Free Republic

If you're like me, you've been following this year's primary season with a mixture of amusement and consternation. While most of the choices this year were unpalatable (so what's new?), the really troublesome aspect came from the amount of sheer acrimony that seems to have permeated the race this time around. Some of it has to do with the large number of Republicans running – we started with 17 before slowly whittling them away – which contributed to a seemingly necessary amount of fragmented loyalties among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. However, much of this acrimony arose due to the rise...

Presidential candidate Donald Trump, after some delay, has named a few of his foreign policy advisers. One says he hopes that if Trump is elected, cooler heads will persuade him not to carry through on some of his promises. Walid Phares is a writer, Fox News commentator and onetime national security adviser to 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Although scores of GOP foreign policy specialists wrote an open letter denouncing various Trump views as "unmoored in principle," "a recipe for economic disaster," "inexusable," or reflecting "the sentiment of a racketeer," Phares decided he could help the candidate. "It is...

Meet Curly Haugland, former chairman of the North Dakota Republican party and current Republican national committeeman. Haugland is one of just 112 delegates who will arrive unbound to this summer’s Republican convention in Cleveland, free to cast a vote for any candidate he chooses on a first ballot because North Dakota does not hold a primary or caucus. That makes him a particularly valuable asset to the still-dueling presidential campaigns...

LONDON — He incensed Paris and London by saying that some of their neighborhoods were so overrun with radicals that the police were too scared to enter. He raised Scottish tempers by threatening to pull the plug on his investments there, including his luxury golf courses, if British politicians barred him from entering Britain. Now Donald J. Trump has upset the already beleaguered people of Belgium, calling its capital, Brussels, “a hellhole.” Asked by the Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo about the feasibility of his proposal to bar foreign Muslims from entering the United States, Mr. Trump argued that...

Washington, D.C. — It was billed as an attempt to win new supporters from the ranks of congressional Republicans. But after Donald Trump convened a handful of lawmakers and a number of party luminaries for lunch on Monday, the sole attendee not already backing Trump’s candidacy emerged as uncommitted as he’d gone in. Held in D.C.’s high-powered Jones Day law firm, the confab was supposed to be a congressional outreach effort, but only one attendee — Senator Tom Cotton — was neutral on Trump’s candidacy. The others — including Senator Jeff Sessions and Representatives Chris Collins, Scott DesJarlais, Renee Ellmers,...

Sen. Ted Cruz landed an immediate blow on GOP presidential rival Donald Trump, who spoke before him Monday at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference, for how the front-runner referred to the Palestinian people. "Let me say at the outset, perhaps to the surprise of the previous speaker, Palestine has not existed since 1948," Cruz said to lead off his speech in Washington. Trump repeatedly referred to the Palestinian people as "Palestine" during his remarks just minutes before Cruz. Neither the United States nor Israel recognizes Palestine as a country...

The aversion to Donald Trump is so strong among Utah Mormons that if the Republican frontrunner secures the party’s presidential nomination, it could produce a general election outcome that has not happened in half a century: the state could go blue. “The Bible says if you’ve got a wicked leader, the nation suffers,” said Chris Herrod, a former Utah state representative and a Utah campaign coordinator for Ted Cruz. “I’m not saying Donald Trump is wicked, but for most Utahns, the moral character of a leader makes a big difference.” At the state’s high-stakes GOP caucuses on Tuesday, political experts...