As a confirmed "Never Trumper," I would be thrilled, if there were no other considerations, to see Donald Trump’s Republican Party get blitzed in these elections and Trump therefore be humiliated.
The casual political observer in Indiana would be confused.
The Democrat turned Republican turned Independent re-registers as a Democrat with 2020 on his mind.
Hosted by Charlie Sykes.
The Nebraska senator tweeted about it on Saturday.
A special politics chat featuring writers from THE WEEKLY STANDARD and FiveThirtyEight.
There were a handful of primary elections last week in Ohio, Indiana, and West Virginia, and while the results from Middle America were more or less predictable—“establishment” Republicans prevailed against some Trumpier-than-thou candidates—the headlines were revealing in their way: “Parties’…
The right fell for the myth of Pajama Boy, and it disregards young adults at its own peril.
As all doomsday cults eventually learn, you can predict the end of the world only so many times before everybody stops listening to you.
Two weeks after Hillary Clinton sparked an uproar by blaming backward-looking voters in middle America for her 2016 election loss, Republicans are already laying plans to turn her remarks into a major campaign talking point. Missouri Senate candidate Josh Hawley on Monday released two ads tying…
The other day I signed an online petition sponsored by Republicans for the Rule of Law. It’s addressed to Donald Trump: “Mr. President: Firing Robert Mueller would gravely damage the Presidency, the GOP and the country. Please don’t do it.” Since this is an effort to rally Republicans behind…
Millennial women are leaving the Republican Party in droves in recent years, with less than a quarter of younger women voters now identifying as Republicans.
Republicans in Congress appeared open to President Donald Trump’s proposal to use the death penalty to crack down on drug dealers on Thursday night before the expected release of the president’s long-awaited opioid plan.
Larry Kudlow got blindsided in 2017 when President Trump was putting together his White House staff. He was a Trump loyalist, having announced his support at approximately the moment Trump announced his candidacy. And he and his partner Stephen Moore—both longtime advocates of supply-side, or…
State legislative elections are easily overlooked, but they can carry enormous consequences for policy and politics, even on the national level. Democrats were reminded of this truth the hard way in 2010, when Republicans took control of state governments across the country amid the Tea Party wave.…
Donald Trump is historically unpopular, and Republicans are underperforming his margins in special elections across the country. Some might be tempted to look at these numbers and conclude that Trumps’ re-election effort (which is already underway) is doomed.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD had the chance to talk to South Carolina Republican Mark Sanford about President Donald Trump’s proposed steel and aluminum tariffs, which would tax imports at 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively. Sanford, who has represented the state’s 1st District since 2013, ardently…
House Speaker Paul Ryan is pushing back on President Donald Trump’s announcement that he will impose hefty tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum, his spokeswoman said on Monday.
Donald Trump is beating Congressional Republicans in the polls. And that’s not necessarily great news for either of them.
If a congressional campaign won’t tell you the candidate’s schedule two weeks out from a tight special election, it’s a safe bet to go to an American Legion post (it doesn’t matter which one, any post will do) and simply wait. This is how I found myself at a Friday night fish fry at American Legion…
During a televised bipartisan meeting to discuss gun control proposals with members of Congress on Wednesday, President Donald Trump split with conventional Republican wisdom and suggested that guns be confiscated from individuals who could pose safety threats before due process is carried out…
When is Texas going to turn blue?
Most Americans have probably heard the parable of the blind men and the elephant. There are different versions of the story, but the basic idea is that a group of blind men encounter an elephant, and they each touch different parts of it. One man feels the tail, another the leg, another the ear,…
For much of December and early January, Democrats held a double digit lead in the RealClearPolitics average for the generic ballot–a poll that basically asks a national sample of voters which party they intend to vote for in the upcoming congressional elections. Today, that advantage is down to…
House Oversight Committee chairman Trey Gowdy announced Wednesday that he will not be seeking re-election and will instead be returning to work in the justice system.
Congress has just two weeks to come to a consensus on how to codify protections for the Dreamers—roughly 700,000 unauthorized immigrants who were brought to the United States as children—before government funding runs out February 8, or risk another shutdown scenario.
You’ve got to feel for Robert Mueller.
Donald Trump is historically unpopular. At the end of 2017, the three major polling aggregators—the Huffington Post Pollster, Real Clear Politics, and FiveThirtyEight—put his approval rating at 40.4, 40, and 37.9 percent respectively. According to FiveThirtyEight’s historical averages, this is the…
The first year of the Trump presidency was like the election that preceded it: unpredictable, norm-shattering, and disorienting. From the “American carnage” in his inaugural address to the kerfuffle over whether he referred to countries in Africa as “s—holes” or “s—houses,” Washington and the…
For 37 years, efforts to open the remote Alaskan tundra known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling for oil and natural gas got nowhere. It’s a barren, uninhabitable area that looks like the surface of an asteroid. But environmental groups and their Democratic allies treated it like a…
On Tuesday, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, jumped into the race for Arizona’s now-open Senate seat. Arpaio is, to put it mildly, controversial. He was recently pardoned by President Trump for contempt of court (the case related to racial profiling), he’s publicly questioned whether…
“My neighbors probably think I’m nuts,” says Cory Gardner. The fresh-faced senator is from tiny Yuma in northeastern Colorado, a 3,500-person town with “horrible cell service” to the point where he doesn’t get reception inside his house. So when the secretary of state calls, Gardner does what the…
In 1878, Chester Alan Arthur held one of the most powerful and lucrative patronage positions in the federal government: collector of the Port of New York. Thanks to the percentage system by which he was paid, Arthur took in about $50,000 per year at a time when the president earned half as much.…
The Senate's longest-serving Republican, Orrin Hatch of Utah, has announced that he will not seek reelection. Mitt Romney, as The Weekly Standard was first to confirm, intends to run for the seat. This news item provoked a characteristically fevered round of speculation and theorizing from the…
Sen. Orrin Hatch announced Tuesday that he would retire at the end of his term. Hatch’s retirement is interesting from a political perspective—former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, one of President Trump’s most vocal opponents within his party—may end up in the Senate. But it’s less…
Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican presidential nominee, is planning a Senate bid to replace retiring Sen. Orrin Hatch in 2018, according to three individuals close to the situation.
Republican senator Orrin Hatch of Utah announced he would not seek re-election to an eighth term in 2018 in a video Tuesday afternoon.
Shocked by Donald Trump’s election, Democrats adopted a strategy of resistance that’s simple and blunt: Anything Trump is for, they’re against. It’s turned out to be one of the least successful strategies a political party has ever pursued. Yet Democrats have stuck to it.
Correction, 12/21/2017: The piece originally said that "If you have children under the age of seventeen, while you’re getting an additional $1,000 per child, you’re losing their personal exemption, which was worth $4,050 per child. (So you’re still short by $2,050, per child.)" It has been amended…
The Tax Foundation on Monday said the final GOP tax bill would increase the national debt by $448 billion over the next decade, far less than the estimated $1.5 trillion in lost tax revenues under the bill.
President Trump told reporters Sunday evening that he is not considering firing special counsel Robert Mueller, whose investigation into Russian election meddling has been a constant irritant to the White House. At the same time, however, Trump and his allies are stepping up their campaign to…
Winning isn’t everything, nor is it the only thing for Democrats in special elections this year. Political observers had built up Tuesday’s Alabama Senate vote as yet another put-up-or-shut-up moment for Washington’s minority party, suggesting that a loss by Doug Jones there would be another…
Despite the best efforts of the president and the Republican National Committee, voters in Alabama didn’t elect a man credibly accused of sexual predation to the U.S. Senate.
A neighbor has parked his classic Jaguar in front of my apartment building for the last two months. Around it are a new BMW, a Mercedes, and two Audis.
Last week, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell inked a five-year contract that is expected to pay him up to about $200 million. This agreement has a little implication and a big implication.
There are plenty of understandable objections to the tax bill sailing through Congress. Some people think it will increase the deficit. Others cry foul that it is being rushed through without sufficient deliberation. And there are those who like big government and frankly oppose the idea of letting…
This is a day of mourning for Americans who believe that our politics are broken, who yearn to reach across the aisle, stop the partisan bickering, and eradicate the influence of money, Big Business, the military, corporate media, parochial interests, anti-tax activists, the NRA, the AMA, the CIA,…
Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., would be more likable were it not for the fact they’re craven opportunists.
There are, in essence, three things wrong with the federal tax code. They are, in descending order of importance, that corporations pay an absurdly high rate; that the code is a labyrinthine mess that turns the work of paying one’s taxes into a nightmare; and that marginal individual rates have in…
While the allegations of sexual misconduct and assault against Roy Moore have seriously cast the viability of his Senate candidacy in doubt, some Republicans are now calling for his expulsion if he still wins the Senate race in deep-red Alabama.
Attorney general Jeff Sessions has told political allies in Alabama he is not considering running for his old Senate seat as a write-in candidate in next month’s special election. That’s according to a spokeswoman for Sessions at the Department of Justice, Sarah Isgur Flores, who also tells me…
I was in New England for a few days last week and found myself at breakfast one morning with a group of Armenian academics, born in Lebanon but now settled permanently in and around Boston. By any measure, they were a distinguished group—historians, physicians, political scientists—and for them, of…
With each passing week, more and more congressional Republicans are announcing their retirements. Their reasons are varied. Jason Chaffetz of Utah quit Congress to take a job as a Fox News commentator. Several members not seeking reelection, like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem and Tennessee’s Marsha…
GOP Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia announced on Thursday that he will not seek re-election in 2018, citing the upcoming end of his tenure as chair of the House Judiciary Committee.
Republicans finally released a full working draft of their mammoth tax reform plan on Thursday. The 400-page Tax Cuts and Jobs Act doesn’t deliver the full Christmas list of tax priorities the White House requested in April, but it’s still a massive reorganization of the tax code that includes huge…
Rep. Jeb Hensarling, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told constituents in a Tuesday email that he will not seek re-election in 2018.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, Congress’s longest-serving member, is privately planning to retire at the end of his term, according to a report from the Atlantic on Friday.
Everyone’s talking about the civil war in the Republican party. It seems more like a surrender to us.
The House of Representatives narrowly approved a Senate budget proposal on Thursday, paving the way for the long-anticipated tax reform package Republicans hope to pass by the end of the year.
President Trump said Wednesday that the GOP has "great unity" despite a series of attacks over the past week from Republicans, two of whom are retiring after 2018.
Mark Herring, Virginia’s attorney general, wanted to run for governor this fall. But Terry McAuliffe, the current governor, thought otherwise. And his endorsement of lieutenant governor Ralph Northam for the Democratic nomination for governor sent a blunt message to Herring: forget it.
Boston
Scottsdale, Ariz.
Boston
Mark Herring, Virginia’s attorney general, wanted to run for governor this fall. But Terry McAuliffe, the current governor, thought otherwise. And his endorsement of lieutenant governor Ralph Northam for the Democratic nomination for governor sent a blunt message to Herring: forget it.
Scottsdale, Ariz.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford, a case in which University of Wisconsin professor William Whitford and a group of plaintiffs (all Democratic voters in the state) contend that the drawing up of Wisconsin’s state legislative districts was an…
Jennifer MacMillan is a tax preparer. Her business ebbs and flows with the season. In the months before April 15, she talks with clients and pores over the records of their financial lives. She deciphers statements from their brokerages, determines how much they can claim for their home offices,…
With the U.S. Supreme Court case, Gill vs. Whitford now concluded, we wished to look at how the Badger State found itself at the center of the judicial fight over partisan gerrymander. The following is Part 2 in a series relaying Wisconsin’s recent history in drawing its legislative district lines.
Jennifer MacMillan is a tax preparer. Her business ebbs and flows with the season. In the months before April 15, she talks with clients and pores over the records of their financial lives. She deciphers statements from their brokerages, determines how much they can claim for their home offices,…
The Republican party is divided into two groups these days. There’s the Trump faction and its rival, the elected leaders, GOP officials, and rank-and-file antagonists of Trump. The split is not ideological. For the most part, the two sides agree on cutting taxes, killing Obamacare, and building up…
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford, a case in which University of Wisconsin professor William Whitford and a group of plaintiffs (all Democratic voters in the state) contend that the drawing up of Wisconsin’s state legislative districts was an…
The last time Republicans advanced a serious plan to overhaul the tax code, Madonna had a No. 1 hit and Back to the Future had just been released on VHS. The new Republican tax plan harkens back to Ronald Reagan’s 1986 reform package, promising a future of stronger growth with less economic…
If more congressmen like Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., start heading for the exits, it will become harder for Republicans to defend their House majority next year in what figures to be a challenging election cycle.
President Trump and his Never Trump antagonists have found something they agree on. They both want to separate Trump from the Republican Party.
Stuart Stevens is something rare in politics: A campaign strategist who can write. Stevens has run just about every kind of campaign there is—he helped win elections for Bob Dole, Haley Barbour, and George W. Bush. He got the guy from The Love Boat into Congress and ran Mitt Romney’s failed 2012…
President Donald Trump is inching closer to abandoning the Republican party, even as the GOP is in the middle of an effort to remake itself in Trump’s image.
Congressional Republicans are attempting to pivot away from Obamacare repeal toward tax reform. But they continue to butt heads with a White House that’s unhappy with where they left the health care debate.
The chairwoman of the RNC responded to intra-party criticism of President Trump with a warning Monday.
West Virginia’s Democratic governor Jim Justice is expected to announce he is changing parties at a rally Thursday night with President Donald Trump, after Trump promised earlier in the day “a very big announcement” was to come during the event. The New York Times was first to report the news.
Leave sausage out of this. The ever-evolving Republican health care bills demonstrate how rancid legislative livermush gets made: a pudding of policy innards blended and baked with haste because the ingredients were up against their expiration date, or in this case the August recess. The concoction…
In the wake of Wednesday's shooting at a practice for the congressional baseball game, politicians and pundits—appropriately—have made much ado about renewing bipartisanship and mutual respect in politics. Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi made statements of unity that were roundly praised; Bernie Sanders…
Many Trump critics relished a recent Quinnipiac poll showing that President Trump's job approval had fallen to a new low, at a net -23 percent (34 percent approve, 57 percent disapprove).
Many Trump critics relished a recent Quinnipiac poll showing that President Trump's job approval had fallen to a new low, at a net -23 percent (34 percent approve, 57 percent disapprove).
Rep. Mike Kelly is frustrated by his Republican colleagues' resistance to President Trump.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner two months into President Trump's administration, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) reflected on the president's ascent to America's highest office, offering fresh insights from his vantage point as a libertarian-leaning representative smack in the heart of…
British prime minister Theresa May sweeps into Washington, D.C. Friday as the first foreign leader to meet with President Donald Trump. Just one week after his inauguration, Trump will welcome May at the White House and the two will hold a joint press conference before engaging in a "working lunch."
President Donald J. Trump gave an aggressive, combative inaugural speech today, heavy on the populism and economic nationalism that energized his campaign, and virtually devoid of the themes and principles that have defined the Republican party and the conservative movement at its heart.
Nearly seven years ago, moments before President Obama signed the national healthcare legislation into law, he declared, "When I sign this bill, all of the overheated rhetoric over reform will finally confront the reality of reform."
Top Republicans are pushing back on the potential appointment of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state due to the executive's ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin, throwing a potential Senate confirmation into doubt.
Lost in the momentous events of the recent election was the news that the citizens of the District of Columbia overwhelmingly approved a "state constitution" for the proposed state of New Columbia. This presages a renewed public campaign for D.C. statehood. One can easily imagine how much the…
Top Republican senators tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD they don't know what a Donald Trump administration will mean for Ukraine, but they plan on urging his team to support the country in its fight against Russian aggression regardless.
Donald Trump has done what Ronald Reagan did. He beat back a hostile press, smears by his opponent, outrage by foreign leaders, vast campaign spending by Wall Street and the wealthy one percent, and vows by actors and rock stars to leave the country if he was elected president.
Donald Trump has won the presidential election. He overcame the polls, the expectations, and the faith-based belief of the political establishment that he couldn't do it. As the results began to come in Tuesday night, as must-win states for Trump slid easily into his column, and as the Democrats'…
Republicans in tight races are closing out the election with ads blasting their Democratic opponents for supporting last summer's nuclear deal with Iran, while Democrats are remaining largely silent about the broadly unpopular agreement, according to media analysis provided to THE WEEKLY STANDARD…
Suppose, for a moment, that Donald Trump is elected president Tuesday evening. It seems unlikely, but is not impossible; and we've faced the apocalypse a couple of times in recent memory.
A savvy (if somewhat sadistic) friend writes:
Greenville, N.C.
Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, and Kelly Ayotte, and of all you desperate GOP candidates, threading the needle between a working class base in thrall to a demagogue and another fairly large bloc that detests him: Ike feels your pain. So does John Kennedy, and a very large group of the best and the…
Youngwood, Penn.
The presidential race continues to be the main focus of most pundits, but next week the country will vote for the entire House of Representatives and a third of the U.S. Senate. What is the state of play in these races? Over the course of this week, I'm going to outline where things stand, starting…
We've heard some weird political arguments this year. The strangest of them is raging in California, where else? There the hotly contested question revolves around an electoral initiative known as Proposition 60.
Patrick J. Buchanan, a fervent Donald Trump supporter, wrote recently and approvingly that Trump’s campaign embodies "the populist-nationalist right that is moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy."
Bill Kristol, editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, joined Jay Caruso and Neal Dewing of the Fifth Estate podcast to discuss the future of conservatism after the 2016 election, among other topics:
Donald Trump believes he has lost the presidential election. That's the only reasonable explanation for the Republican nominee's decision on Saturday in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to reiterate his claim that the more than 10 women who have accused Trump of past acts of sexual assault are liars.…
If there's a Republican on the ballot this year who deserves to be called the anti-Donald Trump, it might be Colorado's Mike Coffman. The Denver-area congressman is testing whether his strategy—running as the spiritual opposite of the GOP presidential nominee—won't pay off in a tough swing district.
Political scientists usually define a party as a team united around common principles for the purposes of winning elections.
Now that the presidential race is over, it's time to start thinking about what's going to happen to the Republican party next.
So you've got this buddy, Bob. You aren't as close as you used to be, but you grew up together and have a bunch of friends in common. And even though you're both busy with your lives, you get together every couple years to catch up.
It's going to get worse.
The emergence Friday of the disgusting Trump tape was a gift to the Republican party. It provided an occasion, at the very last minute, for the party to dump a fundamentally unworthy and radically unfit nominee. At the very least it provided an occasion for the party to separate itself radically…
There is one important sense in which Donald Trump "won" the debate on Sunday night: He did not implode. He wasn't "good," or attractive, or knowledgeable. He was coarse and whiny and unpleasant. He lied constantly. And he became the first presidential candidate in the history of our Republic to…
Bill Kristol uses a great quote from Churchill in the service of urging all of the various Republican/conservative factions to come together and remove Donald Trump from the ticket.
Former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has withdrawn her endorsement of Donald Trump.
Alabama representative Martha Roby is the latest Republican member of Congress to denounce her party's presidential nominee and call for him to step away from the presidential race. The three-term House member released a statement Saturday morning in response to the report that Donald Trump, in…
"We have to think of the future and not of the past. This also applies in a small way to our own affairs at home. There are many who would hold an inquest in the House of Commons on the conduct of the Governments—and of Parliaments, for they are in it, too—during the years which led up to this…
Stephen Hayes analyzed the problem correctly back in a piece in late July headlined, "Donald Trump Is Crazy, and So Is the GOP for Embracing Him." And he also prescribed the solution (short of persuading or forcing Trump to relinquish the nomination, which should also be explored):
Quinnipiac University released several swing state polls on Monday that were, on balance, good news for Hillary Clinton. She had leads in Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania—which suggests a fairly comfortable Electoral College win. Yet Donald Trump was shown with a five-percentage point lead…
House speaker Paul Ryan has publicly rooted for a Donald Trump victory this November, but there are still indications the two are on a different page on policy.
History will not end on November 8, 2016. The next day, the party that loses will pick itself up, dust itself off, and try again—in just 24 short months. That's how politics in a democratic republic works. While claiming that the Battle of Armageddon is upon us helps gin up turnout every two years,…
Why hasn't there been more disruption in Congress? Looking at the highly disruptive presidential primary campaign, some analysts are scratching their heads and asking that very question. In primary election after primary election, Republican congressional incumbents—such as Paul Ryan, John McCain,…
Matthew Continetti, writing at the Washington Free Beacon, examines the fate of traditional conservatives in state- and congressional-level primaries—as well as the long-term implications for the Republican party and conservative movement.
The low point for Marco Rubio came on March 15 when he was trounced in the Republican presidential primary in Florida, his home state, by Donald Trump, 46 to 27 percent. At that point, it appeared Rubio would finish his Senate career at the end of the year and leave politics behind.
Among the worst demographic groups for Donald Trump are college graduates and young people. A recent CNN poll, for instance, found that just 25 percent of voters under 30 say they're voting for the Republican nominee—far below the average of 38 percent GOP candidates have received with this group…
What I was trying emphasize with all the poll talk Wednesday is that this race is over. There is no coming back from where Trump is now. A candidate with high-favorables and a semi-competent campaign—say, Bob Dole—couldn't do it. A conspiracy-obsessed narcissist who is hated by 60 percent of the…
I received an email this morning from Michael Lieber, the former GOP city captain for Bay Village, Ohio, who resigned that post last month to protest Donald Trump's nomination as the presidential candidate for the Republican party. Because Lieber says concisely and eloquently what so many others…
I admire Tom Edsall a ton. Like Robert Putnam and Phil Longman, he's smart and honest and interesting and you don't have to be a fellow-traveler to profit from reading him.
A correspondent calls to my attention a remarkable op-ed in the Plain Dealer in Cleveland by Phil Van Treuren, a Republican member of the Amherst City Council in Lorain County, Ohio.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is "discrediting conservatism." That's what Bill Kristol said Friday on CNN about the New York businessman and reality-TV star.
A group of more than 70 former Republican officeholders and national committee staff and officers have penned a letter to RNC chair Reince Priebus urging him to stop spending party money to boost Trump's presidential campaign and instead focus on vulnerable House and Senate seats. Politico has the…
Who's in the mood for some good news?
Donald Trump is not going to quit the race. The Republican party is not going to push him off the ballot. He may have a brief surge in the polls at some point, because the first rule of politics is that all races tighten.
You should clear the decks and read Michael Barone's new piece in the American Interest. It's an examination of the future of the Republican party and I simply don't think you can have an informed view on the subject without drinking in Barone's thoughts first:
House speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin crushed his GOP primary opponent Paul Nehlen Tuesday by nearly 70 points. With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Ryan led Nehlen 84 percent to 16 percent.
Acknowledging the unrest of voters dissatisfied with the nation's economy and politics, Maine Republican senator Susan Collins announced Monday night that she won't vote for presidential nominee Donald Trump, citing the candidate's personal behavior as her primary reason for withholding her support.
This weekend's ABC News/Washington Post poll was very bad news for the Donald Trump campaign. Not only did it have Hillary Clinton with a comfortable, 50-42, lead over Trump in the head-to-head matchup, it provided more evidence that the Clinton campaign has done a better job corralling the core…
A former CIA counterterrorism officer and congressional staffer is launching a long-shot third-party bid for president, aiming to provide a conservative alternative to Republican nominee Donald Trump. The candidate's name is Evan McMullin and his campaign staff consists of operatives from the super…
As Ukraine fears a new Russian offensive "at any time," Republican lawmakers are remaining silent on the Trump campaign's reported role in scaling back calls for assisstance to the eastern European country in the Republican party platform.
A spate of polls taken over the weekend show Hillary Clinton enjoying a healthy bounce coming out of the Democratic National Convention. This is to be expected. What is unusual is that the Democratic party is substantially more unified than the Republican party. Indeed, the GOP electorate looks to…
Chuck Todd and Hallie Jackson of NBC News report that allies of Donald Trump are planning a "candidate intervention" to convince the Republican nominee for president that his campaign needs an overhaul.
My editorial in the latest WEEKLY STANDARD has generated several kind and thoughtful responses. Here's one that I think deserves wider readership (and which I reproduce here with the writer's permission):
Philadelphia
Philadelphia
Donald J. Trump is the presidential nominee of the Republican party. But that does not absolve every Republican office holder, donor, and activist from the responsibility of satisfying himself that it is right to support that nominee for president. There are, in my judgment, many reasons to doubt…
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
Cleveland
Cleveland
CLEVELAND — As Mike Pence accepted the Republican Party's nomination for vice president, I witnessed a supporter of Donald Trump and a Ted Cruz backer in a nearly chest-to-chest shouting match in the back of the convention floor, fighting over Cruz's non-endorsement.
From the Republican party platform: "Merit and hard work should determine advancement in our society, so we reject unfair preferences, quotas, and set-asides as forms of discrimination."
Cleveland
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.
Cleveland
Cleveland
Cleveland
CLEVELAND — A coalition of gadfly delegates will try to slow proceedings at the start of the Republican National Convention this afternoon. There is no robust push to stop Donald Trump from becoming the nominee (that was effectively quashed last week); instead, they will push to have a roll call…
Cleveland
Polls show that we are approaching our date with the November 8 election as a 50-50 America when it comes to choosing between a self-styled billionaire who might initiate a major war if some foreign leader insults him, and a woman whom the FBI has demonstrated has not even a passing acquaintance…
Call it déjà vu, call it old whine in new bottles, call it a tale thrice told, perhaps by an idiot; there are a lot of things one can call this Republican political season, but new is not one of them. Been-there-done-that might be more like it.
"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…
Whether Donald Trump emerges from the Republican convention as the GOP presidential nominee is an open question at the moment. I happen to believe that he will; but it is theoretically possible that he will not—and we might well see a brokered convention, or a fractured convention, in Cleveland…
NBC News's First Read has the list of those "in the hunt" to be Donald Trump's vice-presidential pick down to five names, the same number that Trump gave Monday morning to the Washington Post. Both lists include one name that would likely doom Trump's candidacy: retired Army general Michael Flynn.…
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…
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"…
This election cycle hasn't been kind to Republican big shots. Their favorite presidential candidates—Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio—fell short. Their opposition to Donald Trump was ineffectual, and their subsequent submission to him inglorious.
It's two weeks from the start of the GOP convention in Cleveland, a time in which a traditional party nominee would be consolidating his base of support and seeking to broaden his appeal. So, what's Donald Trump doing? Attacking the GOP-friendly Chamber of Commerce; boasting about the…
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported on the Republican National Committee's efforts to squelch the "Dump Trump" movement among delegates. The article ended with this ominous line:
Donald Trump suggested to a group of evangelical activists that America's leaders don't deserve prayer because they're "selling Christianity down the tubes." Trump also said it was more important that people pray "to get everybody out to vote" for him in the general election.
Republicans and their allies seem determined to try to blame their electoral woes on anything other than their own poor messaging, their failure to listen to Main Street voters (a fact that Donald Trump capitalized on) and their woefully deficient nomination process (which has now produced Trump as…
Donald Trump awakened this morning to a Wall Street Journal editorial, "The Third-Party Temptation," warning against the search for an independent candidate who "would give conservatives an honorable alternative to Trump-Hillary." The Journal in effect called on all concerned to (grudgingly) accept…
In a memo distributed to the press this morning, the Republican National Committee is fighting back against Donald Trump, who has criticized the political party for its system of selecting a presidential nominee.
Several Fox News employees have linked Ted Cruz to an anti-Donald Trump ad featuring the billionaire businessman's third wife, Melania, but it was produced by a political action committee that is in no way affiliated with the Texas senator's campaign.
Americans are a trusting people. We trust that our neighbors behave decently inside their own homes and therefore do not see fit to constantly check on them but rather let them live in peace; we trust that our fellow citizens will act with decency in their jobs so we feel comfortable buying a…
I had thought that Matt Lewis's new book about the conservative Republican future, Too Dumb To Fail, had a title that was accurate but a bit ahead of its time. Then, on the eve of the book's publication, Sarah Palin endorsed the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, with a rambling "speech" that…