Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and one of Donald Trump's main rivals in the Republican presidential primary, has endorsed the Republican nominee in a lengthy Facebook post. "After many months of careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience, I have decided that on Election Day, I…
As the 2016 Republican National Convention began, GOP chairman Reince Priebus spoke with confidence about the coming transformation of presumptive nominee Donald Trump. "He knows the pivot is important," Priebus said. "He has been better and I think he's going to be great moving forward." Priebus…
How did it get to this point?
Philadelphia
When accepting the Republican nomination in Cleveland last week, Donald Trump said:
Philadelphia
Donald Trump is leading Hillary Clinton in one new poll and tied with her another. Both polls were taken after the Republican National Convention, giving Trump an overall lead of 0.2 percentage points over Clinton in the Real Clear Politics average of polls. This marks Trump's first RCP lead since…
In an article and podcast posted Sunday, Politico's Glenn Thrush interviewed the boss about 2016.
Cleveland
Cleveland
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on Donald Trump's convention speech and about spending a week at the RNC Convention.
In his Thursday night convention speech, Peter Thiel cribbed his same old thesis but Trump-style.
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on Trump's convention speech.
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Cleveland
Ted Cruz's speech Wednesday night was an impressive endorsement of conservatism, the Constitution, and liberty—and an equally impressive non-endorsement of Donald Trump. It was, in other words, a conservative version of Ted Kennedy's "Dream Will Never Die" speech, given at the 1980 Democratic…
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with deputy online editor Chris Deaton on Mike Pence's address to the GOP convention.
Cleveland
Byron York has an interesting piece Thursday about the Trump team's bizarre eagerness to get into a fight with John Kasich. You should read the whole thing, but the short version is this: Kasich, either out of pique or self-interest or principle, didn't want to participate in the convention in his…
Cleveland
Something is missing from the Republican National Convention YouTube page. The page includes Monday's live stream, and a link to Thursday's live stream, but not Tuesday's or Wednesday's.
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Cleveland
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with contributing editor Charles Krauthammer on Ted Cruz's speech at the GOP convention.
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Well, it's finally here, the moment we've all been waiting for, when Donald Trump is formally enshrined as the face, the body, and the soul of the Republican party. I hope it works out for them ...
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One of the truths I've come to believe over the years in covering conventions is that they play differently in the hall than they do on TV. I'm not in Cleveland, so I can't tell you how it played to the room, but on the screen, Chris Christie's show-trial indictment of Hillary Clinton came across…
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Cleveland
Trumpism is a many splendored thing. It encompasses both support for the Iraq war and opposition to it. On a meta-level, it condemns supporters of the Iraq war and also forgives them.
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On Twitter, Jarrett Hill noted a big problem in Melania Trump's Republican National Convention speech. It was First Lady Michelle Obama's.
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Arkansas senator Tom Cotton defended Donald Trump's track record of receiving false and misleading ratings from fact checkers Monday.
House speaker Paul Ryan said Donald Trump is "not my kind of conservative" Monday, as he tried to explain the ideology of the presumptive GOP nominee for president.
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Cleveland
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on good books to read at the GOP Convention.
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On Sunday, 60 Minutes aired a joint interview with Donald Trump and his vice presidential pick, Mike Pence. After Trump suggested that as president he would declare war on ISIS, Lesley Stahl noted, "but we did go to war, if you remember. We went to Iraq."
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Cleveland
Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, has published a predictive model of presidential elections for decades. Through three simple factors—economic growth, presidential job approval, and tenure of the incumbent party—Abramowitz explains most of the variation in presidential…
"Lemon laws are American state laws that provide a remedy for purchasers of cars and other consumer goods in order to compensate for products that repeatedly fail to meet standards of quality and performance," goes the Wikipedia definition. Republican delegates should study this carefully, as it…
The Drudge siren is blaring that Mike Pence is Trump's VP pick. I'm not sure I believe it, though, for a couple reasons.
Cleveland
Three stories Wednesday morning out of Trump World on the vice presidential front. The first is CNN reporting that the Trump children want Mike Pence while Big Orange is leaning toward Christie. The second is the New York Times with a quote from Trump where he says that he has five finalists, two…
With fewer than than 48 hours until the 2016 Republican National Convention's Rules Committee convenes, a leading anti-Trump delegate is increasingly convinced she'll have the votes necessary to allow the delegates to vote their consciences when casting ballots for the GOP's presidential nominee.
The Trump campaign and the leadership of the Republican National Committee are working hard to pressure delegates to vote for Trump. The race is over, they say. The voters have rendered their judgment. Delegates do not have the right to nullify this verdict. Now is the time to rally around Trump…
Though I'm not a delegate to the Republican National Convention, the following letter to the presumptive nominee says what I imagine many party faithful, deeply concerned about both the party and the country, might wish to say to Donald Trump.
In Cleveland Monday morning, Boyd Matheson, the former chief of staff to Utah senator Mike Lee, made an interesting pitch to Republicans on the party's platform committee: a shorter, more meaningful GOP platform. Rather than a party platform that takes up tens of thousands of words and attempts to…
Any serious student of the theory and history of the Republican National Convention knows the delegates to that convention are unbound and free to exercise their judgment. If this were not the case, why did the Gerald Ford forces think it necessary in 1976 to move to explicitly bind the delegates…
Bill Kristol joined the table on MSNBC's Morning Joe Thursday to discuss the latest in the effort to unbind delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland later this month. Kristol disputed the idea that Donald Trump espoused in his Ohio speech Wednesday that the "Never Trump"…
I was chatting the other day with a politically savvy and experienced friend. While neither of us is pro-Trump, we agreed that, analytically, Trump's chances are being underrated, and that while one would still have consider Trump an underdog to Clinton, it's not out of the question that he could…
With Donald Trump slipping, if not precipitously yet nonetheless seriously, in the polls, his choice of a vice-presidential candidate looms all the more important. The wrong choice could doom him, the right choice pull him up even, perhaps ahead of Hillary Clinton. As a not altogether disinterested…
A Republican delegate and national committee member is pushing to change the party rules in order to ensure Donald Trump's nomination at the upcoming convention. He claims not to be doing the bidding of Trump or the Republican National Committee. But his effort, if successful, would help both avoid…