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Despite his big win in New York on Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has had a pretty bad week. But will it matter? It should -- and just might. During an NBC "Today" show town hall Thursday, the host read a question from Twitter concerning Trump's views on LGBT issues and how he plans to be inclusive as president. "Speak about North Carolina bathroom law in particular." Trump responded: "I had a feeling that question was going to come up, I will tell you. Well, look, North Carolina did something that was very strong, and they're paying a big...

Donald Trump runs The Trump Organization, his real estate company that dabbled in failed meat, water, and education industries, among others. His campaign for president, on the other hand, has been anything but organized. The way heÂ’s run his campaign has the appearance of a wealthy man who decided heÂ’d run for president on a lark, then woke up to find himself in the lead with no clue how to handle it or finish the job. In many ways the Trump campaign is The Mouse That Roared. For those of you who donÂ’t know, The Mouse That Roared is a...

If the Republican primary process were designed to produce an exactly proportional result based on voters' choice rather than a winner, the party would have been doomed to a contested convention almost from the start. Donald Trump, who has failed more than any other GOP presidential front-runner in recent history to unite the party behind him, would have no chance of securing the nomination, for he has won only 37 percent of primary votes so far. Keep this in mind as Trump gripes about how his opponent Ted Cruz secured all 37 delegates at the Colorado convention last weekend. The...

The Associated Press is out with new polling pitting Democrat Hillary Clinton against Republican Donald Trump. Clinton beats Trump in every category among the general electorate, including on the questions of who is best to create jobs, who is better on international trade and who can "Make America Great Again," which of course is Trump's campaign slogan. First, the criteria:

So I asked Bitey the Dog about her views on NATO, and she responded by growling and attacking my sock. In doing so, she offered a more comprehensive, insightful, and sane commentary on this vital alliance than the putative Republican frontrunner. Yes, it’s been a bad couple weeks for Donald Trump. Let’s review: · His skeevy attacks on Ted Cruz’s wife confirmed his status, in the eyes of women, as America’s nightmare first husband. · His transparent plant of the bizarre “Ted Cruz, Sex God” story in his pal’s pseudo-paper offended anyone who doesn’t require a drool bib. · He...

Donald Trump has gotten a lot of criticism from both sides of the abortion debate for his five different positions on abortion in three days. Those criticisms are legitimate because it shows Trump either doesn’t know what he’s talking about, is faking his position on abortion to appease his supporters, or has no real position at all. But that’s not stopped Maureen Dowd with The New York Times from asking one of craziest questions of the political cycle. Given his draconian comment, sending women back to back alleys, I had to ask: When he was a swinging bachelor in Manhattan,...

Why does Donald Trump assert that he is pro-life? It’s easy to understand that if he is running as a conservative for the GOP nomination this checked-box would be necessary to survive the primary process. He is running against two other candidates who have clear credentials on the matter, and if he were to be found to still be pro-abortion it would doom his chances of securing the nomination. It might also be because he is ashamed of the pro-abortion views he has held for most of his sixty-nine years on the planet. It might be that he is filled...

On the heels of a Marquette University poll showing Sen. Ted Cruz taking a 10-point lead in Wisconsin, Donald Trump once again whined on Wednesday that the “establishment” is trying to take the nomination away from him, citing the Louisiana delegate allocation which gave Cruz more delegates even though Trump got more votes. as Exhibit A. As Breitbart News reported: With less than a week to go until the Wisconsin primary, Trump came out swinging -- against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), against the Establishment lining up behind Cruz in order to keep Trump below 1,237 delegates so they can broker...

Have you heard? The Establishment is conspiring to steal the GOP nomination from Donald Trump! It’s true. I read it somewhere. There have been secret meetings all over the country of Establishment types plotting how best to deny what the voters want, and what they want is Donald Trump! At least, that’s how the story goes from the paranoid and the media desperate to attract them to their shows. It’s pathetic. Here’s some breaking news for you: If Donald Trump acquires 1,237 delegates to the GOP convention he will be the nominee. If he doesn’t, he may not be the...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I must begin the program today with an announcement of sorts. I know that a major story in the media today is -- I don't know what we call it -- Lewandowskigate, Grabgate. Whatever it is, the ongoing and still blossoming controversy involving the videotape of the reporterette, Michelle Fields, the Trump campaign coordinator, Corey Lewandowski, and the Trumpster himself and what the heck happened. My friends, I have decided that, going forward, I cannot share with you my opinion on this story. And so going forward, I will not opine. I will simply tell you what...

Frontrunner Donald Trump has become more unpopular since the start of primaries in February, and now the convention calendar turns to more moderate-to-liberal states as the contest draws near completion. Will Trump's decreasing popularity cost him the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the nomination outright?In January, the Huffington Post Pollster average of recent polls found that only 37 percent of voters view The Donald favorably, while 57 percent view him unfavorably. This was bad enough, but the most recent numbers (from Tuesday, March 29) show an even less popular frontrunner. Only 31.6 percent have a positive image of the...

Donald Trump is a boor. He's a vulgarian, a liar, an ignoramus. He has only the most cursory grasp of policy, a stentorian voice and a great big set of self-assurance. He's winning the Republican nomination. Why? It is partly because of the Clintons. While the media point and laugh at the Trump reality show carnival, they forget that the Clintons originally took us all to the circus. This week, we found out that Hillary Clinton's email scandal now occupies the attention of 147 FBI agents, and that she will be questioned by the FBI. We found out that her...

They're both iconic figures in American culture who are known by their first names. California's former governor is Arnold. The GOP presidential front-runner is The Donald. We Californians who lived through Arnold's two terms in the governor's office have watched The Donald's presidential campaign unfold with a sense of deja vu. Donald Trump starred in the TV show "Celebrity Apprentice." Arnold Schwarzenegger will replace him. Both men can boast supersize personalities and bulging bank accounts. Both bombasts ran for a top office with no political experience whatsoever -- which turned out to be a plus, as they tapped into a...

MORE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS have been expelled from the United States during Barack Obama's presidency than ever before. Since 2009, the Obama administration has removed 2.5 million people from American soil — an enormous crackdown that has consumed an enormous amount of money. The federal government now spends more on border and immigration enforcement than it spends on all other criminal law-enforcement agencies — including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, the US Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — combined. So many aliens have been removed on Obama's watch that critics ranging...

"Ronald Reagan is dead, and he's not coming back." "I wish more conservatives could come to grips with this relatively simple fact. We are now in something like the fifth round of the pin-the-tail-on-the-next-Reagan game and it's getting old. Catering to the conservative base, the GOP presidential candidates keep trying to put on the Reagan mantle the way Cinderella's ugly stepsisters tried to cram their dogs into her glass slipper. Not gonna happen." I wrote the above nine years ago. I'm not plagiarizing myself to save time, but to point out that Reagan obsession on the right has been a...

Perhaps the most important results of the March 22 Republican primary in Arizona and caucus in Utah were numbers that didn't appear on your television screen, no matter how late you stayed up for the poll closing times. Those were the numbers of votes cast for Marco Rubio in Arizona -- 70,587 of them at this writing. That was 17,595 more than the 52,992 votes cast there for John Kasich, even though Kasich was an active candidate on March 22 and Rubio had "suspended" his campaign after his defeat in Florida seven days before. One lesson from this is that...

For months now, I, and many other concerned voices in the conservative movement, have written about the danger a Donald Trump nomination presents not just to the future of the GOP, but to the foundational values upon which our nation was built. We have outlined how Trump’s past and present statements and actions overtly contradict even the most fundamental precepts of conservatism. Yet, no matter how eloquent the argument, cogent the logic, or veracity of the examples we provide to support our thesis that Trump unquestionably is not a conservative, the end result feels very much like talking to a...

This short essay is in response to a friend who asked me to explain how Donald Trump is unacceptable to "movement conservatives." Let's first acknowledge that many Trump supporters don't even claim to be conservative -- though others do -- and Trump himself is rather dismissive on the point, so they may consider this column a meaningless academic exercise. But a Trump supporter asked, so I'll try to explain. Because I think my questioner was inquiring mostly about issues, I won't delve into Trump's apparent lack of presidential temperament and public deportment -- as reflected mostly in the debates and...