Free Republic

BURLINGAME, Calif. — Donald J. Trump got a taste on Friday of what his next month of campaigning in California could be like. He was forced to exit his motorcade and walk through a field, climbing an embankment with Secret Service agents helping him, to avoid angry demonstrators on the street. “We went under a fence and through a fence, and oh, boy, it felt like I was crossing the border, actually,” Mr. Trump said when he finally made it to a ballroom to speak at California’s Republican Party convention. For the next 25 minutes, though, Mr. Trump spoke little...

A powerful array of the Republican Party’s largest financial backers remains deeply resistant to Donald J. Trump’s presidential candidacy, forming a wall of opposition that could make it exceedingly difficult for him to meet his goal of raising $1 billion before the November election. Interviews and emails with more than 50 of the Republican Party’s largest donors, or their representatives, revealed a measure of contempt and distrust toward their own party’s nominee that is unheard of in modern presidential politics. More than a dozen of the party’s most reliable individual contributors and wealthy families indicated that they would not give...

Ever since talk radio, cable news and the Internet emerged in the 1990s as potent political forces on the right, Republicans have used those media to attack their opponents through a now-familiar two-step. Political operatives would secretly place damaging information with friendly outlets like The Drudge Report and Fox News and with radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh — and then they would work to get the same information absorbed into the mainstream media. Candidates themselves would avoid being seen slinging mud, if possible, so as to avoid coming across as undignified or desperate.

Democrats could hardly believe their good fortune last month when it became clear that Hillary Clinton was headed to a general election showdown with Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump carried so much baggage and had insulted so many voting blocs that some Clinton supporters began to imagine a landslide. But early optimism that this would be an easy race is evaporating. In the corridors of Congress, on airplane shuttles between New York and Washington, at donor gatherings and on conference calls, anxiety is spreading through the Democratic Party that Mrs. Clinton is struggling to find her footing.

HOUSTON — J. Mark Metts, a 60-year-old partner at one of this city’s prestigious law firms, had never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate until 2016. Now he and some of his neighbors in the moneyed River Oaks enclave of Houston are about to oppose a Republican once again, to register their disapproval of President Trump. “With Congress not really standing up to Trump, this election is becoming a referendum,” Mr. Metts said, explaining why he would no longer support the re-election of Representative John Culberson, an eight-term Republican. Mr. Culberson is now running roughly even with the Democratic candidate,...

With elections fast approaching, Friday’s New York Times was packed with accusations of President Trump as a racist and hostile to immigrants, most intensely in the lead story by Michael Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis. The headline deck: “Trump Invoking ‘Crisis’ at Border As Voting Nears – Message For Midterms – A Presidential Theme Is Built Around a Fear of Immigrants.” Illegal immigrants, actually, but don’t count on the Times to ever clarify. President Trump’s closing argument is now clear: Build tent cities for migrants. End birthright citizenship. Fear the caravan. Send active-duty troops to the border. Refuse asylum. Immigration...

RICHMOND, Va. — The political tumult in Virginia widened Thursday as the State Senate’s top Republican faced an onslaught of questions about racist photographs and slurs in a college yearbook that he helped oversee, transforming the Capitol’s nearly week-old crisis into a bipartisan reckoning over personal conduct. The senator, Thomas K. Norment Jr., who is the majority leader, was the managing editor of the 1968 Virginia Military Institute yearbook, which included images of students in blackface.

They were the towheaded sisters who tagged along on campaigns, polite and smiling, as their father rose through Wyoming and then Washington politics to become one of the most powerful men in the country. “We were as close as sisters can be,” recalled Mary Cheney of her relationship with her older sister, Liz. But now, a feud between the two has spilled into public view, involving social media, an angry same-sex spouse, a high-profile election and a father who feels uncomfortably caught between his two children.

**SNIP** These Democrats worry that her uncompromising liberalism would alienate moderates in battleground states who are otherwise willing to oppose the president. Many fear Ms. Warren’s past claims of Native American ancestry would allow Mr. Trump to drown out her policy message with his attacks and slurs against her. They cite her professorial style and Harvard background to argue that she might struggle to connect with voters from more modest circumstances than hers, even though she grew up in a financially strained home in Oklahoma. And there are Democrats who, chastened by Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, believe that a...

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s erratic handling of the coronavirus outbreak, the worsening economy and a cascade of ominous public and private polling have Republicans increasingly nervous that they are at risk of losing the presidency and the Senate if Trump does not put the nation on a radically improved course. The scale of the GOP’s challenge has crystallized in the last week. With 26 million Americans now having filed for unemployment benefits, Trump’s standing in states that he carried in 2016 looks increasingly wobbly: New surveys show him trailing significantly in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, and he...

President Donald Trump arrives at Election Day on Tuesday toggling between confidence and exasperation, bravado and grievance, and marinating in frustration that he is trailing Joe Biden, whom he considers an unworthy opponent. “Man, it’s going to be embarrassing if I lose to this guy,” Trump has told advisers, a lament he has aired publicly as well. But in the off-camera version, Trump frequently exclaims, “This guy!” in reference to Biden, with a salty adjective separating the words. Trailing in most polls, Trump has careened through a marathon series of rallies in the past week, trying to tear down Biden...

Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is denying that the leader told GOP colleagues he would recommend former President Trump resign if he was impeached over the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, one of many Trump-bashing comments from top Republicans revealed in a forthcoming book.

In a leaked recording of Kevin McCarthy on a call with Liz Cheney and other House Republicans, the Minority Leader told Cheney that he would counsel Trump to resign back on January 10, 2021. “I think [impeachment resolutions] will pass, and it would be my recommendation you should resign,” McCarthy said he would tell Trump before further adding, “what he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it.” Liz Cheney had pressed McCarthy about whether Trump could possibly choose to resign on his own: “Is there any chance? Are you hearing that he might resign? Is...

New York Times reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin offered a recording on Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” allegedly of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy telling Rep. Liz Cheney that he would recommend to then-President Donald Trump that he should resign. Earlier today, a spokesman denied the report that McCarthy called for Trump’s resignation from the upcoming book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” authored by Burns and Martin. Partial transcript as follows: CHENEY: I guess there’s a question. When we’re talking about the 25th Amendment resolution, and you asked if,...

Rachel Maddow leaked a private phone call on her show on Thursday night of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy with Trump-hating lunatic Liz Cheney on January 10, 2021. On January 10, 2021, Kevin McCarthy spoke with several GOP House leaders including Liz Cheney who was third-in-line in the House Republican Caucus at that time. During the call, McCarthy told Liz Cheney that he would counsel President Trump Trump to resign. From the call: Kevin McCarthy: “I think [impeachment resolutions] will pass, and it would be my recommendation you (President Trump) should resign… What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend...

Republican Rep. Liz Cheney is denying she leaked a tape of a conversation with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in which he says he'll push former President Donald Trump to resign from office after the January 6 Capitol attack. 'The select committee has asked Kevin McCarthy to speak with us about these events but he has so far declined. Representative Cheney did not record or leak the tape and does not know how the reporters got it,' Cheney's spokesperson said, according to CNN. After denying he made such comments, audio of a conversation between Cheney, then the No. 3 House...

MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on Friday reacted to alleged audio of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) telling Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) that he would recommend then-President Donald Trump resign over the January 6 Capitol riot. Scarborough said McCarthy, who has denied saying he would recommend Trump resign, just never learned that “you can’t bow and scrape to Donald Trump enough” because “he will end up throwing you under the bus at the end no matter what.”

Rachel Maddow leaked the private phone call on her show on Thursday night of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy with Trump-hating lunatic Liz Cheney on January 10, 2021. During the call, McCarthy told Liz Cheney that he would counsel President Trump Trump to resign. This is exactly what the book reported. Liz Cheney released the call to the authors. And now Kevin McCarthy was caught in a lie. From the call: Kevin McCarthy: “I think [impeachment resolutions] will pass, and it would be my recommendation you (President Trump) should resign… What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and...

Former VP Dick Cheney called Trump "a maniac," per a new book by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. The elder Cheney backed his daughter Liz in her vote for Trump's second impeachment, the book said.

As senators gathered in a secure location amid the riot at the Capitol on January 6, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was apoplectic, even complaining to a Capitol Police officer that the security force "let people breach the Capitol." That's according to reporting included in "This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future," a forthcoming book from the New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns.