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Politico had an unusual homework assignment for a number of futurists, political analysts, and prognosticators. It was to put on their Nostradamus caps to predict what, if any, Black Swan events could affect the 2024 presidential election. The results ranged from the somewhat reasonable to the downright bizarre as you can see in Friday's "The Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events That Could Throw 2024 Into Turmoil."One of the assignees was the melodramatic Marquette University political science professor, Julia Azari, who rather than write a simple prediction interpreted her job as writing a novel starting with the very Hemingwayisque title of...

President Donald Trump took his attacks on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to a new level Wednesday, as a super PAC linked to the 76-year-old accused his would-be rival of ethics violations tied to what it calls DeSantis’ “shadow presidential campaign.” A draft of the 15-page letter by Make America Great Again Inc. calls on the Florida Commission on Ethics to investigate DeSantis, alleging that the 44-year-old has violated a slew of state statutes as well as federal campaign finance laws. The complaint refers to DeSantis as a “de facto candidate for president” and claims that ​the governor is “leveraging his...

Columbus, Indiana -- Outside an Indiana ice cream shop today, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz stepped off his campaign bus and was almost immediately confronted by an angry Donald Trump supporter. Kathy Hiel questioned Cruz about the delegate process, accusing him of rigging the system. The contentious exchange ended with Hiel saying Cruz isn't a natural-born citizen and Cruz saying that if Trump had been confronted by a voter challenging him, the Trump campaign would have threatened the voter with violence.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on campaign 2016 (all times Eastern): 8:15 a.m. Donald Trump says he believes transgender people should be able to use whichever bathroom they choose. Speaking at a town hall event on NBC's "Today" Thursday, Trump said North Carolina's so-called "bathroom law," which directs transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificates, has caused unnecessary strife.

In an interview with the Today show, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he “absolutely” wants to change the Republican party’s current pro-life platform to promote abortions in cases of rape or incest. The comment is the latest in a long line of comments from Trump upsetting pro-life voters — including multiple remarks praising the Planned Parenthood abortion business, saying abortion laws should not be changed and saying women should be punished for having abortions and flip-flopping hours later. ….. Below is the full text of the current pro-life platform in the Republican Party: THE SANCTITY AND DIGNITY OF HUMAN...

Donald Trump might have rolled to 60 percent of the Republican vote in New York Tuesday night, but he came in a distant third in the big scheme of things nonetheless. Keep in mind, this is the candidate and the campaign that constantly pout about one-man one-vote and popular vote totals. They threaten to both call the lawyers about this concept and to riot in Cleveland over this. Thus, by Trump's own standards, Trump got thrashed in New York. Both Hillary and Bernie Sanders destroyed Trump in raw vote totals. I'm not saying Trump didn't win the N.Y. Republican primary...

Roger Stone loves resilience. It's why the former body builder had Richard Nixon's face tattooed on his broad back. "It's there to remind me that in life, when things don't go your way, you get back in the game," Stone said in an interview with CNN. "Nixon said, 'A man is not finished when he's defeated, he's only finished when he quits.'" When it comes to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential bid, things did not initially go Stone's way. He had one vision for the campaign; Trump had another. But after leaving in August, Stone is back, in a manner of...

7/11, 9/11, it’s all the same to Donald Trump. The billionaire — who never visited the Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum in lower Manhattan until months after his campaign kicked off —seemed to have briefly forgotten the date the terrorist attack happened. “I wrote this out, and it’s very close to my heart,” he said at the First Niagara Center on Monday night during the rally. “Because I was down there and I watched our police and our firemen down at 7/11, down at the World Trade Center right after it came down. And I saw the greatest people I’ve...

It’s not often that a Republican presidential primary in New York matters. This year it does. It’s a time for choosing, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan. The choice is between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, though John Kasich is on the ballot too. The real race to the nomination has been Trump v. Cruz for at least several weeks and it is likely to remain that way. Faced with that choice, it’s easy. Legal Insurrection started in October 2008 in anticipation of the Obama presidency. We were part of the Tea Party movement (though aligned with no specific group) since the...

The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump will win the New York primary with well over 50 percent and win nearly all of the Empire State’s 95 delegates this upcoming Tuesday. While this is certainly a possibility, there is also a chance, and not a far-fetched one that Trump will finish with under 50 percent of the vote. If that happens, it will signal a seismic shift in the race for the Republican nomination. A look at recent polling makes it seem almost certain that Trump will finish with over 50 percent of the vote. The current New York Real...

Via Red State, not a huge deal but worth flagging in case there’s another poll this weekend showing his numbers dipping a bit in New York on the eve of the primary. That would suggest a trend, and that would be a big deal given what’s at stake. To be clear: Trump’s going to romp in NY on Tuesday night, winning by 25 points or better, and will pick up something like 75 delegates even in a worst-case scenario. But since his path to 1,237 is so difficult, it matters a lot whether he ends up with 75 in New...

Shortly after he claimed to be a “unifier” during his Super Tuesday press conference, Donald Trump was at it again, lambasting “so-called conservatives” who don’t share his liberal position on Planned Parenthood, continuing to insist he applauds the group because it allegedly “does a lot of good of good things” for women’s health. Similar logic applies to his position on ObamaCare. He loves the coercive freedom- and job-killing individual mandate, which is the heart of ObamaCare, because he doesn’t want to see bodies in the street, a classic liberal rhetorical scare tactic. Planned Parenthood may do the occasional mammogram referral,...

After Ted Cruz won every delegate up for grabs at the Colorado Republican convention, Donald Trump began complaining that the process at such conventions is unfair. His claim is that party insiders should not be making these choices, but rather that the power should be vested with the voters. As a consequence, Cruz is “stealing" delegates from Trump, and in so doing defying the will of the voters. Trump's accusations are specious and disingenuous. The process that has been playing out is perfectly legitimate. Trump's real problem is that he is being outhustled by the Cruz campaign. The Republican nomination...

When conservatives think about what they most hate about the left, several factors come to mind: their racist appeals, their whining social justice warrior nonsense, their distinct willingness to attack conservative women, their consistent stream of lies, their perversion of buzzwords.

It's one thing to be upset with the so-called Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Barack Obama and his destructive policies, but it's another for a GOP presidential candidate to exploit that anger illegitimately against a fellow anti-establishment candidate. Many of us have been critical of the GOP leadership for opposing conservatives in GOP primaries, not backing conservatives in office trying to do the right thing, always advising that Republicans dilute their message to attract independent voters and not sufficiently recognizing the threat President Obama represents to this nation and opposing his agenda. From the beginning, grass-roots conservatives,...

In “Through the Looking Glass,” the Queen tells Alice: “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” She might have choked on her grits, however, at the thought of Ted Cruz becoming the Republican nominee. Until a few weeks ago he was low in the polls and loathed by the GOP establishment. Sen. Lindsey Graham joked about murdering him. But now, the impossible has happened: Cruz’s unlikely emergence as the favorite to beat Donald Trump. His transformative win in Wisconsin. And even his unthinkable endorsement by Graham. Can Ted believe this is happening? And does he —...

The state will host what’s likely to be the contest's decisive primary in June, but the campaigns are already marshaling their forces. Ted Cruz lands in California on Monday for two rallies in a state where voters won’t head to the polls for nearly 60 days, but the West Coast swing is anything but a diversion. It’s preparation for the campaign’s endgame. If Cruz is to stop Donald Trump short of 1,237 delegates, the final, decisive stand will almost certainly come in California. And that realization has spurred a behind-the-scenes arms race, with Cruz, Trump, John Kasich and their allies...

You see, contrary to the impression that many people have been left with over the past couple of days, Colorado’s traditional caucus-night poll had never been a binding, primary-like election. That’s not how it worked. It was a simple straw-poll — nothing more, nothing less. It wasn’t the process used to distribute delegates to the candidates. The nomination procedure in this state has been driven by the election of representatives for over a hundred years (except for from 1992 to 2002). It starts with grassroots caucus attendees from local precincts voting on congressional-district delegates (their neighbors) to represent them, and...

Despite what you may have heard or read, Donald Trump has never filed for bankruptcy. His companies have, four times, but Donald Trump never has.  The purpose of corporations is for investors to put a limited amount of capital at risk in exchange for the opportunity to earn money in any one of a myriad of legal ways. Investor use the corporate structure to ensure that if their bets go south, the most they can lose is the capital they invested in the first place. Corporate bankruptcy laws can give a company an opportunity to restructure its business in a...

Donald Trump recalls with chagrin that he supported Barack Obama for president in 2008, but says he now realizes that those moving hope-and-change speeches were nothing more than rhetoric. "I thought he was a positive person, always," Trump said of candidate Obama. "I thought he'd be like a cheerleader for the country. I think he is creating a class warfare that is a very dangerous thing for the country." And the country "is blowing up" because it's so deeply divided, he said. "I've never seen this country in this kind of trouble before, and a true leader wouldn't let that...