Free Republic

Donald Trump at this point is probably just days away from calling Papa John’s and ordering a dozen pizzas to be delivered to the headquarters of each of his rivals for the GOP presidential nomination – with a promise of payment in cash, of course. Trump’s presidential campaign looks increasingly like a piece of performance art designed to gauge the Republican voter base’s tolerance for a candidate utterly divorced from the idea that a presidential election is a serious national conversation about policy ... Pause for a moment and consider that the man currently in the lead in the race...

For the past six weeks, an overarching concern for the Republican Party has been the impact that Donald Trump might have on the GOP primary election — particularly the damage he could do on the debate stage by turning an already unmanageable 10-candidate forum into a full-on circus. On Sunday, though, Trump himself gave one of the clearest examples yet of why his candidacy is doomed to fail, and why, if handled properly, the debate stage could be his Waterloo. Trump called in to CNN's State of the Union on Sunday morning to speak with host Jake Tapper. Much of...

For the past six weeks, an overarching concern for the Republican Party has been the impact that Donald Trump might have on the GOP primary election – particularly the damage he could do on the debate stage by turning an already unmanageable 10-candidate forum into a full-on circus. On Sunday, though, Trump himself gave one of the clearest examples yet of why his candidacy is doomed to fail, and why, if handled properly, the debate stage could be his Waterloo. Trump has staked much of his campaign on his promise to solve what many of his supporters see as a...

The Republican Party is currently trying to sort out an internal battle between its dwindling stock of moderates who are occasionally willing to work with Democrats, and its hard-right base, which views compromise with Democrats in general, and President Obama in particular, as heresy. But in a speech Monday, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the second-ranking Democrat in the House showed that there are significant fissures in the Democratic Party as well. Hoyer, though nominally Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s second-in-command, is starkly different from Pelosi and many others on the party’s left wing when it comes to economic and fiscal issues....