Free Republic

A brash, rich lout crashes the party—and becomes an instant crowd favorite.During the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney was repeatedly dogged by negative stories about his personal wealth. There was the car elevator. There was Cookiegate. Four years earlier, John McCain—hardly anyone’s idea of a typical plutocrat—got hammered for not being able to remember how many houses he owned. It was an issue for Steve Forbes before him and for George H. W. Bush before him. Republicans are already trying to use the many millions accumulated during Bill Clinton’s post-presidency as a cudgel against Hillary. Although it’s true that great wealth...

A former CEO gets taken to the woodshed for job cuts—and loses an election. Sound familiar? Carly Fiorina has a Mitt Romney problem. Fiorina, like Romney, is a wealthy former CEO from an affluent Republican family. Like Romney, she entered the Republican presidential contest assuming that her record running a large company would be one of her greatest assets. But she may be about to learn that her opponents have little trouble turning that record into her greatest liability. Like Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, the private equity firm at which he oversaw the dismantling of numerous companies purchased by...

WASHINGTON – The Empire strikes back? First, the Republican Party made Donald Trump sign an oath of loyalty by pledging to support its eventual presidential nominee and not run as a third-party candidate. Now, the establishment GOP may be planning to do the very thing it made Trump promise not to do: bolt from the Republican party and run a third-party campaign. Mark McKinnon, former President George W. Bush’s chief media strategist, suggested a scenario to NPR the GOP elite might follow if it looks like Trump will win the party’s presidential nomination. “The Republican establishment completely freaks out. They...

A Michigan political consultant working for Rand Paul says he was punched in the face by Marco Rubio's deputy campaign manager during an alleged incident at a bar in Mackinac Island, where the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference is set to begin Friday. John Yob, who is national political director and chief strategist of Paul's Michigan campaign, wrote that Rubio deputy campaign manager Rich Beeson "literally physically assaulted me by punching me in the face." "Last night I went to a bar on Mackinac Island for the GOP Mackinac Conference. I ran into a guy named Rich Beeson, who frankly I...

THERE IS one man who can save the Republican Party, and his name is Mitt Romney. Seriously. Seven years after Romney crashed and burned in the 2008 Republican primary and three years after he beat a weak GOP presidential field before losing to President Obama, he is still the party’s best hope of winning back the White House.

Some of them go back to 2002, the win. Others slogged through Iowa, twice, and rode aboard the Mitt Mobile. In 2012, they were so close to the White House they could taste it. Now, the Mitt Romney diaspora — an army of former aides and advisers from Romney’s long political career — are arrayed among a host of Republican presidential campaigns. But, through no concerted effort, they are curiously aligned once again in common cause, a stem-to-stern effort that has united old comrades even as they nominally play for different teams: stopping Donald Trump.

As Donald Trump continues to dominate the Republican presidential race, frustration and panic have become high enough to make some inside the party Establishment pine for a candidate they roundly rejected as recently as January: Mitt Romney. Romney himself has become one of Trump’s most vocal detractors inside the party. “He’s someone to whom civility means a lot. The whole Trump thing really bothers him,” a close Romney adviser told me — and some Romney-ites are only too happy to talk up the prospect of their man jumping into the race if the Establishment fails to stop Trump, whose support...

The more you hate Romney the more you should want him in the race, not just for strategic reasons, because it’ll split the center further, but for sheer comic value. If you think it’s funny watching Trump invent new insults daily to question Bush’s masculinity — we can’t be more than a week away from him calling Jeb “low T” — then you’ll have the time of your life watching him hassle Mitt as a choke artist whose piddling $300 million fortune would relegate him to carrying people’s clubs at Mar-a-Lago. **************************** One Romney bundler puts the odds of him...

As Jeb Bush struggles to carry the establishment mantle, some wonder whether the time is right for Mitt There is on the edge of the spectrum a thought awakening that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who ran for President in 2008 and 2012, might get back in the race. It comes naturally to think so. Before the race got seriously underway Mr. Romney met with Jeb Bush to consider their fates. Mr. Romney’s wife Ann went so far back then as to suggest on Cavuto that If Jeb ran, Mitt would stay out, as they both represented a similar center...

Colorful former Trump adviser Roger Stone thinks 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney is thinking about getting back in the presidential race. Stone tweeted his suspicion, and told CNN he had heard that Romney was considering a run from his sources. The move could indicate Romney sees an opportunity to better confront and challenge front-runner Donald Trump. Some see current establishment standard bearer former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as flailing. Trump has mocked Bush for being "just flat" on the campaign trail and Sunday called him a "low energy" candidate. Romney publicly considered a third run as recently as January, but...

Colorful former Trump advisor Roger Stone thinks 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney is thinking about getting back in the presidential race. Stone tweeted his suspicion, and told CNN he had heard that Romney was considering a run from his sources. The move could indicate Romney sees an opportunity to better confront and challenge front-runner Donald Trump. Some see current establishment standard bearer former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as flailing. Trump has mocked Bush for being "just flat" on the campaign trail and Sunday called him a "low energy" candidate. Romney publicly considered a third run as recently as January, but...

I have a question for you FReepers. In a Primary debate in late January, 2012, Romney tried to get to the right on illegal immigration by proposing that we make conditions so difficult for the illegals that they pack it up and go home on their own (i.e., self-deportation), rather than rounding them up and deporting them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObVnA0nIx_s A Google search finds many columns on this topic, but only immediately after that debate. Then Obama brought it up in an October debate, just before the election and blasted Romney on it. After the election, the Republican 'advisers' (most of them...

Having used my Sunday column to double down on one 2016 prediction — that Hillary’s still a mortal lock to be the Democratic nominee — let me use this post to quickly hedge a more recent bet: Namely, that the rise of Donald Trump might be a much-needed gift to Jeb Bush’s struggling “frontrunner” campaign. I offered various arguments three weeks ago for why this might be so, and most of them might yet be vindicated once we leave the preliminary phase of the campaign, Jeb starts spending ad dollars in earnest, the establishment field gets winnowed and voters get...

... A new Morning Consult survey of self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents shows Trump maintaining his standing at 32 percent, far ahead of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), who earns 12 percent of the vote. ...

I think we all knew there would be more than a few of these cases reverberating around the country following the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage, and this time it’s popping up in Ohio. Some municipal judges are either refusing to perform the ceremonies for gay couples or stopping performing marriages entirely, citing religious freedom objections. This prompted an inquiry at the state supreme court and their advisory Board of Professional Conduct has come back with an answer. Now if only somebody can figure out exactly what they meant. Amid scattered instances of balking, Ohio judges who perform...

Four years ago, only one Republican candidate was consistently hitting the same kind of polling heights among the presidential field that real estate mogul Donald Trump is reaching now. His name was Mitt Romney. The fact that Romney went on to capture his party’s nomination should be, at the very least, one basic reason why Trump’s recent surge can’t be dismissed as the aberration that so many pundits and party strategists claim it is. That doesn’t mean, of course, that Trump, who will command center stage at the first Republican presidential debate on Thursday, is going to wind up the...

However, 25 years later the themes of this film still resonate with Trump's character. A quarter of a century later, here it is. In 1988, Leonard Stern commissioned the film as part of a celebrity businessman series. Here's a Huffington Post piece about the documentary by its original writer, and here's the press release announcing the online debut-it appears that the film covers some allegations... Trump grew wealthy during the 80's, the start of the "me generation" of moneymakers, and the "decade of greed". In it, he was revealed to be "the opposite of a small-government conservative" and someone who'd...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Mitt Romney is out there ripping into Ted Cruz, and I made the observation that I can't recall a presidential candidate -- losing presidential candidate -- ripping presidential candidates in his own party in the next election cycle. I was trying to think, in the modern era, if there was an example of it. I couldn't think of one. It wasn't so much trying to think of Reagan's 11th commandment as I was thinking more about establishment Republican versus upstart Tea Party conservative. By the way, here's another thing: I've been doing... In the course of show...

The Tea Partyer was secretly recorded bashing Romney as the worst GOP presidential candidate on Earth.When Tea Party firebrand and Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz lashed out Mitt Romney yesterday for daring to condemn his over-the-top charge that the Obama administration had become the worldÂ’s leading state sponsor of terror by negotiating a nuclear nonproliferation deal with Iran, it was hardly the first time the Texas senator has attacked his partyÂ’s 2012 presidential nominee. According to a new report in the National Journal, during a private speech back in May to the Council for National Policy, a secretive group of...

Ted Cruz’s Blunt Response to Mitt Romney Saying It Was ‘Way Over the Line’ to Say Iran Deal Would Make Obama ‘Financier’ of Terror Republican presidential candidate and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz fought back Thursday after Mitt Romney criticized him for saying the Obama administration would become the “leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism” if Congress approves the Iran nuclear deal. Romney had taken to Twitter to say that Cruz’s comment was “over the line.” I am opposed to the Iran deal, but @SenTedCruz is way over the line on the Obama terrorism charge. Hurts the cause.— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney)...