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Donald Trump Tag

Posted by Mike LaChance on January 24, 2016 108 Comments
The next Republican debate is coming up this Thursday and will be hosted by FOX News. Based on their back and forth the last time FOX News hosted, Donald Trump asked the network to take Megyn Kelly off the moderator desk. Unfortunately for Trump, the network is doing no such thing. USA Today reports:
Fox to Trump: Megyn Kelly will be a debate moderator Fox News has a message for Donald Trump: Megyn Kelly will be a moderator for next week's Republican debate, despite the businessman's call for her removal.

Posted by New Neo on January 23, 2016 39 Comments
A recent Politico article talks about how Trump might defeat Clinton. The article's lede focuses on potential support among black voters:
If Donald Trump becomes the next president of the United States, there will be plenty of surprises along the way. One of the biggest will be the help he gets from black voters. According to Republican pollsters and Trump’s allies, the GOP poll-leader — who has been dogged by accusations of racism, most recently for tweeting out a chart that exaggerated the share of murders committed by blacks — is poised to out-perform with this demographic group in a general-election matchup with Hillary Clinton.
However, although it quotes pollsters, the article doesn't link to any actual polls that show Trump's support from black voters. Nor do those pollsters mention any poll numbers that would support the contention that black voters support Trump.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 22, 2016 164 Comments
Speaking to a crowd in Las Vegas Thursday night, Donald Trump said he'd be part of the establishment if elected; a bit odd considering he's spent the majority of his campaign portraying himself as the ultimate political outsider. But standard rules don't apply this election cycle. Apparently. The abbreviated version of Trump's remarks:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 22, 2016 122 Comments
National Review has a special issue Against Donald Trump, with columns by 22 people, most of whom are familiar conservative writers and media personalities. I skimmed a few of the columns and they make the case persuasively that Trump is not a conservative. You know the arguments already. He's for activist big government, a populist with no conservative ideological compass, and is not what he purports to be even on his core issue of immigration (where he may be to the left of Marco Rubio in reality). National Review Conservatives Against Trump Cover

Posted by Jonathan Levin on January 22, 2016 50 Comments
The Republican emeritus leadership seems to be breaking for Donald Trump over Ted Cruz as the lesser of two evils.  They reason that Trump is less extreme, less likely to cause collateral damage to Republicans in Congressional and state races, and more electable. They're also probably wrong, at least about the electability question.  Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com writes:
It’s hard to say exactly how well (or poorly) Trump might fare as the Republican nominee. Partisanship is strong enough in the U.S. that even some of his most ardent detractors in the GOP would come around to support him were he the Republican candidate. Trump has some cunning political instincts, and might not hesitate to shift back to the center if he won the GOP nomination. A recession or a terror attack later this year could work in his favor. But Trump would start at a disadvantage: Most Americans just really don’t like the guy.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 21, 2016 72 Comments
Anyone who a year ago picked Donald Trump and Ted Cruz to be the two leading Republican candidates heading into the Iowa Caucuses either (i) is a liar, or (ii) should invest heavily in the lottery because they are beyond lucky. Certainly, the powers that be in the Republican Party were not expecting it. Here's what a Fox News poll looked like in January 2015: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/interactive/2015/01/29/fox-news-poll-voters-believe-romney-clinton-remain-top-picks-for-2016-believe/ The pollster didn't even bother to ask about Trump. And Cruz was in low single digits. Now Trump is on top in the national polls and Cruz is in second place. In Iowa, three polls released today show Cruz leading, a dead heat, and Trump leading.

Posted by Jonathan Levin on January 20, 2016 189 Comments
Bob Dole, who has endorsed Jeb Bush, has weighed in on the budding Ted Cruz v. Donald Trump contest in the early GOP primaries, and backed Trump in the strongest terms.  According to the New York Times, Dole warned of "cataclysmic,” and “wholesale losses” if Cruz is nominated.

Dole's logic is viewing the Trump/Cruz contest explicitly in terms of what is better for the Republican Party establishment:

“I question his allegiance to the party,” Mr. Dole said of Mr. Cruz. “I don’t know how often you’ve heard him say the word ‘Republican’ — not very often.” Instead, Mr. Cruz uses the word “conservative,” Mr. Dole said, before offering up a different word for Mr. Cruz: “extremist.” . . .

The remarks by Mr. Dole reflect wider unease with Mr. Cruz among members of the Republican establishment, but few leading members of the party have been as candid and cutting.

Dole added that Cruz has falsely “convinced the Iowa voters that he’s kind of a mainstream conservative.”

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 20, 2016 73 Comments
Donald Trump recently stated that he wanted Apple manufacturing back to the U.S.:
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he will push for companies including Apple Inc. to bring manufacturing back to the United States. "Make America great again," Trump said in a speech at Liberty University in Virginia. "We’re going to get things coming. We’re gonna get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries.”
Some are interpreting his words as saying he would use the power of government to force Apple back, others put a more benign spin on it, that he would develop policies to encourage Apple. Regardless, it is an empty promise. When I heard about the statement, I recalled an article from a few years ago making the case that the scale of what is needed is so enormous, that the U.S. does not have the engineering or manufacturing capacity, much less the labor force willing to work under conditions necessary. I don't know if this NY Times article is the one I recalled, but it made the point back in 2012, How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 19, 2016 150 Comments
Seems like only yesterday I was watching Sarah Palin stump for Ted Cruz in the Texas Senate Runoff race. My how times have changed. Before a huge crowd gathered in the smoldering July heat of The Woodlands, Texas, alongside then Senator Jim DeMint, Palin said:
But the good news is, there is nothing wrong with America that a good ol' fashioned election can't fix. Ted [Cruz] is a proven, common sense, Constitutional conservative. He's a fighter and he will bring new leadership to the United States Senate. He will shrink government, he will be putting it back on the side of the people and he will defend the United States Constitution. Ted Cruz represents the positive change that we need.
In addition to Gov. Palin, Cruz also garnered endorsements from Senator Rand Paul, Senator Pat Toomey, Senator Jim DeMint, RedState, and Sean Hannity in 2012.

Posted by New Neo on January 19, 2016 94 Comments
Professor Jacobson has opined on the question of whether Ted Cruz qualifies to be president as a "natural born citizen." The short answer is: he definitely does. However, as Professor Jacobson also indicated, that hasn't stopped Trump from attempting to foster doubts in voters’ minds about it. You can see the results in the increased amount of chatter about the issue---which is likely to have been exactly what Trump wanted when he put forward his oh-so-helpful suggestion that Ted Cruz could and should settle the "natural born citizen" question by going to federal court and seeking a declaratory judgment on the matter. So, why doesn't Cruz do what Trump has suggested, and put it to rest? The reason is that it is almost certain that Cruz couldn't get a court to rule on the issue. J. Christian Adams, who was in the Justice Department under George W. Bush, explains why:

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on January 18, 2016 10 Comments
Despite his and his team's efforts, Rand Paul's presidential campaign has simply not taken off.  The global unrest and Islamic terrorist threat work against him in this cycle, and he's clearly shaken by how little support he has managed to acquire.  In addition to refusing to appear in the undercard debate, Rand is now taking a stand against Donald Trump. In an interview on The Alan Colmes Show, he vowed to spend his "every waking hour" to "try to stop Donald Trump." The Hill reports:
Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul on Thursday pleged to spend "every waking hour" trying to keep rival Donald Trump from winning the GOP nomination. "Donald Trump takes us in the wrong direction. He would be a disaster. We’ll be slaughtered in a landslide," Paul said in an interview on the Alan Colmes radio show, as first reported by BuzzFeed. "That’s why my every waking hour is to try to stop Donald Trump from being our nominee." "I think we, the Republican Party, becomes the party of angry people that insinuate that most immigrants are drug dealers or rapists, that’s a terrible direction for our party," he said.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 17, 2016 142 Comments
I was a guest on Caffeinated Thoughts Radio on 93.3 FM in Iowa on Saturday, January 16, 2016. (Full audio at bottom of post.) The topic was Ted Cruz and the "natural born Citizen" controversy. For my prior analysis, which is referred to in the radio discussion, see my September 3, 2013 post, natural born Citizens: Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz. In the past 2.5 years, many people have sent me complaints and supposed analyses of things I missed; I track those down and not a one has persuaded me one iota that my analysis was wrong. As I said in that post:
I also am not trying to “win” the argument. I have no intention (hah!) of getting into the endless argument streams this topic engenders, where for every answer there is a new obscure historical reference or convoluted theory until someone gives up. There are some things you just can’t “win” on the internet, and this is one of them.
Yet it sickens me the way Donald Trump and Ann Coulter have demagogued the issue. They may be successful in creating doubts in voters' minds; that's the nature of propaganda, it sometimes works. Here are excerpts from my interview; the full audio is at the bottom of the post:

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on January 16, 2016 79 Comments
Following the GOP debate, Professor Jacobson noted that it looks like a two person race between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, and not only is this view becoming a consensus but apparently Trump thinks so, too. Trump has taken to Twitter to rant and rave against Cruz. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/688327093214662657

Posted by Mike LaChance on January 16, 2016 24 Comments
The new Michael Bay film "13 Hours" is out now and is by all accounts, an accurate portrayal of the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya. In a move that is as funny as it is politically savvy, Donald Trump is making sure the voters of Iowa get a chance to see it. The Des Moines Register reports:
Trump rents Iowa theater to show Benghazi movie Donald Trump has rented space at an Urbandale movie theater and will give Iowans free tickets to a showing of the Benghazi movie that critics of Hillary Clinton have been eagerly awaiting. “Mr. Trump would like all Americans to know the truth about what happened at Benghazi,” the GOP presidential candidate’s Iowa co-chair Tana Goertz said Thursday night.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 15, 2016 183 Comments
The exchange between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump on "NY values" was one of the highlights of last night's debate. While Cruz clearly was referring to liberalism, he used a phrase that left him open to Trump's counterattack invoking 9/11: The media is thrilled with Trump's response. Of course, much of that media is in or from NY City. I expressed last night that I wasn't sure that the issue would play in Trump's favor outside NY. I was born in NYC, spent my early childhood there, grew up in and returned to the NYC suburbs after law school until moving to Rhode Island in 1993. And since 2008 have lived (originally part time now full time) in Ithaca. I understand what Cruz was referring to. And it has nothing to do with knocking the heroism of NY police and firemen, or how New Yorkers reacted under attack. It has everything to do with political, economic and social outlooks which are not accepted in the Republican Party in general much less among conservatives. The Cruz campaign apparently thinks this is a fight it needs to have, via Washington Examiner:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 14, 2016 137 Comments

Big Picture

Tonight's GOP debate was Ted Cruz's night. He went right after Donald Trump multiple times, but in a way that came across as forceful and informed, but not nasty. He also fended off a pretty vigorous attack from Marco Rubio. His strongest points came early and against Trump, when the audience would be the largest. Trump was runner-up. He had a good moment on Cruz's slam on "NY Values," but I'm not sure how defending NY values plays outside NY. His performance will confirm pre-existing views of him. Rubio had an okay night, not great, not horrible. Maneuvered the immigration issue into one of national security -- in other words Gang of 8 was then, this is now. Landed some punches on Cruz at the end. Christie may have raised his profile as the acceptable establishment candidate, as Jeb again failed to impress, and Kasich was Kasich. At least Christie showed some fight. Biggest loser -- Ben Carson. Didn't seem to be in the game at many levels.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 12, 2016 63 Comments
Joining Chris Matthews' Hardball on MSNBC Monday night, Republican strategist Liz Mair sparred with columnist and purveyor of outrage, Ann Coulter, over Donald Trump's candidacy. Coulter, Mitt Romney fan girl and Chris Christie acolyte has been a champion of Trump's candidacy since he announced. Mair, who runs the PAC Trump Card LLC, the "guerrilla effort" to thwart Donald Trump's candidacy, is leading the charge to "Make America Awesome (America is Already Great!)." The result? A smackdown you won't want to miss:
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