are expanding their offensive against the Republican front-runner, releasing a TV advertisement in Florida just days before the state's primary that spotlights a former Trump University salesman who says he was "ashamed" to work for the online school. In the 60-second ad, the employee, named Cliff, describes receiving "nonstop calls with complaints" from customers unhappy with Trump University services. He also talks about the school's low ratings from the Better Business Bureau. "I think I walked away from the job because I couldn't sleep at night," Cliff says. "With Donald Trump, you always have to read the...

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.