Free Republic

As he inches toward the GOP nomination, Donald Trump is becoming more and more disliked among American voters. Donald Trump wasn't wildly popular to begin with. And now he's becoming even more disliked among American voters, creating a significant threat to his chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination. Trump is, by far, the GOP delegate leader — and the only candidate with a realistic shot at winning a majority of delegates before the July convention. But at the same time, nearly two-thirds of Americans view Trump unfavorably — and his image rating has declined since Republican voting began in...

Unless, of course, there is some kind of separate system of justice for the powerfulÂ… The 2016 election has many bizarre aspects, but surely one of the most bizarre is the fact that one of the main presidential candidates is under active investigation by the FBI, and that this is somehow being treated as unimportant or inconsequential. Of course, everyone knows that Hillary Clinton has a pending FBI investigation, and everyone has a vague sense that it is continuing to grow rather than disappear, and that theoretically the possible consequences include indictment and prosecution. But for some reason a major...

I believe that there are a lot of things we do in life not because they will be fun, but just because we want to say we did them. For me, one of those things ended up being attending a local Ted Cruz rally last week (March 14, 2016) with a few of my friends. Before this, my friends and I had never been to any sort of political rally. This was certainly an interesting choice to be our first. Supporters in the crowd wore election-themed shirts and fervently waved posters in the air. Among the messages portrayed through this...

What’s it like to have a friend run for president? In the new issue of National Review, I have a piece about Ted Cruz. I’d like to expand on it here in Impromptus. I think that both pro-Cruz people and anti-Cruz people will find certain things of interest. Same with people in between. Okay, here we go … It’s really strange to have a friend running for president. It’s strange enough to have a friend in the U.S. Senate. There are only a hundred of them, you know. It’s the house of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Robert Taft … When...

Via RCP. My headline’s misleading, as I’ll explain in a sec, but it does capture the newsiest soundbite from this clip. Standard operating procedure when a politician’s caught in a sex scandal is for his close allies to rally around him. It was a regrettable lapse, he has much to atone for, but we all make mistakes and in the end it’s a private matter — you know how the script goes. Beck’s having none of that. If Cruz is guilty of what the National Enquirer’s accused him of, he says, I’m done. I heard that sentiment repeatedly from Cruz...

The biggest question for Bernie Sanders and his supporters is whether they'll transform his presidential campaign into a permanent organization that can carry his political revolution forward in the long-term; or whether, like Occupy Wall Street, it will quickly disappear. If Bernie pulls off a triple bank shot, receives the Democratic nomination, and is elected president, such an organization will be needed to help him accomplish his ambitious goals. If a corporate centrist Democrat like Hillary Clinton becomes president, a mass national social democratic/socialist/liberal organization is needed to prevent her from moving to the right and to build a base...

Pinch yourself, hard. The unthinkable, the unimaginable, the impossible is happening. People are actually feeling empathy for Ted Cruz. What does this say about our beloved America? Into what kind of weird cosmic rat-hole have we let ourselves be dragged? One of the coldest, most despised figures in the Senate, Cruz is endeavoring to appear human. The same snide jerk who led the costly, unpopular Republican shutdown of the government is now warming hearts for the way he rushed to the defense of his wife, Heidi. For this Frankenstein turn of events we can thank Donald Trump. In case you...

After nearly eight years of Obama they may be ready to try something new How millennials have gone left during the past decade Millennials, that perplexing generation between the ages of 18 and 30, have famously gone for leftist presidential candidates in recent elections. They famously went for Barack Obama in 2008, caught up in the hope and change fever. Four years later, millennials choose Obama again over Mitt Romney by large margins. In the current election cycle, the younger generation has tended to support Bernie Sanders, the elderly senator from Vermont and avowed socialist. Millennials are turning to Ted...

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz has won the support of state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the latest member of Wisconsin's Republican establishment to back the Texas senator. Meanwhile, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton's campaign said she will hold events across the state starting Monday. Details were not immediately available Friday afternoon, but a stop in Madison is expected on Monday or Tuesday. Clinton joins her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders in the Badger State. Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, plans a rally Saturday at the Alliant Energy Center. Vos, R-Rochester, announced his Cruz endorsement on radio host Charlie Sykes' program Friday...

Ted Cruz is suddenly having a moment. The question is whether that moment comes too late for him to beat Donald Trump. Cruz never managed to capitalize on winning the Iowa caucuses, which led to a streak in which Trump captured 20 states and a seemingly insurmountable lead in delegates. But now that every other candidate other than John Kasich has bit the dust, the Texas senator has emerged as the anti-Trump alternative--even among those who don't much like him. And that has produced more positive coverage--or at least more respectful coverage--from a press corps that Cruz once told me...

Ted Cruz, "Today radical Islamic terrorists targeted the men and women of Brussels as they went to work on a spring morning. In a series of co-ordinated attacks they murdered and maimed dozens of innocent commuters at subway stations and travelers at the airport. For the terrorists, the identities of the victims were irrelevant. They – we — are all part of an intolerable culture that they have vowed to destroy. For years, the west has tried to deny this enemy exists out of a combination of political correctness and fear. We can no longer afford either. Our European allies...

Scott Adams remembers just how the game turned. He was young and improving at chess, but the masterful kid across the board would outmaneuver Adams till the game seemed a runaway. Now, this kid didn't want to just beat Adams; he wanted to embarrass him. "So after he'd picked away three-fourths of my pieces and I was discouraged," Adams recounts, "he would offer to turn the board around and play with my pieces." And then effectively "win" again. On those occasions, Adams, the creator of "Dilbert," got insight into the type of personality that loves not only the challenge of...

Hillary Clinton is blasting Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump for foreign policy stances she argues would "make America less safe and the world more dangerous." Clinton spoke at Stanford University one day after terror attacks killed more than 30 people in Brussels, Belgium. The former Secretary of State said, "the threat we face from terrorism is real, it is urgent, and it knows no boundaries." She outlined a three-pronged approach to fighting ISIS: increased bombings in Iraq and Syria; increased anti-terrorism efforts around the world; and ramped up intelligence and security efforts within the United States. But...

If I told you at the start of the 2016 race that Mitt Romney would vote for Ted Cruz in the Utah caucuses and that Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham would endorse the Texas senator's presidential campaign, you would have laughed. Probably loudly. Cruz was -- and is -- hated by the Republican Party establishment, who view him as a grandstander with little interest in any of the niceties of politics. Cruz is the guy who doesn't play well with others, and whom others dislike -- a lot -- for that unwillingness to go along to get along. And yet,...

Today, during a press conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, President Obama issued a personal rebuke of Ted Cruz, indicating that his plan to patrol Muslim neighborhoods was like something out of communist Cuba. The Hill reports: Obama invoked Cruz's Cuban heritage, arguing the senator was ignoring the personal journey of his father, who fled the island nation for the United States to escape political oppression. "I just left a country that engages in that kind of neighborhood surveillance, which by the way, the father of Sen. Cruz escaped for America," the president said. "The land of the free. The notion...

The former president was speaking on behalf of his wife, Hillary Clinton, at a campaign event.Bill Clinton slammed the "awful legacy of the last eight years" on Monday, which Republicans quickly claimed was an attack on President Barack Obama. However, the former president was really talking about Republican obstructionism. Clinton was speaking in Spokane, Washington on behalf of his wife, former secretary of state and Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton, calling her a "change-maker" who can "make democracy work the way the framers intended for it to work." He added: "Now, if you don't believe we can all grow together...

Ohio Gov. John Kasich rebuked Sen. Ted Cruz's call to "patrol and secure" Muslim neighborhoods in the wake of the deadly explosions in Brussels on Tuesday. "We are not at war with Islam--we're at war with radical Islam," Kasich told reporters in Minneapolis, according to the New York Times. "In our country we don't want to create divisions where we say, 'OK, well your religion, you're a Muslim, so therefore we're going to keep an eye on you." He added, "The last thing we need is more polarization." ISIS has since claimed responsibility for the attacks, which have killed at...

The only defense that he and his supporters can muster is that he has "evolved" on his beliefs of nearly seven decades. This is awfully convenient, of course, considering that his new talking points match the narrative that is required to stir up what psychologists are calling the "authoritarian wing" of the Republican party. These are the Republicans who are angry about what the government is doing and who want someone strong to tell them what to think and how to act. It's the daddy-issues wing of the party - those who know enough to want change but who don't...

According to the latest polling, Gary Herbert is hardly alone in Utah, but his endorsement may kneecap a fellow Republican governor in Utah. In a Facebook post earlier today, Governor Herbert urged his fellow Utahans to cast their vote for "a consistent conservative," and to cement the state's status as something more than just another "flyover state": Tomorrow night, Utah will award 40 delegates to the Republican National Convention. If one of the Republican candidates can receive more than 50 percent of the vote, that candidate will receive all of Utah's 40 delegates. Ted Cruz is a consistent conservative who...

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has said the US has now become a "third world country" as compared to infrastructures in Dubai and China, and promised that things would change once he is elected the American president. "We have become a third world country, folks!," Trump, 69, told his supporters at an election rally at Sal Lake City in Utah, which goes to presidential primary elections on Tuesday. "If you go to places like Dubai, China, you look at the roads, at the rail roads, they have the bullet trains that go 100s of miles an hour. And if you...