Free Republic

President Donald Trump took his attacks on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to a new level Wednesday, as a super PAC linked to the 76-year-old accused his would-be rival of ethics violations tied to what it calls DeSantis’ “shadow presidential campaign.” A draft of the 15-page letter by Make America Great Again Inc. calls on the Florida Commission on Ethics to investigate DeSantis, alleging that the 44-year-old has violated a slew of state statutes as well as federal campaign finance laws. The complaint refers to DeSantis as a “de facto candidate for president” and claims that ​the governor is “leveraging his...

The Associated Press is out with new polling pitting Democrat Hillary Clinton against Republican Donald Trump. Clinton beats Trump in every category among the general electorate, including on the questions of who is best to create jobs, who is better on international trade and who can "Make America Great Again," which of course is Trump's campaign slogan. First, the criteria:

Republican presidential candidate Texas Senator Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said he would seek out and deport all the illegal immigrants in the US and that both fellow candidates Donald Trump and Florida Senator Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)“would allow those 12 million people to become US citizens” on Monday’s “The O’Reilly Factor” on the Fox News Channel. Cruz began by stating [relevant remarks begin around 2:30] that the law should be enforced, and illegal immigrants in the US should be deported. When asked if he would “go look for them” Cruz responded, “Bill, of course you would. That’s what ICE exists...

Trump's old line about his opposing the Iraq War: "I'll give you 25 different stories." His new line after no one has found proof he actually opposed it: "I wasn't a politician so people didn't write everything I said." Donald Trump offered a new reason for why, after exhaustive searches, no one has found proof he opposed the Iraq War before it began: People didn't write everything he said. The comments are a stark difference from what The Donald said at a Republican debate in September of last year, when said he could provide 25 stories showing his early opposition...

Trump certainly sound like Obama when he was talking about George Bush. If there weren’t WMD’s how did Saddam Hussein use them? Why did we keep finding left overs for many years to come? Yes, Saddam exaggerated what he had, but there was enough WMD’s to worry about. Plus I don’t know anyone even on the liberal side that blames Bush for 9-11. That was just way off. This really could be Trump’s downfall. Check it out: Donald Trump and Jeb Bush argue over Iraq, 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction at Saturday night’s debate moderated by CBS News. Trump...

Glenn Beck unloaded on Republican presidential contender Donald trump after Saturday night’s debate, characterizing him as a “narcissistic psychopath” who is in desperate need of a “diagnosis.” “Tonight’s debate is the most uncomfortable, angry, hate-filled 2 hours I have ever experienced,” Beck wrote on Facebook. “Is anyone else shaken by this? I found it seriously and deeply disturbing.”

Apparently Donald Trump has reconsidered his stance that Ted Cruz is eligible to run for president after noticing that he’s kicking his butt in the Iowa polls, which is how the founders intended for us to solve such matters. Here’s el Trumpo back in September telling ABC News that ALL the lawyers said Cruz could run legally:

Republican primary front-runner Donald Trump in an interview broadcast Sunday refused to escalate his feud with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). When asked about his chief political rival during an interview with ABC News's Jon Karl, the businessman said Cruz, who has recently taken the lead in Iowa, was a "nice guy." "He is a very nice guy, he has been very respectful," Trump said. Trump also said when he entered the presidential race, he had no idea he would sustain such a dramatic lead over his competitors, ABC News reported. "It's a very, very big lead, so I didn't think...

Are you a conservative? Are you rocking so much conservative street cred that you chose to stay home rather than vote for Republican nominees Mitt Romney in 2012 or John McCain in 2008 because you consider them undercover liberals, a couple of donkeys outfitted with fake trunks? Do you look at the big government left and the big government right and have trouble telling them apart? Do you currently support Donald Trump? If you answered "yes" to the above questions, this intervention is for you. I don't want to make you angry. I don't want you to make you scream...

Rush Limbaugh said today on his radio show that Donald Trump’s attack on Ted Cruz over the weekend, calling him a ‘maniac’ given the way he’s dealt with McConnell and others in the Senate, is not an attack a genuine conservative would make and it has raised a red flag for him: While I would certainly vote for Trump if he were the nominee, I’ve never thought he was a genuine conservative. But I do think he’s tried in some ways to bridge his positions with conservatism and I think he generally leans in that direction. At the end of...

Donald Trump is at 36 percent in a recent poll, and Philip Bump at the Washington Post has a piece up about why that is important. But here's the thing: the poll is not very important at all, for many reasons. 1) It's a national poll — there's no such thing as a national primary. National polls are helpful very early in the primary season. In 2008, 59 days out, Rudy Giuliani was easily in first place nationwide, with double-digit leads on McCain, Romney and Huckabee. He went nowhere. In 2012, Cain was the leader nationally, but Romney was the...

After the Paris attack, conventional wisdom held that Republican voters would finally turn away from political outsiders and reward candidates representing sobriety and experience. No one stopped to consider that, actually, voters might be drawn to the guy who memorably said of ISIS that he would "bomb the ---- out of them." Not only has Donald Trump not been hurt by Paris, he has bumped up in the aftermath (Ben Carson, on the other hand, has indeed dropped). The cliche about Trump is that he's defying the laws of political gravity. If Trump is cutting against the contemporary political grain...

Donald Trump is still the GOP front-runner in opinion polls, but Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has seen a surge on CNN's Political Prediction Market, and is now seen by players as more likely than the billionaire businessman to be the Republican nominee. Cruz's odds -- which stand at 21% -- are greater than Trump's 20% odds for the first time, according to the Political Prediction Market, a live, online game, conducted by the company Pivit for CNN. It uses polling data and input from its 25,000 users to predict outcomes. Play the Political Prediction Market at cnn.com/Predict Movement on the...

The Donald’s life has been seven decades of buffoonery. If there was a good reason to distrust presidential candidate Mitt Romney, it had to do with his views on abortion. Not his position per se — as difficult as it is to understand the pro-choice tendency, there are people of good faith on both sides of the abortion question — but the fact that he arrived at that position so late in life and at a moment when his change of heart was politically convenient. Even if we assume that this was not simple cowardly political calculation, as in the...