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Despite his big win in New York on Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has had a pretty bad week. But will it matter? It should -- and just might. During an NBC "Today" show town hall Thursday, the host read a question from Twitter concerning Trump's views on LGBT issues and how he plans to be inclusive as president. "Speak about North Carolina bathroom law in particular." Trump responded: "I had a feeling that question was going to come up, I will tell you. Well, look, North Carolina did something that was very strong, and they're paying a big...

Donald Trump runs The Trump Organization, his real estate company that dabbled in failed meat, water, and education industries, among others. His campaign for president, on the other hand, has been anything but organized. The way heÂ’s run his campaign has the appearance of a wealthy man who decided heÂ’d run for president on a lark, then woke up to find himself in the lead with no clue how to handle it or finish the job. In many ways the Trump campaign is The Mouse That Roared. For those of you who donÂ’t know, The Mouse That Roared is a...

The Associated Press is out with new polling pitting Democrat Hillary Clinton against Republican Donald Trump. Clinton beats Trump in every category among the general electorate, including on the questions of who is best to create jobs, who is better on international trade and who can "Make America Great Again," which of course is Trump's campaign slogan. First, the criteria:

So I asked Bitey the Dog about her views on NATO, and she responded by growling and attacking my sock. In doing so, she offered a more comprehensive, insightful, and sane commentary on this vital alliance than the putative Republican frontrunner. Yes, it’s been a bad couple weeks for Donald Trump. Let’s review: · His skeevy attacks on Ted Cruz’s wife confirmed his status, in the eyes of women, as America’s nightmare first husband. · His transparent plant of the bizarre “Ted Cruz, Sex God” story in his pal’s pseudo-paper offended anyone who doesn’t require a drool bib. · He...

Donald Trump has gotten a lot of criticism from both sides of the abortion debate for his five different positions on abortion in three days. Those criticisms are legitimate because it shows Trump either doesn’t know what he’s talking about, is faking his position on abortion to appease his supporters, or has no real position at all. But that’s not stopped Maureen Dowd with The New York Times from asking one of craziest questions of the political cycle. Given his draconian comment, sending women back to back alleys, I had to ask: When he was a swinging bachelor in Manhattan,...

Why does Donald Trump assert that he is pro-life? It’s easy to understand that if he is running as a conservative for the GOP nomination this checked-box would be necessary to survive the primary process. He is running against two other candidates who have clear credentials on the matter, and if he were to be found to still be pro-abortion it would doom his chances of securing the nomination. It might also be because he is ashamed of the pro-abortion views he has held for most of his sixty-nine years on the planet. It might be that he is filled...

Have you heard? The Establishment is conspiring to steal the GOP nomination from Donald Trump! It’s true. I read it somewhere. There have been secret meetings all over the country of Establishment types plotting how best to deny what the voters want, and what they want is Donald Trump! At least, that’s how the story goes from the paranoid and the media desperate to attract them to their shows. It’s pathetic. Here’s some breaking news for you: If Donald Trump acquires 1,237 delegates to the GOP convention he will be the nominee. If he doesn’t, he may not be the...

Donald Trump is a boor. He's a vulgarian, a liar, an ignoramus. He has only the most cursory grasp of policy, a stentorian voice and a great big set of self-assurance. He's winning the Republican nomination. Why? It is partly because of the Clintons. While the media point and laugh at the Trump reality show carnival, they forget that the Clintons originally took us all to the circus. This week, we found out that Hillary Clinton's email scandal now occupies the attention of 147 FBI agents, and that she will be questioned by the FBI. We found out that her...

Although the current colorful, for want of a better word, presidential campaign is attracting attention from voters, indicators are that this attention reflects voters being turned off to the whole process. According to new polling data from Gallup, in the first three months of 2016 the percentage of Americans who say they have given "a lot of thought" to the election increased from 63 percent to 71 percent. However, over the same period, the percentage saying they are "extremely or very enthusiastic" about voting dropped from 48 percent to 43 percent. And the current 43 percent who say they are...

They're both iconic figures in American culture who are known by their first names. California's former governor is Arnold. The GOP presidential front-runner is The Donald. We Californians who lived through Arnold's two terms in the governor's office have watched The Donald's presidential campaign unfold with a sense of deja vu. Donald Trump starred in the TV show "Celebrity Apprentice." Arnold Schwarzenegger will replace him. Both men can boast supersize personalities and bulging bank accounts. Both bombasts ran for a top office with no political experience whatsoever -- which turned out to be a plus, as they tapped into a...

MORE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS have been expelled from the United States during Barack Obama's presidency than ever before. Since 2009, the Obama administration has removed 2.5 million people from American soil — an enormous crackdown that has consumed an enormous amount of money. The federal government now spends more on border and immigration enforcement than it spends on all other criminal law-enforcement agencies — including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, the US Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — combined. So many aliens have been removed on Obama's watch that critics ranging...

"Ronald Reagan is dead, and he's not coming back." "I wish more conservatives could come to grips with this relatively simple fact. We are now in something like the fifth round of the pin-the-tail-on-the-next-Reagan game and it's getting old. Catering to the conservative base, the GOP presidential candidates keep trying to put on the Reagan mantle the way Cinderella's ugly stepsisters tried to cram their dogs into her glass slipper. Not gonna happen." I wrote the above nine years ago. I'm not plagiarizing myself to save time, but to point out that Reagan obsession on the right has been a...

Perhaps the most important results of the March 22 Republican primary in Arizona and caucus in Utah were numbers that didn't appear on your television screen, no matter how late you stayed up for the poll closing times. Those were the numbers of votes cast for Marco Rubio in Arizona -- 70,587 of them at this writing. That was 17,595 more than the 52,992 votes cast there for John Kasich, even though Kasich was an active candidate on March 22 and Rubio had "suspended" his campaign after his defeat in Florida seven days before. One lesson from this is that...

For months now, I, and many other concerned voices in the conservative movement, have written about the danger a Donald Trump nomination presents not just to the future of the GOP, but to the foundational values upon which our nation was built. We have outlined how Trump’s past and present statements and actions overtly contradict even the most fundamental precepts of conservatism. Yet, no matter how eloquent the argument, cogent the logic, or veracity of the examples we provide to support our thesis that Trump unquestionably is not a conservative, the end result feels very much like talking to a...

Nominating Donald Trump will wreck the Republican Party as we know it. Not nominating Trump will wreck the Republican Party as we know it. The sooner everyone recognizes this fact, the better. Denial has been Trump's greatest ally. Republicans and commentators didn't believe he would run. They didn't believe he could be an attractive candidate to rational people, no matter how angry with "the establishment" voters said they were. They -- which includes me -- were wrong. The denial lasted longer for some than others. Long after many observers had come to the realization that Trump was the front-runner, Jeb...

This short essay is in response to a friend who asked me to explain how Donald Trump is unacceptable to "movement conservatives." Let's first acknowledge that many Trump supporters don't even claim to be conservative -- though others do -- and Trump himself is rather dismissive on the point, so they may consider this column a meaningless academic exercise. But a Trump supporter asked, so I'll try to explain. Because I think my questioner was inquiring mostly about issues, I won't delve into Trump's apparent lack of presidential temperament and public deportment -- as reflected mostly in the debates and...

I first became aware of Donald Trump when he chose to make cheating on his first wife front-page news. It was the early '90s. Donald and Ivana Trump broke up over the course of months. Not that divorce is shocking, mind you; among the glitterati marriage seems more unusual. Nor is infidelity exactly novel. But it requires a particular breed of lowlife to advertise the sexual superiority of one's mistress over the mother of one's children. That was Trump's style. He leaked stories to the New York tabloids about Ivana's breast implants -- they didn't feel right. Marla Maples, by...

Many Donald Trump supporters think he is a slam dunk to beat Hillary Clinton in the general election. The candidate himself certainly takes this view. But Trump's analysis of current public polls is preposterous. In the RealClearPolitics.com average of recent polls, Trump trails Clinton by 6 points, 47 to 41 percent. Ted Cruz, in contrast, leads Clinton 46 to 45 percent. Ex-candidate Marco Rubio and splinter candidate John Kasich have been running even better. All at least equal the 46 percent that is the lowest percentage won by either party's nominee this century. Against each of them Clinton falls short...

For years, conservatives have told themselves the pretty bedtime story that they represent a silent majority in America -- that most Americans want smaller government, individual rights and personal responsibility. We've suggested that if only we nominated precisely the right guy who says the right words -- some illegally grown Ronald Reagan clone, perhaps -- we'd win. Donald Trump's impending nomination puts all of that to bed. There can be no doubt: The Republican Party has successful killed the legacy of Ronald Reagan. By consistently moving to the left in every presidential election, by granting the left its general premise...

"Try not to hurt 'em. If you do, I'll defend you in court. Don't worry about it." [Cheers]. This past Sunday when Trump was confronted with similar questions on Meet the Press, he suggested he was seriously considering covering the legal bills for a man who punched an African-American protester in the face at a rally over the weekend.  The assailant later said that perhaps next time, he'd kill the protester.  “I'm going to take a look at it,” Trump told host Chuck Todd.  “I've actually instructed my people to look into it, yes.”  Forty-eight hours later with Stephanopoulos, Trump made the following two...