Ted Cruz has a problem. Since he launched his campaign for president at Liberty University more than a year ago, he has aimed to consolidate the right. He has largely succeeded. He has vanquished Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, and Carly Fiorina, and now he enjoys the overwhelming support of movement conservatives. His problem ...
Bipartisanship has become so rare in Washington that pundits risk forgetting how lousy it can be. In 1964, Democrats and Republicans came together to overwhelmingly pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which authorized Lyndon Johnson to use force in Vietnam. The Defense of Marriage Act, which in 1996 made gay marriage illegal under federal law, enjoyed broad bipartisan support too. …
Paul Ryan “thinks only he can help House Republicans maintain an independent brand if Trump is the nominee.” That’s what a Republican insider told me yesterday in an illuminating conversation about the GOP speaker’s announcement that he won’t accept his party’s presidential nomination. …
Hillary Clinton will soon face the strangest general-election campaign in modern American history. In a conventional sense, it’s the easiest. That’s because her likely opponent, Donald Trump, is almost certainly too unpopular to win. A full two-thirds of Americans view him unfavorably. To be sure, Clinton’s unfavorability rating is high as well: It’s around 50 percent. The difference is that she retains the support of ...
When pundits claim Donald Trump can win the presidency, they often evoke a fabled political species: “Reagan Democrats.” “Are Reagan Democrats becoming Trump Democrats?” wondered CNN commentator Jeffrey Lord last fall in The American Spectator. “I think there’s a lot of Reagan Democrats waiting to vote for him,” declared MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in January. This almost certainly isn’t true. The more you examine it, the ...
Right after the attacks in Brussels on Tuesday, Donald Trump did something bizarre. He spoke the truth. Appearing on Fox and Friends, the GOP presidential frontrunner declared that, “This all happened because frankly there is no assimilation.” …
What will happen to American politics if, as now appears likely, the Republican Party nominates Donald Trump? Here’s one bet: It will get more violent. …
Marco Rubio would be a terrible president. His tax proposals make George W. Bush look fiscally prudent. He acts as if America can use sanctions, war, or the threat of war to bludgeon its adversaries into submission despite the devastating failure of that approach since 9/11. He has been dishonest and gutless on immigration. He has flirted with climate-change denial even though his hometown now ...
Last Sunday, Marco Rubio voiced the conventional wisdom that guides much horse-race commentary about the GOP campaign: “Part of the dynamic up to this point,” Rubio declared, “is Donald [Trump] has been, you know, in the mid 30s to low 30s, high 20s, in most polls, and then you have 70 percent of the Republican electorate that says, ‘We’re not voting for him.’ But they’re ...
If Jeb Bush hadn’t run for president, Donald Trump would have had to invent him. The former Florida governor was Trump’s perfect foil. First, because Jeb was prim, proper, and incapable of expressing the rage—especially towards Muslims and Mexicans—that many Republicans currently feel. Second, because Jeb’s candidacy represented the reductio ad absurdum of the campaign finance corruption that Trump, alone among GOP candidates, calls out. ...