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Some 2016 intrigue coming from The Washington Post’s Robert Costa, who reported on a meeting Mitt Romney had with the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol last Thursday on the possibility of running as a third party candidate. Kristol is part of a large swath of conservatives within the Republican Party, who are highly skeptical of presumptive nominee Donald Trump on a whole host of issues—the most obvious being that the billionaire magnate isn’t even a conservative Republican:

With Bill Kristol's help, Mitt wants to go back to being an independent, to prevent a republican victory in November!

(Newser) – Mitt Romney and William Kristol met privately "over glasses of water" Thursday to discuss running a third-party candidate and the possibility that candidate might be Romney himself, the Washington Post reports. Kristol, a conservative commentator and editor of the Weekly Standard, has been a major part of the #NeverTrump movement, according to Time. “[Romney] came pretty close to being elected president, so I thought he may consider doing it, especially since he has been very forthright in explaining why Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should not be president of the United States,” Kristol tells the Post. Romney announced...

I have always voted for the Republican presidential candidate. From Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford to Ronald Reagan (twice) and George H. W. Bush (twice) and Bob Dole, from George W. Bush (twice) to John McCain and Mitt Romney—I've checked the box next to those eight names on all 11 occasions I've had the chance. About half the time, I've voted for someone else in the primary. But even in those cases I never hesitated before supporting the Republican nominee in the general election.

WOW! On Wednesday night Politico reported that Donald Trump Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski will not be charged for a hoax assault on reporter Michelle Fields. She made it up. Unfortunately, a lot of Cruz supporters stood with the hoaxer Fields. Tonight Megyn Kelly blamed the Trump Campaign for Michelle Fields filing a fraudulent police report against Trump Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski.

At this point, whatever happens, the GOP’s chances of winning this election is at best 25%, if Cruz is the nominee. If Trump is the nominee, that falls to 3% at best. The problem is; Trump won’t win … and he won’t let himself lose. If he loses the nomination, I see two possibilities; 1) He immediately endorses his friend, Hillary Clinton. His promises are as genuine as a three dollar bill. 2)He waits until mid-October, when all the ballot papers are printed, and then he’ll endorse his friend, Hillary Clinton.

Back in late 2014, Bill Kristol foresaw that Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky wouldn’t get very far in the forthcoming Republican primary season. He also forecast that Jeb Bush, then the presumed Republican front-runner, would struggle to secure the nomination. He was correct in both instances. This is newsworthy in the same sense that a man biting a dog is newsworthy. It’s an unusual, even aberrant event, a violation of the usual order of things. Kristol, 63, the eminent conservative commentator, has made so many wrong predictions that he’s become a kind of cult figure of wrong, at least among...

REDSTATE CALLS ON FAR LEFT PROTESTERS TO BRING GUNS TO TRUMP RALLIES! RedState, a right of center website, managed by Trump-basher Erick Erickson, is part of Townhall Media. The website claims it has three goals: 1) Educate conservatives 2) Motivate conservatives to get involved in the political process 3) Activate conservatives through RedState’s support and tools Today Redstate called on all far left protesters to BRING FIREARMS to Donald Trump rallies. This is a new low for the Trump-hating ‘so-called’ Conservative media. They can’t beat Trump at the ballot box so now they want his supporters shot dead. It’s one...

Donald Trump’s runaway success in the GOP primaries so far is setting off alarm bells among neoconservatives who are worried he will not pursue the same bellicose foreign policy that has dominated Republican thinking for decades. Neoconservative historian Robert Kagan — one of the prime intellectual backers of the Iraq War and an advocate for Syrian intervention — announced in the Washington Post last week that if Trump secures the nomination, “the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.” Max Boot, an unrepentant supporter of the Iraq War, wrote in the Weekly Standard that a “Trump presidency would...

In theory, Ted Cruz's best states are behind him. But at the Detroit debate, Cruz was clearly the class of the field and it's clear that no one should count him out as the delegate race moves into its next phase. The delegate math is complicated, but the basic gist goes something like this: Donald Trump has a commanding lead at the moment, but it is not a given that he will reach the 1,237 threshold he needs to clinch a majority. Simply put, Trump has failed to break through the ceiling of support he's held since New Hampshire even...

Donald Trump has claimed  he has the "world's greatest memory," but when it came time this winter to give testimony in fraud cases filed against him and a real estate training program known as "Trump University," he displayed a repeated inability to recall names and faces of instructors he had claimed to have hired personally. "I can't remember that," he said on Dec. 10, when asked by trial lawyers in one of the class-action cases whether he had met one of the instructors in a program that provided training in building wealth through real estate. "The name sounds familiar but...

Why I Changed My Mind and Joined the #NeverTrump Movement DAVID FRENCH March 2, 2016 Let me begin by saying that I was wrong. Weeks ago I said on a number of radio interviews that while I opposed Trump in the primary, I’d back him if he won the GOP nomination. I hadn’t yet seen — or had been unwilling to believe — the full extent of his contempt for the truth, his fondness for far-left conspiracy theories, and his sheer malice. When I saw Trump in full, my decision was easy: Never Trump. I have spent my entire adult...

In winning Texas by 16 points, winning Oklahoma, winning (as of this writing) Alaska, and finishing second in Alabama, Arkansas, Minnesota, and Tennessee, Ted Cruz has now solidified his grip on second place in the ‎GOP presidential race. He increased his lead over Marco Rubio in states won, votes won, and delegates won--and unless Rubio can win in Florida in two weeks (or John Kasich can win in Ohio), Cruz may soon be battling Donald Trump one-on-one (more or less) for the Republican nomination. But how can Cruz beat Trump? The number-one thing that needs to be undone from the...

It’s been right there all along; a sense, an instinctual sense, a gut feeling, since late June 2015, and in all the subsequent months, it just kept reoccurring – and with the passing of events, each time it became more and more difficult to dismiss…. Before getting to the heart of this entirely speculative presentation, and specifically because it’s so far out there that, well, if accurate, a litany of people will claim we had to hold some insider connection, we must restate and remind everyone – we have never had any contact with any entity from the Donald Trump...

Is that why he refuses to release his tax returns? After it was revealed this summer that Planned Parenthood was selling the organs and body parts of aborted human beings to biotech companies, Donald Trump said he wasn't sure if the organization should lose its federal funding. He even went out of his way to praise Planned Parenthood's good work. Meet the Press host Chuck Todd found Trump's stance interesting, so he asked Trump if he had ever been a Planned Parenthood donor. "It's possible," Trump replied. TODD: You were pretty--you were somewhat defending Planned Parenthood earlier this week. It...

Brand Index reported: Since the first GOP presidential debate last August, Fox News Channel seems to have lost its perception mojo with its core right-leaning audience. By mid February, FNC’s perception by Republican adults 18 and over had reached its lowest point in more than three years, and has declined by approximately 50% since January of this year. Coinciding with Trump’s rise to front-runner in the GOP presidential race, Fox News Channel has seen its perception by Republicans slide. In early August 2015, right after the first GOP debate aired on Fox News Channel,Trump went on a Twitter war with...

The article appearing on the magazine's website Friday written by David Harsanyi reveals just how far National Review is willing to go to continue the war. It's title: "Why President Trump Would Be a Bigger Disaster Than President Clinton." "Whether you're an ideological conservative, a proponent of limited government, or someone who believes that the president has too much power already, you shouldn't think of this matchup as a contest between horrifying candidates," Harsanyi writes.

And so we are now being treated to a wave of Donald Trump fatalism. Yes, he's defied expectations in a pretty remarkable way. Yes, he's won three of the first four GOP contests. Yes, he's ahead in the polls in the states coming up. Yes, he has an easier path to victory than any other candidate. But only four states about 1.2 million people have actually cast ballots. Trump has won about a third of the votes cast; Cruz and Rubio have each won a bit over a fifth. Trump leads in delegates with 79 out of the 110 selected...

...For the last eight months, the sophisticated view of Trump and Trumpism has gone something like this: Donald Trump may be a huckster, but he has done a service to the Republican party by bringing new, nontraditional voters into the tent. He has shown his fellow candidates that they can flatly reject the demands of political correctness and need not drop into turtle-guard whenever the New York Times takes a shot at them. And while Trump the man is not presidential material, Trumpism -- that is, the collection of populist and nationalist concerns that have become wrapped up in the...

... After combing my vast Trump archive, as well as contacting Trump sources, I present herewith nine of Trump's Trumpiest moments -- a Trump Moments collage, if you will -- that distill the very essence of the man. Not unlike Trump's tremendous cologne, Success, an inspiring blend of fresh juniper and iced red currant, with rich bottom notes of vetiver, tonka bean, birchwood, and musk. (In a word, "classy.") One cannot hope to capture Trump's entirety, since he contains multitudes. For instance, sometimes Trump will say he's "really rich," while at others, he'll say he's "very, very rich." That's Trump...