Free Republic

As the president tells it, Donald Trump is the embodiment of what he's been up against in Congress. According to the president, Trump is the embodiment of the Republican Party’s dysfunction, the natural outgrowth of an opposition that has become unmoored from reality. The Republican front-runner has given Obama a way to brag about adding the collapse of the GOP to his legacy, providing the president with the highest-stakes argument for Democrats running for Congress: American democracy is on the line.

In his first Sunday show interview since taking on an expanded role in Donald Trump's campaign, Paul Manafort was quick to raise questions about the tactics Sen. Ted Cruz' campaign is using to secure delegates. After being asked whether threatening delegates is fair game in the hunt for the 1237 required to secure the republican nomination, Manafort responded, "It's not my style, and it's not Donald Trump's style … But it is Ted Cruz's style." He then called the Cruz campaign's methods "Gestapo tactics, scorched-earth tactics." "We're going to be filing several protests because reality is, you know, they are...

About half a dozen times in the past few weeks I have been taken aside by a 20-something who’s looking for reassurance that the republic will not end. There has never been any campaign like this in the history of the nation, they say, and they know this is true because they’ve read it everywhere. “We have officially hit a new low in political discourse,” declared Stephen Colbert (after Trump’s penis allusion on national television). Next, the Huffington Post warned, “Recent violence at Trump rallies marks a new low for American politics.” Not long after that, the Financial Times said:...

An Associated Press-GfK Poll released Thursday finds Donald Trump’s “unfavorable” numbers are nearing 70 percent. The AP reports: Seven in 10 people, including close to half of Republican voters, have an unfavorable view of Trump, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll. It’s an opinion shared by majorities of men and women; young and old; conservatives, moderates and liberals; and whites, Hispanics and blacks — a devastatingly broad indictment of the billionaire businessman.Even in the South, a region where Trump has won GOP primaries decisively, close to 70 percent view him unfavorably. And among whites without a college education,...

Wall St is pretty certain Hillary Clinton will be president Jeff Cox | @JeffCoxCNBCcom http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/06/wall-st-is-pretty-certain-who-will-be-president.html "While there's still plenty of time before the November election, markets are getting acclimated to the idea of a Clinton victory. Wall Street-related firms are Clinton's biggest contributor group, giving her just over $21 million of the total $159 million she has raised during her campaign, according to OpenSecrets." "An awful lot of investors view her as the devil they know as opposed to the devil they don't know," said Greg Valliere, chief global strategist at Horizon Investments and widely recognized as one of the...

Newt Gingrich on Wednesday marveled at one of Donald Trump's biggest accomplishments in the 2016 race — making Ted Cruz appear normal. The former House speaker predicted that Cruz could be boosted at a contested convention by establishment support, something that would be unthinkable without an even more polarizing figure like Trump in the race. “The challenge is entirely on Trump,” said Gingrich, who has been supportive of Trump. “He is not gonna get any help out of the establishment. They have reluctantly concluded that if, you know — Trump in a funny way has normalized Ted Cruz because without...

Shock: Ted Cruz Takes Lead in Reuters Poll Over Donald Trump for First Time by MIKE FLYNN5 Apr 2016 For the first time in the Republican primary, Reuters’ tracking poll shows Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)97% leading Donald Trump among likely voters in the Republican primaries. This is also the first time Donald Trump hasn’t led the tracking poll in 2016. Cruz has the support of 39 percent of likely Republican voters nationwide, just ahead of Donald Trump, who has 37 percent support. Ohio Governor John Kasich is a distant third, with 23 percent support. In the broader survey of...

As Wisconsinites head for the polls, our Beltway elites are almost giddy. For they foresee a Badger State bashing for Donald Trump, breaking his momentum toward the Republican nomination. Should The Donald fall short of the delegates needed to win on the first ballot, 1,237, there is growing certitude that he will be stopped. First by Ted Cruz; then, perhaps, by someone acceptable to the establishment, which always likes to have two of its own in the race. But this city of self-delusion should realize there is no going back for America. For, whatever his stumbles of the last two...

On several occasions in October, Donald Trump tweeted links to stories at Prntly.com, a blog that didn’t exist during the last election cycle. One story (now offline but copied here) indicated that Trump’s support from blue-collar workers was the highest since Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. Prntly popped up again last week as the source of a rumor about the Ted Cruz campaign. The site cut and pasted an old story about Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe. The headline suggested that perhaps Roe had approved the ad attacking Melania Trump run by an anti-Trump super PAC, but it offered no evidence...

The bottom is dropping out for Donald Trump. While Trump was never popular outside of his loyal slice of GOP voters, a raft of new polls show his national position hitting new lows, including with groups that are supposed to form his base. America's widespread loathing for Trump puts further pressure on Republican delegates to deny him the nomination in July if he falls short of a majority, a move that would set off an ugly civil war but that some in the party believe would be necessary to stave off generational damage. A collection of recent surveys by Real...

By this time, everyone with a television, a smart phone or a computer has already seen the MSNBC town hall exchange between Chris Matthews and Donald Trump where the abortion question came up. (Even if you lack all three of those modern devices, you may have caught wind of it via the screams of horror emanating from the windows of your neighbors, both Democrat and Republican.) But on the odd chance that you were in a coma for the past sixteen hours and happened to turn to Hot Air before doing anything else this morning, here’s the short but brutal...

Latest MU Law poll in Wisconsin GOP primary (change from last): Cruz 40 (+21) Trump 30 (0) Kasich 21 (+13) Kasich will cost Cruz delegates. — Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) March 30, 2016

He was a lobbyist who represented one client who sought funds from the federal stimulus program and then another, a group backed by the Koch brothers, who opposed it. He was a political operative who once debated a cardboard cutout of the Democratic governor of New Hampshire to protest tax rates. And he was a congressional aide who was arrested after he brought a gun to work, then sued when he did not get it back. Perhaps not surprisingly, the campaign manager for Donald J. Trump’s unorthodox bid for president, Corey Lewandowski, a 40­year­old New Hampshire resident, does not have...

Plenty of buzz about this last night, especially among anti-Trumpers struck by the coincidence of Trump superfan Newt criticizing him publicly on the same day that an even bigger superfan, Ann Coulter, called Trump “mental” in an interview. (Matt Drudge, yet another superfan, is leading as I write this with the news of Trump’s campaign manager being arrested for battery.) Are Trump’s cheerleaders heading for the lifeboats because they know something we don’t? Nah. They’re still onboard, they’re just alarmed that the captain won’t steer away from that iceberg that keeps getting closer. Trump’s fans within the commentariat have, I...

If the election for President was being held today, and the candidates were Donald Trump and Mitt Romney, for whom would you vote?" We asked the question this way to make it more generic rather than get in to the complexities of an open national Republican convention. 50% of Republicans chose Donald Trump while 37% chose Mitt Romney, and 13% indicated they were unsure. Trump clearly won with males 56/33%. With females, his margin was closer 44/42%. He also carried retired Republicans 59/32%, and won in every age group from 18-65+, including among parents 53/36%. Trump lost among those Republicans...

The Clinton Foundation is a cesspool of corruption, first check out today's article in The Observer , it's an eye-opener, but not surprising. This video was put out by Fox last May, but it's worth a re-visit

A pair of new polls are showing good news for presidential hopeful Ted Cruz. In a new Fox News poll of 388 likely GOP primary voters, frontrunner Donald Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz are now in a statistical dead heat nationally. The poll shows Trump and Cruz polling at 41%-38% respectively, a slight edge for the real estate mogul, but within the poll's +/- 5 point margin of error. Governor John Kasich is running in third place with 17%. A second poll, this one from Emerson College, is spelling good news for Ted Cruz in the April 5th, winner-take-all...

Michael Savage said today on his radio show that the National Enquirer story smearing Ted Cruz is completely false, and he knows this based on a source he says he would trust with his life. Savage points out that Cruz is rightly offended over this utter garbage. But even more so, Savage says that he abhors these attempts of assassination by innuendo, as it has been done to him, and while he doesn’t blame Trump for the story, he threatens to withdraw his support of Trump if he doesn’t completely disavow the story and the man who owns the National...

“Private detectives are digging into at least five affairs Ted Cruz supposedly had,” claimed a Washington insider. The ENQUIRER reports that Cruz’s claimed mistresses include a foxy political consultant and a high-placed D.C. attorney!

Donald Trump outlined an unabashedly noninterventionist approach to world affairs Monday, telling The Washington Post's editorial board that he questions the need for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which has formed the backbone of Western security policies since the Cold War. The meeting at The Post covered a range of issues, including media libel laws, violence at his rallies, climate change, NATO and the U.S. presence in Asia. Speaking ahead of a major address on foreign policy later Monday in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Trump said he advocates a light footprint in the world. In spite...