Free Republic

The latest polling data shows solid support in North Carolina for Donald Trump with less than a month to go before the March 15th primary. The Elon University poll finds Republican registered voters and Independents who describe themselves as leaning Republican favor Trump over all other candidates vying to be the GOP's presidential nominee. The real estate mogul was favored by 28% of those voters surveyed, compared to 19% for Ted Cruz, 16% for Marco Rubio, and 10% for Ben Carson. Trump v. Clinton Donald Trump: 41 percent Hillary Clinton: 47 percent Neither/Someone Else: 9 percent Don’t Know: 4 percent...

In July of 2003, the Dixie Chicks, a platinum-selling Texas-based country band, was playing a show in England when lead singer Natalie Maines decided to address the contentious debate over whether or not the United States should invade Iraq. “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all,” Maines told the London audience. "We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." -snip- The whole incident is worth recounting because here we are, almost 13 years later, and the lead in the Republican primary race, Donald...

Dear Donald Trump Fan, I'm going to tell you the truth, friend. You say you want the truth. You say you want someone who speaks boldly and brashly and bluntly and "tells it like it is" and so on. According to exit polls in South Carolina, voters who want a president who "tells it like it is" are an essential demographic for Trump, just as they're an essential demographic for Judge Judy and Dr. Phil. You say you want abrupt and matter-of-fact honesty, and you want it so much, you'll make a man president for it regardless of whether he...

He's definitely thorough -and thoroughly devious- I'll give him that. But besides apparently buying-out apparently Breitbart, (aka 'Trumpbart' lol) Trump is now unleashing wave-after-wave of online trolls to attack every single pro-Cruz post... and twirl their virtual pom-poms in your face. They are very easy to spot, tho- 20 - 100 followers, lame sunset or some such background they found in 5 seconds, one 'character' trait like 'I'm a trucker', and typically a profile photo that looks like a model or some other 'winner'. And they always link Trump's own twitter account on EVERY thread... apparently getting paid per post. It's obvious they...

...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...

I'm trying to understand FR's embrace of the Donald, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this one. I too had a favorable first reaction when I heard him talking about building the wall in absolute terms, and his rejection of the concept of amnesty for illegal aliens. I also admired that he was the first politician in a long time that would fight back against the media and left-wing attacks, instead of trying to appease the left. However, that admiration quickly wore off when I researched Trump and found clip after clip of the man, in...

... The previous debate (which Trump boycotted) was much more civilized and informative. Trump's foreign policy would be a disaster because, in a meeting with a representative of a foreign country who wants a real discussion, he would be playing reality show host, cussing and fuming at them continually (a leopard can't change its spots). Yes, Trump said the border should be secured and illegals sent back; that has some merit even as a questionable goal. But he is a one-trick pony with no other agenda to speak of -- no knowledge that I can see regarding what government is...

People who pride themselves on rational thinking know there are few feelings worse than being wrong about something, especially something that they made a big noise about at the time. What helps lessen this intellectual humiliation is understanding that, given the information available at the time, the decision was a rational one at the time. The remedy for the initial error is to use the newly available information to reach a more reasoned decision. As the campaign season goes forward, we're learning more about Donald Trump's politics and seeing his initial ebullient puckishness too often give way to self-referential arrogance...

Republican primary front-runner Donald Trump on Sunday said he does not know what he was trying to say during a 2002 interview in which he supported the Iraq invasion. Asked if he was in favor of invading Iraq by radio show host Howard Stern, Trump responded: "Yeah, I guess so. You know, I wish it was - I wish the first time it was done correctly." Asked Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" to clarify the comment, Trump said he doesn't know what he meant. "Well, what I mean by that is it almost shouldn't have been done, and, you...

Donald Trump attacked Republicans this morning for their opposition to government-provided health care. Appearing on Meet the Press, Trump told host Chuck Todd, "We're not going to let people die in squalor because we are Republicans, okay?" "That's part of the problem with the Republicans, somehow they got fed into this horrible position," Trump said. "We're going to take care of people." Trump also said he didn't mean to express support for Obamacare's individual mandate during Thursday night's CNN town hall when he told Anderson Cooper, "I like the mandate." "We had a situation where we were Anderson Cooper, who's...

Fox News has been spinning the false narrative that South Carolina was "tailor-made" for Ted Cruz and saying "if he can't win there, where else can he win?" This is a COMPLETELY MADE-UP FALSE NARRATIVE. It was never a favorable state for Cruz. It was a state where Santorum finished a distant third four years ago, behind more secular candidates Gingrich and Romney. While Cruz does have a real but mostly still untapped potential to appeal to secular voters, the Faux narrative that evangelicals made South Carolina a very favorable state for Cruz is JUST WRONG. South Carolina went for...

Today, South Carolina Republicans cast votes in the 2016 presidential primary. As expected, two things happened. First, Donald Trump wiped the floor with the competition. Second, pundits have overreacted in declaring that his second win clears him a path to the nomination. The latter is not only premature, but rabidly underestimates how the party primary system works. But in due fairness, let's address both points. Trump continues to be underestimated This is not a post to bash Donald Trump. In fact, as a student of elections, Trump wildly impresses me. He entered a crowded race in which Republicans had not...

If there's one thing that Donald Trump has done for the leaders of the conservative movement, the Christian Right and the Republican party it's that he's teaching them a necessary lesson in reality: It turns out that a large number of their supporters don't really care about ideology, morality or even their supposedly mutual loathing of the hippie Democrats on the other side. Their concerns run to something much more primitive.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, as the saying goes, but maybe it’s not so strange that the anti-war loony left group Code Pink praised Donald Trump’s embrace of their “Bush Lied, People Died” mantra in the South Carolina debate. Trump’s comments that President George W. Bush deliberately sent Americans to their deaths based on a lie and knew 9/11 was coming and did nothing fits Code Pink’s alternate universe. Trump’s character assassination of the last Republican President should disqualify him from being the next one.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who served alongside former President George W. Bush, issued a bold criticism of Republican presidential contender Donald Trump Monday, saying the billionaire “sounds like a liberal Democrat” when it comes to the Iraq war and 9/11. “You heard at the debate Saturday Donald Trump accuse President Bush and his team of purposefully lying the country into war in Iraq, saying, ‘I will tell you they lied, they said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. They knew there were none.’ Your response?” Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked. The former vice president was...

Donald Trump is a habitual liar, and the thing about habitual liars is that they lie habitually. In a testy exchange with former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Trump insisted that he’d never gone bankrupt, and that claims to the contrary are a lie. That’s the Trump magic right there: Lying about your business history is one thing, lying that your critics are lying about it is another. Trump has a peculiar way of speaking about bankruptcy: He has a deep aversion to the word itself. He speaks of “putting a company into a chapter” without ever answering the implicit question:...

Presidential candidate Ted Cruz has praised Donald Trump for making illegal immigration a central issue of the Republican presidential race, but in an exclusive interview with ABC News, Cruz said that Trump’s immigration plan amounts to amnesty. "So Donald Trump's position is once you deport them, it's what's called touchback. A lot of establishment Republicans had touchback," Cruz said in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. "Basically you make them fly back to their country for a minute, touch the ground, and then they come back with amnesty as citizens. Now, Donald is entitled to do that. He can...

He has broken with many Republicans on taxing the rich, threatening trade wars and keeping Planned Parenthood alive. On Friday, Donald J. Trump faced criticism for an even bolder act of conservative heresy: embracing the core tenet of the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Trump has to date offered only bits and pieces of his health agenda, generally presenting a vow to repeal "Obamacare" and replace it with "something great." In a town-hall meeting hosted by CNN on Thursday night, he shared some more expansive views on the subject, and unlike most Republicans he did not call for removing the individual...

Donald Trump's opponents are increasingly targeting him in a slew of TV attack ads that throw shade on his business ventures and conservative credentials and draw attention to some of his un-presidential qualities on the campaign trail - like his use of the f-bomb. In large part, that is unsurprising. Mr. Trump is the front-runner heading into the South Carolina primary on Feb. 20 and the ads are ratcheting up the pressure - aimed at dislodging the billionaire real estate tycoon from the top of voter survey polls. Another wealthy Republican candidate faced a similar barrage of TV attacks four...

Trump is Owned by EVERY Bank on Wall St. (Except Citi, Who He Stiffed for $300M)...