Free Republic

Donald Trump likes to say he's running a campaign unlike any other. He's willing to do the things other candidates won't. Sometimes there's a reason nobody's touching the hot stove. Today, the GOP front-runner learned what happens when a candidate goes off-script on abortion. The remarks came while Trump was being asked by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews during a pre-taped town hall about the practical implications of banning abortion nationwide. Matthews specifically pressed Trump on the criminal consequences women would face for seeking abortions if Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide, were overturned. “This is not...

I have a confession to make. I actually like Donald Trump. I also like all the other conservative GOP candidates. I’d vote for any one of them over Hillary, Obama and Sanders, who all represent the totalitarian Left, the curse of American politics today. The totalitarian Left is now in bed with Jihad, which is why Obama will not allow the words “Jihad War” or even “Islamic terror” escape his lips. There are no words to describe that kind of sabotage and betrayal, and none of the other Democrats are any better. On the other hand, I’ve known business people...

A federal judge has asked the Obama administration to shield from public disclosure court records related to the once-secret criminal history of a former Donald Trump business partner. In an unusual order prompted by an unsealing request from The Associated Press, U.S. District Judge Brian M. Cogan said that unless the Justice Department acts before April 18, he will decide whether to make the court files public under the assumption that federal prosecutors don't care. The case involves Felix Sater, a Trump business associate who pleaded guilty in a major Mafia-linked stock fraud scheme in the late 1990s and cooperated...

Donald Trump has turned the whole of the Washington ‘establishment’ for miles around the ‘beltway’ into a fearful and muddled morass emitting noxious gas, hoping it asphyxiates all sources of energy propelling Trump toward the White House. The majority of the MSM pretends it is only the Republican establishment which hates Trump, although it is safe to say, most talking-heads are mystified. The Republican establishment professes Trump isn’t ‘conservative’ enough and he’s not really a Republican. Plus, he’s not religious enough.  The truth-challenged Clinton machinery and backers pretend he hates women, and oh, by the way, ‘he’s also racist’ and...

An op-ed penned this month by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and published online appears to be blatantly plagiarized from an article written days earlier under former rival Ben Carson’s name, The Daily Caller has determined. The similar op-eds were written on the topic of America’s territories and commonwealths. Both pieces appear under the by-lines of the candidates. Carson’s piece, published Feb. 26, was published in the Marianas Variety in the Northern Mariana Islands. Trump’s op-ed — published in the Pacific Daily News in Guam, part of the USA Today Network — was published 12 days later on March 9.

Donald Trump's presidential candidacy threatens the Left's strangehold in this country more than any other movement in American politics in my memory, if not modern history. That's the simple reason thousands of Leftists mobilized in Chicago last week to shut down the democratic process -- to seize the space inside and around a Trump political rally and transform it into a morass of menace, sirens, chaos, and mobs. Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Rachel Maddow, Jake Tapper, Megyn Kelly et al to the woeful contrary: Nothing, but nothing, Donald Trump has said from his podium...

Trump is crude and politically clueless, but no more so than the Clintons, Sanders — or Obama. Donald J. Trump thus far has not shown that he has the level-headedness to be president. He has no political ideology and could just as well govern to the left of Hillary Clinton as to the right of her. Yet his sloppy way of speaking has earned him equally sloppy, over-the-top analogies — to Mussolini, Hitler, George Wallace, and a host of other populist and racist demagogues. But is he uniquely dangerous, ignorant, or cruel in terms of either distant or recent American...

I was wrong about Donald Trump: Camille Paglia on the GOP front-runner’s refreshing candor (and his impetuousness, too) Yes, he remains thin-skinned and easily riled. But his fearlessness and brash energy also seem necessary and rare Camille Paglia I’m dying for an update from you on Donald Trump. Last summer you called him “not a president” and a “carnival barker.” Do you still feel the same? If you loved Trump, would Salon even let you proclaim it? I mean, they’re kind of as liberal as they come, no? Why can’t there be a party that is basically Republican, but minus...

From my perspective as a fervent supporter of the ruggedly honest and principled Bernie Sanders, Trump with his pragmatic real-life record is a far more palatable national figure than Ted Cruz, whose unctuous, vainglorious professions of Christian piety don’t pass the smell test. Trump is a blunt, no-crap mensch, while Cruz is a ham actor, doling out fake compassion like chopped liver. Cruz’s lugubrious, weirdly womanish face, with its prim, tight smile and mawkishly appealing puppy-dog eyebrows, is like a waxen mask, always on the verge of melting. This guy doesn’t know who the hell he is—and the White House...

What would happen if Donald Trump sat down with the Creator of the universe in a SoHo bistro?The following statements attributed to Mr. Trump are not fabricated. The man truly uttered them. Those attributed to God are likewise genuine.With whom do you agree?Lattes are poured and chairs, scooted.The discussion begins.Trump: “I am a really smart guy. I’m intelligent. Some people would say I’m very, very, very intelligent. I know what sells, and I know what people want.”God: “[I] oppose the proud, but give grace to the humble. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself...

Former New York City Michael Bloomberg issued a directive that opinion journalists not attack Republican frontrunner Donald Trump after he complained about coverage, according to a report from New York Magazine. Gabriel Sherman reported after Trump had a "scathing letter" about negative coverage from Bloomberg's media arm hand-delivered to Bloomberg's Upper East Side home, stories about the real estate mogul were subject to "special scrutiny."The original story quoted an unnamed high-level source saying that Bloomberg handed down an "edict" to ensure journalists did not attack Trump in their stories. Even a reference to Trump as "P. T. Barnum" was cut...

On “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump is the guy who fires people. In real life, it’s a different story. For 16 years, Anthony “Tony” P. Senecal was Trump’s personal butler at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s home and club in Palm Beach, Fla. Few people know Trump as well as Senecal. During the first interview Senecal has given since retiring last year, he told Newsmax what it was like to work for him.

Let us now do something sullying. Let us now praise Donald Trump. It is not a specific action or statement that earns him his gold star. But he has nonetheless given America something it needs. Oddly from a man so uninformed and inarticulate, that something is knowledge. He is teaching white people something important, for many of us have been locked in shameful ignorance of our countrymen. Much of America convinced itself that there were no racists left--that the silencing of overt bigotry by social and legal censure (think of Paula Deen, Donald Sterling, or Don Imus) meant the problem...

A lot has been written about how Donald Trump’s asset churning and bombastic attacks on partners and takeover targets in Atlantic City may have profited him personally, but ultimately led to the demise of his Atlantic City casino empire, costing small investors, contractors and suppliers millions of dollars and throwing thousands of employees out of work. But as our friend, and former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams has documented, Atlantic City isn’t Trump’s only failed enterprise, nor is it the only example of how Donald Trump has made money by duping Donald Trumpand bullying the little guys he now...

We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump.

We're in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you're teasing him. Trump.

In an effort to take out frontrunner Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidates have pelted Trump with criticism over his multiple trips to federal bankruptcy court. That criticism was on full display in CNN's Republican debate Sept. 16. Most notably, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina criticized Trump's history of bankruptcies in his businesses. "You know, there are a lot of us Americans who believe that we are going to have trouble someday paying back the interest on our debt because politicians have run up mountains of debt using other people's money," Fiorina said. "That is in fact precisely the way you...

Trump is in part a reaction to the intellectual corruption of the Republican Party. That ought to be obvious to his critics, yet somehow it isn't. Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you'd have to consider it wasted. Pretty...

President Bill Clinton's presidential library is set to make public nearly 500 pages of records pertaining to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to an official notice from the National Archives. The records will detail the Clinton White House's interactions with Trump and his Trump Organization, as well as how Clinton aides prepared to field questions about Trump's entry into the 2000 presidential race, where he sought the nomination of the Reform Party for a few months before dropping out. The files could revive questions about the friendly relationship Trump had with President Clinton and Hillary Clinton before Trump launched...

Jim Geraghty dives down the memory hole to remind us what Donald Trump was saying just a few short years ago, in an interview with Larry King:...