Are we, though?
Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images
CNN
Scott Olson / Getty Images
WASHINGTON — As the Republican race tightens into a two-man affair, some establishment Republicans, who were initially concerned about Donald Trump’s dubious relationship with conservatism, have started suggesting Trump would be a preferable nominee to Ted Cruz.
But there’s one group still unwilling to commit to the real estate mogul, even as he wins over its base of activists: conservative leaders fueled by the rise of the tea party.
Several tea party leaders — many of whom wrote pieces for the “Against Trump” issue of National Review last week — are rallying behind Cruz and making a last-minute effort to educate their base of activists on Trump’s past positions on a range of issues from healthcare to eminent domain.
“Over the years, there have been endless fractures in the façade of individual freedom, but three policies provided the fuel that lit the tea-party fire: the stimulus, the auto bailouts, and the bank bailouts,” wrote Glenn Beck, one of the most popular conservative talk radio hosts, who endorsed Cruz at a rally on Saturday. “Barack Obama supported all three. So did Donald Trump.”
The magazine’s anti-Trump issue comes after a group of 50 conservative leaders settled on pledging their allegiance to Cruz in a private meeting inside a boardroom at the Sheraton Hotel in Tysons Corner, Virginia, National Review reported last month. Leaders of socially conservative groups, who have endorsed Cruz, are especially wary of Trump — something the Texas senator has capitalized on lately with his “New York values” attack line.
And even among groups that haven’t yet endorsed Cruz, the issue remains that Trump just doesn’t have a very conservative policy record or platform, especially for the more libertarian-minded conservatism that originally fueled the tea party.
“When you get into the intellectual right, Trump isn’t going to do well,” said Sal Russo, chief strategist of Tea Party Express. “His appeal is more emotional — let’s give them hell in Washington type.”
Tea Party Express, which has not endorsed in the primary, has been regularly polling its members over the last few months. The most recent poll conducted in January found Cruz in the lead with Trump on his heels, Russo shared with BuzzFeed News. In November, the group had Carson and Cruz in the lead and Trump toward the bottom — in ninth place. But with Carson fizzling out, Trump has climbed up rapidly in the group’s polls in just the last two months.
Candidates have been moving around a lot in the poll because it’s been hard for tea party activists to settle on one candidate given that the movement has so many divergent voices and attitudes, Russo said, but Trump's trajectory has remained upward. The leaders who have come out in support of or against either Cruz or Trump run the risk of “getting carried away and losing where the flock is,” he added.
Another major group, FreedomWorks, also hasn’t endorsed yet and has been hosting cattle calls for presidential candidates, but members of its staff have expressed concerns about Trump’s past positions on health care, taxes, and private property rights.
Jason Pye, the spokesman for the group who has written at least two pieces critical of Trump for its members, said Trump has “tapped into something very real,” but the group is still in wait-and-see mode when it comes to the presidential race.
“In terms of how FreedomWorks feels about Trump, we have concerns about his past policy positions as well as the many tens of thousands in contributions and endorsements he has given to Democrats,” Pye said.
At FreedomWorks’ last summit back in September, Cruz won the straw poll with Trump coming in third. The results could be very different at its next gathering in March after the early state primaries.
The fiscally conservative Club for Growth has essentially been the only group among the establishment and far right to actually spend money on targeting Trump. The group has aired ads attacking Trump for supporting liberal policies, but their efforts couldn’t keep the real estate mogul from continuing his rise in polls.
Some conservatives are also making the electability argument. In a recent op-ed, Brent Bozell III, a prominent leader of the tea party movement, encouraged fellow conservatives to rally around Cruz over Trump.
"There’s nothing the Left would like more than to see Donald Trump win the GOP nomination,” Bozell wrote. “He cannot, will not defeat Hillary Clinton. She will be our next president, and God help us then. Only Ted Cruz can defeat Trump; and if he does, he’ll defeat Hillary.”
But activists drawn to Trump’s outsider rhetoric believe the leadership ranks within the tea party movement are wrong about Trump’s electability and that his level of conservatism should be irrelevant, said Wayne Allyn Root — a businessman and Trump backer who gave the tea party response to this year’s State of the Union.
“I’m not going to tell you that Trump’s the most conservative,” he said in an interview. “Ted Cruz wins that mantle, but Trump is the most electable. Working class voters love Trump. He’s got an edge that no other candidate has.
“And No. 2, I’m not worried how conservative someone is as long as they are willing to change Washington…I don’t think anyone has the chutzpah to do what Donald Trump is going to do."
Mark Kauzlarich / Reuters
DES MOINES — Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said about voter turnout on Tuesday what he always says about voter turnout: If it's high, he and his aides say, he can win the Iowa caucuses.
But he also lowered the ceiling for what "high" means, warning observers not to expect President Obama's unforgettable Iowa caucus night to be repeated this time around.
"Obama in 2008 ran a campaign which is really going to stay in the history books. It was an unbelievable campaign. In places they ran out of ballots as I understand it," Sanders said during a frigid press conference next to his campaign bus. "Do I think that in this campaign that we're going to match that? I would love to see us do that. I hope we do. But frankly I don't think we will. What happened in 2008 was extraordinary."
Sanders has been comparing his campaign to Obama's 2008 bid more and more in recent days. He tells Iowans on the stump not to believe Hillary Clinton messaging that he's unelectable, that his vision for a new progressive-driven American politics is naive. Those are the same arguments, Sanders says, Clinton made about Obama, and he wants Iowans to remember how that turned out.
"We get attacked about five times a day," Sanders said during a rally in Clinton, Iowa, last week. "But it reminds me very much of what happened here in Iowa eight years ago. Remember that? Eight years ago, Obama was being attacked for everything. He was unrealistic; his ideas were pie-in-the sky; he did not have the experience that was needed."
"You know what?" Sanders told the crowd. "People of Iowa saw through those attacks then, and they're going to see through those attacks again."
Clinton aides, and the candidate herself, were overjoyed Monday when Politico published an interview with Obama where the president pretty clearly dismissed the idea that Sanders is carrying on his legacy. Obama made many of the same arguments about Sanders that Clinton does, namely that Clinton represents the politics of the possible and Sanders does not.
However, there are parallels here in Iowa in the way Sanders hopes to win. His campaign is fueled by young, energetic boosters and people fed up with establishment politics. His campaign is working hard to pull out people who don't usually caucus, attempting to drive up the minuscule turnout that defines Iowa's complicated and unwelcoming-to-neophytes process.
Obama relied on those people too (plus healthy support from minority voters that Sanders has not matched, even as some of his minority support numbers have risen of late).
The central claim from Clinton folks these days is that Sanders lacks broad enough support to win Iowa. Concentrated groups of support won't win Iowa, and Clinton people doubt he has enough support in enough counties to win the majority of delegates.
Sanders is aware of this theory.
"We have some fairly sophisticated people who know about the caucus process here in Iowa," he said Tuesday. "We understand that if we get all of our votes in certain communities it is not going to do for us what has to be done. So we are working hard all over the state of Iowa. The hope is that work will pay off."
Sanders is projecting a campaign that can do some of what Obama's did — first time caucus goers, young caucus goers, enthusiastic boosters — but telling observers not to expect a 2008 redux. The race is "nip and tuck" close, he told the reporters huddled next to his bus.
So don't expect 2008 exactly, Sanders said. But don't be surprised if it's a little bit of 2008.
"What we are doing — and remember we started our ground game organization in Iowa a lot later than Secretary Clinton did," Sanders said. "She was here in 2008, has experience that we did not have. She's done this once before. We didn't. She has a very strong organization. But I will tell you that in the last couple of months we have gained a whole lot of ground and, again, I think we stand a real chance to create a large voter turnout. I doubt it will be as high as 2008 was, but I think that it will be high enough for us to win in Iowa."
Right to Rise is running an ad that features an image of Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged Florida woman who was at the center of a decades-long legal and political battle to remove her life support in the ’90s and ’00s.
The husband of Terri Schiavo says a television ad by the super PAC backing Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush that features an image of his deceased wife is "disgusting" and exploitive.
The ad from Right to Rise, which is running on TV stations in South Carolina, shows a brief image of Schiavo — the severely brain-damaged Florida woman who was at the center of a decades-long legal and political battle to remove her life support in the '90s and '00s — while a narrator describes Bush as "a man of deep faith, who fought time and again for the right to life."
"It is simply disgusting that Jeb Bush and his super PAC would exploit my wife's tragedy for his crude political gain," Michael Schiavo told BuzzFeed News. "Shame on Jeb Bush."
Michael Schiavo for years battled his wife's parents in court, arguing over their objections that Terri Schiavo would not want to be kept alive in her vegetative state. Bush, then governor of Florida, got involved in the case in the early 2000s to try to keep Terri Schiavo alive. The Florida legislature in 2003 passed "Terri's Law," which allowed him to order that Terri Schiavo continue to receive life support. After an extended legal battle, the law was later ruled unconstitutional, and in March 2005, Terri Schiavo was removed from life support.
Michael Schiavo said the case showed how Bush would govern if elected.
"Using his disgraceful intervention in our family's private trauma to advance his political career shows that he has learned nothing," Schiavo said. "He's proud of the fact that he used the machinery of government to keep a person alive through extraordinary artificial means — contrary to the orders of the court that were based on the courts determination, made over six years of litigation, that doing so would be against her wishes. What the campaign video shows is that if he ever got his hands on the power of government again, he would do the same thing again, maybe next time to your family."
Musings on weed, Jerry Sandusky, and flaming dog poo.
Donald J. Trump Jr. Instagram
Donald Trump Jr., the son of Ivana and Donald Trump, was a star on The Apprentice and is a vice president at the Trump Organization. Since the start of the presidential campaign, DJT Jr. has acted as a surrogate for his father, with appearances on cable news, in Iowa, and on the radio.
He also maintains a healthy presence on Twitter, offering his thoughts on a variety of topics.
Here's a sampling of his best tweets, some of which have since been deleted but are preserved here for posterity:
Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images
ANKENY, Iowa — MSNBC and The New Hampshire Union Leader will host an unsanctioned Democratic debate in New Hampshire on Feb. 4 moderated by NBC News' Chuck Todd and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, the Union Leader confirmed with an announcement Tuesday.
BuzzFeed News reported the details of their plans earlier Tuesday.
The NBC-Union Leader debate is scheduled to take place five days before New Hampshire primary voting on Feb. 9.
By the end of the day, Tuesday, the debate seemed to be a trial balloon that would fall swiftly back to earth. Hillary Clinton's campaign said she would participate only if the debate is sanctioned by the DNC, which so far, it isn't. There are few signs to suggest it ever will be. In a statement Tuesday, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Shultz said there was no plans to sanction new debates at this time.
"We have no plans to sanction any further debates before the upcoming First in the Nation caucuses and primary, but will reconvene with our campaigns after those two contests to review our schedule," she said in a statement.
Sanders was prodded by one of his biggest boosters, Democracy For America, to sign onto the debate shortly after it was announced. The group citied 145,940 signatures it had collected from Democrats eager for more debates. One was from former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who backs Sanders.
The effort did not convince Sanders to sign on to the debate.
"DNC has said this would be an unsanctioned debate so we would not want to jeopardize our ability to participate in future debates," Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told the AP.
Sanders officials said they would continue to press the DNC to add several more sanctioned debates. O'Malley was quick to sign on to the debate and he called on his fellow Democratic candidates to do the same.
The Democratic National Committee scheduled six debates between the Democratic candidates. That number was enforced by a rule barring any candidate who participated in a so-called "unsanctioned" debate outside those six from participating in any of the DNC forums. The next DNC debate will take place Feb. 11, after the New Hampshire primary.
Wasserman Schultz has repeatedly defended the party calendar in interviews.
But there has been growing frustration among campaign officials, voters and the press about the Democratic calendar, which put many of the debates outside traditional primetime. On Jan. 16, the New York Times cited anonymous Hilary Clinton aides lamenting not asking for more debates. Her supporters feel she has done well against Sanders head-to-head. Sanders and O'Malley aides have said they want more debates for months.
“Let me ask you now, the Republicans have the majority in the Senate and the majority in the House, where is the great establishment Republican bill to enforce our laws?”
Scott Olson / Getty Images
Republican presidential candidate and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said in a radio interview Monday that the GOP establishment position on immigration is "to do nothing about it."
"Let me ask you now, the Republicans have the majority in the Senate and the majority in the House, where is the great establishment Republican bill to enforce our laws?" Rubio Iowa radio show Mickelson in the Morning, responding to a question about how to assuage voters' concerns that he is part of the establishment because of his role in championing bipartisan immigration legislation in 2013. "Not the Senate immigration bill from 3 years ago. Why aren't they passing an immigration bill right now that fixes all those problems?"
"And the answer is, because they're not interested in moving forward, they're playing prevent defense the whole time," continued Rubio, who has sought to distance himself from the so-called "Gang of 8" bill, which would have provided undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship.
Rubio cited the money the super PAC supporting Republican candidate Jeb Bush, Right to Rise, is spending on attack ads against him as evidence that he is not a member of the GOP establishment.
"I have taken on almost 22 to 25 million dollars of negative attacks against me," Rubio said. "That money did not come from grassroots conservative activists. That was money raised for a massive super PAC that's supposed to be helping Jeb Bush, and those are million and multi-million dollar checks that went into that super PAC. I'm not complaining. They have a right to do that. I'm just saying that, if I were the establishment candidate, that money would be being spent on my behalf, not against me."
Also on Monday, in another radio interview with host Michael Medved, Rubio further addressed reports that former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is considering a third-party run for president.
"We'll beat Michael Bloomberg as well," Rubio argued, contending that Bloomberg has "worked consistently to undermine" the Second Amendment.
Via Facebook
When Patrisse Cullors of Black Lives Matter wanted to know how the organization could help local organizers working on the Flint water crisis, one name came up: Nayyirah Shariff, a member of the Flint Democracy Defense League.
Cullors reached out to her longtime friend Invincible, real name Ill Weaver, a Detroit-based artist and organizer, who introduced her to Shariff. Since then, teams from Black Lives Matter network chapters in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo have taken hundreds of gallons water to Flint, Mich., where lead has poisned the water supply of roughly 100,000 people, Cullors said.
The collaboration comes as Flint activists continue the arduous task of distributing clean water to people in public and Section 8 housing. “We’re in the process of figuring out what’s the best way to meet their needs,” Shariff said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “There are so many who don’t have water or a filter. Unfortunately on a lot of this stuff we’re in triage mode.”
Shariff, 39, has been a grassroots organizer for a decade, including a stint working for Stand Up for Democracy in the 2012 fight to repeal Michigan's Emergency Manager Law. She is scheduled to speak on the water crisis at this year's Netroots Nation gathering in St. Louis.
The Flint water crisis has become a top priority for the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Our cities have water warriors who work in solidarity for clean and affordable water for all as well as to address all the other injustices caused by emergency managers who are given dictatorial powers by the state of Michigan to suspend democracy in almost all majority black cities in our state,” Invincible told BuzzFeed News. “Black Lives Matter entered to uplift and amplify that work that Nayyirah and her team have been doing in that movement, as well as connect it to address the war on black lives throughout this country.”
However, the movement's close monitoring of the Flint crisis has also been criticized by those who say it's too quick to frame the crisis as a black issue.
Shariff acknowledges the ways in which austerity measures under the state’s emergency management laws affect black communities, but she views them as a symptom of larger problems in the state’s financial system. This kind of analysis makes Shariff among the most sought after organizers to speak on the issue.
“We all know that the lead came out of the pipes of everybody’s home whether you’re black or white,” she told BuzzFeed News, adding that the two people out in the forefront of the crisis are white women. “But if weren’t a black, poor city we wouldn’t have been taken over by an emergency manager. It was very racialized.”
Flint has had an emergency manager since December 2011.
Shariff and others contend that, even as the Flint City Council wanted to return to the Detroit River as the source of Flint’s water, management officials said it would be too costly.
On Sunday, The Daily Beast reported that city officials testified under oath in 2012 that Flint could not draw its water from the Flint River because it was deemed unsafe.
Activists are trying to figure out exactly who is responsible for the reversal of that decision 16 months later.
The reversal reflected a desire to “balance the books by any means necessary human life be damned,” Shariff said. “If we were an all-white city, would it have taken over a year to declare state of emergency? Or to apologize?”
“There’s a lot that we don’t know,” Shariff said, adding that her organization is tasked with educating people living under the state’s emergency manager law, nearly half of whom are black.
Within a couple months of April 2014, when Flint switched its water supply to the Flint River, Shariff said she started hearing reports of people’s hair falling out and skin breaking out. Others said that when they took showers their skin would itch.
“We were just hearing of these stories in the streets,” she said. “Then we started seeing news stories about trailer parks and apartment complexes who were without water.”
Shariff and others partnered with a local homeless shelter to create an emergency water relief site. Her involvement increased because the city’s emergency management leadership wasn’t responding to people’s needs, she said.
Ferguson Response, led by Leslie Mac, raised enough money to bring over 1,000 gallons of water to the canvassing location in Flint last weekend. Volunteers from All Souls Unitarian Church loaded the truck in Grand Rapids, Mich.
“When people were going down to them and complaining about the water and speaking [at public hearings], they did not make sure those people were taken care of. They didn’t say, ‘Let me get your name and number to schedule an appointment go to your house and see what’s going on with your water.’ At that time people just wanted to be helped. All they knew was their water wasn’t coming out brown before they had Detroit [River] water.”
“We wanted to really learn the truth,” she continued. “And we felt we weren’t getting it from the city of Flint, the emergency manager and the Department of Environmental Quality. As people were showing their water, [officials] kept on saying, ‘The water may be discolored but it’s safe to use.’ ‘Well it’s just hard water,’ or ‘You can just boil the water and you’ll be okay.’ But that water has been [poisonous] that whole time.”
Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality issued a Safe Water Drinking Act violation letter in January of 2015. The letter said Flint’s water tested positive for unsafe levels for trihalomethanes (TTHM), a bond of chemicals formed by disinfecting water.
Shariff said she wants to work with residents on a list of demands on things like necessary nutrition and the possible legal ramifications of the city’s mismanagement, “but it’s like we can’t even address that because people don’t even have water. Why would they care about a lawsuit or nutrition to counter lead poisoning when they don’t even have water to drink or bathe or cook it in?”
There are other challenges. Shariff said many people in a local neighborhood with a large population of undocumented residents only recently became aware that the water wasn’t potable because their families outside of the country alerted them after seeing news reports. Undocumented people then began reporting they were being asked for government-issued identification, or in some cases water bills, to get water at fire stations.
“It was fucked up because this is water that has been donated by people from all around the world,” she said. “Not only are they continuing to ration water, but requiring people to do things to get water [they] did not pay for.”
On Saturday, Yahoo News reported officials who said identification “is not required, it’s just requested.”
This post has been updated.
And that might be underselling it.
Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images
Bob Dole, the former senator from Kansas and the 1996 Republican nominee for president, made it clear in a radio interview with the Michael Smerconish Show on Monday how much he really dislikes Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Dole said that right now he's a "Jeb Bush man," but added that he thinks Donald Trump would be a better president than Ted Cruz because Trump would make deals and compromise with Congress.
"I don't think Ted is a Republican, he's a conservative extremist."
"He uses the title Republican because there's no conservative extremist ballot."
"You can't deal with him."
"If it come downs to Cruz and Trump, I'm a big Trump supporter."
"I think the worst is Cruz because he's so conservative…way way off in right field."
"I think we would lose, senators, governors, state officers, state legislatures, members of Congress. He doesn't get along with anybody, nobody really cares for him in Congress."
Darren Mccollester / Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Before running for president, Sen. Rand Paul tried very hard to make nice with the Republican establishment.
He campaigned on behalf of establishment Senate candidates in 2014. He fundraised for them. He even helped Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — a fellow Kentuckian who is despised by tea party activists — win re-election.
But to capitalize on the anti-Washington, outsider rhetoric GOP presidential primary voters seem to be responding to this election cycle, Paul has reverted back to his old ways — even as his Senate re-election becomes ever more likely the only ballot that Paul will be on in November.
In recent months, Paul has stepped up his attacks on his colleagues in the Senate as he runs for president, repeatedly telling voters it’s been a waste for the GOP to have control of the upper chamber, according to a BuzzFeed News review of the senator's interviews and videos of townhalls. He’s gone after Republican leadership — including Speaker Paul Ryan — and taken shots at McConnell without explicitly mentioning his name, despite the Senate leader’s endorsement of his presidential campaign.
Paul, who has been sliding in the presidential primary polls and didn’t have enough support to make it on the main debate stage earlier this month, is already facing pressure from back home to focus on his Senate race, especially now that a credible Democratic contender has jumped into the race.
Democrat Jim Gray, mayor of Lexington, filed paperwork on Tuesday to challenge Paul. Although Democrats recognize winning Paul’s seat would be tough, they could force Republicans to spend money in the state in an election year where the GOP is defending several seats in battleground states and Paul’s attention is elsewhere.
The campaign arm of the Senate Republicans has been warning Paul’s advisers not to take his re-election bid for granted for months. The National Republican Senatorial Committee met with a top Paul aide, Doug Stafford, last October to make him aware of the senator’s bleak standing in his home state based on a poll they had commissioned, Politico previously reported.
And the Kentucky Republican’s constant disapproval of the Senate’s work could further complicate his re-election bid. Instead of touting legislative accomplishments and explaining why the GOP deserves to keep the majority in the Senate — as other incumbents up for re-election have been doing, Paul's simultaneous run for two offices has muddled his message.
For months, on the presidential campaign trail, Paul seems to have been making the case that he’s the only one standing up to leadership, but there aren’t enough senators like him to result in reform, making the GOP’s Senate majority useless. But now that he’s shifting at least some of his attention to the Senate race, in op-eds in Kentucky newspapers, he’s reminding voters that he’s done his job as a senator well and that it’s crucial for Republicans to hold on to the Senate.
“Regardless of whether a Republican like me is in the White House in 2016 or another one of Obama’s liberal friends is elected, the message is clear: We need a Republican Senate more than ever. If you want your rights to be in the hands of people who believe in Kentucky values you need a Republican Senate. It’s really as simple as that,” Paul wrote in the Lexington-Herald Leader this month.
His plea to keep the Senate in GOP hands is different from the brash tone he’s adopted in Iowa and New Hampshire in recent months.
At a townhall in New Hampshire last year, Paul referred to Congress — the institution he is running to remain a part of — as “wee tiny” and “impotent.”
"You think you’ve elected a Republican House and a Republican Senate and you expect some results,” Paul added during the same event. “But nothing. Absolutely nothing. You’re getting nothing for all the work you’re doing because they’re unwilling to stand up and assert the power of the purse."
In radio interviews in early states this month, he’s pushed a similar message.
"We went around the country and Republicans said: Give us power in the House. The people did. We said: Give us power in the Senate. They did. And yet none of the power of the purse is being exerted,” Paul said in an interview on Iowa’s The Simon Conway Show last week. "It’s very, very disappointing."
"Paul Ryan voted to give an unlimited authority to borrow money in the last year of the president’s tenure. He also voted to increase the spending caps for military and for domestic welfare,” he said in the same interview. "And then Paul Ryan voted for $1.1 trillion spending bill. So Republicans are now saying we’re offended and we’re going to stop the president’s executive order on gun control. I’m with them except the Republican leadership including Paul Ryan voted to give him one-year’s worth of spending… There’s absolutely no leverage to stop anything that the president does in his final year in office, and the Republican leadership gave it up."
When asked if McConnell should be leading the GOP in the Senate in another interview earlier this month, Paul criticized the process by which he was elected even though the majority leader helped Paul get the support he needed from Kentucky Republicans to change the state’s presidential primary into a caucus, clearing the way for him to run for two offices at the same time.
"The leadership is decided basically over decades and decades of — you know we’re talking friendships between five, 10, 15, 20 people,” Paul responded on the Boston-based Kuhner Report. "It’s very difficult to have any changes in that. And it won’t happen until you there's a groundswell from people in sending new people to Washington.”
McConnell was elected majority leader unanimously by his colleagues. A spokesman for McConnell declined to comment for this story.
Paul also told host Sean Hannity in another radio interview this month that Senate leadership “uttered profanities” at him and told him to stay silent when he took to floor at 2 a.m. to urge colleagues to vote against the spending bill in December. "I do everything I can to let them know that we are ruining the country by borrowing so much money.”
Paul’s Senate campaign did not comment on his messaging while running for both offices. But Stafford, his senior adviser, listed Paul’s first-term accomplishments in a statement.
"As Sen. Rand Paul prepares for re-election, he hopes voters will remember his tireless work to balance the budget, his fight against President Obama's War on Coal, his fight against Obamacare, and that Sen. Paul has returned to the taxpayer over $2 million from his office budget,” he said.
Neilson Barnard / Getty Images
Chris Christie, responding to a radio caller's praise of Donald Trump's plan to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border, said Monday that he has never seen a wall that a "determined human being couldn't get over, under, or around."
"There’s never been a wall I’ve seen built, in the world, that a determined human being couldn’t get over, under, or around," the New Jersey governor and presidential candidate said on the Michael Medved Show. "Unless you’re gonna build it like the Berlin Wall, and you’re gonna put soldiers on it at every point, with rifles. And so my point to you is that there are other ways for us to secure the border other than wasting money on a 4,000 mile wall.”
The caller then used an analogy to describe his concerns about the immigration system, asking, “If your bathtub is overflowing, do you grab a mop or do you turn off the water, Mike?"
The host handed off the question to Christie, who said, “You do both. And that’s why you need a biometric system at the airport to monitor people who are coming in on visas and being able to monitor them when they're in there. And the idea that the purely simplistic answer of ‘build a wall’—who’s gonna guard the wall? Are you
gonna guard the wall at every mile? How is that gonna be paid for?"
"And the idea, by the way, Blaine, you don’t believe that the president of Mexico’s gonna pay for the wall, do you?” Christie added, referring to Trump's assertion that the wall he builds will be paid for by Mexico.
The Republican frontrunner called Fox News host Megyn Kelly a “lightweight” and biased. Trump’s campaign said he plans to skip Thursday’s primetime debate.
Trump speaks in New Hampshire Monday.
Gretchen Ertl / Reuters
The decision came after the Republican frontrunner demanded the network remove Kelly — who is set to moderate Thursday's debate, along with anchors Bret Baier and Chris Wallace — calling her dishonest and biased.
At a news conference Tuesday, Trump sharply criticized Fox News for "playing games," saying he would most likely skip the event scheduled just days before the crucial Iowa caucuses.
Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski later confirmed the candidate "will not be participating in the Fox News debate Thursday," the Associated Press reported.
In a statement issued hours later, Trump's campaign said the candidate knows when to walk away, "unlike the very stupid, highly incompetent people running our country into the ground." The statement confirmed again that Trump would not participate in the debate and criticized Fox for "toying" with him.
The comments about Fox were a reference to a taunting statement the network distributed earlier in the day saying Putin and Iran's ayatollah plan to "treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president."
"A nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings," it said.
Trump countered Tuesday that "we've had six debates now."
"Why should the networks continue getting rich on these debates?" he added.
"Let's see how much money Fox is going to make on the debate without me."
Instead of attending the debate, Trump said he plans to raise money for wounded veterans. A campaign spokesperson did not respond to a BuzzFeed News request for comment.
Lance Iversen / AP
LAS VEGAS — Near the Las Vegas strip, five women who share a number of qualities sat down for an interview.
The women are all Latina. They’re foreign-born. They’re members of the 53,000-strong Culinary Workers Union Local 226. They work as housekeepers (four of them at Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel).
And they’re all in the process of becoming naturalized U.S. citizens.
These women are just five of what labor and immigration activists say are a few of the thousands of Latinos they hope to help naturalize, in pivotal swing states like Nevada, Florida, and Colorado. The reason, they say? Trump made them do it.
"I have realized people have erroneous thoughts about all Latinos, they want to pigeonhole us into things we aren’t like rapists and drug dealers," said Maria Mendoza, one of the five women, in Spanish. Mendoza was referring to Trump’s now infamous announcement speech, in which he said Mexico was sending rapists and criminals across the border.
She’s lived in the United States for 18 years, and worked at Trump’s hotel for five; one woman in the group has lived here for more than 35 years. Mendoza said her decision to become a citizen originated from the current political landscape. "They don’t realize we come to this country for a dream, and as Latinos, we want to reach that dream," she said.
If Trump has tapped into disaffected voters this year with his immigration rhetoric, there is also an unintended consequence — a mix of naturalization efforts, voter registration efforts, and ultimately efforts to mobilize voters off Trump’s rhetoric.
In the last 14 years, the local Culinary Union’s umbrella union, Unite Here, has helped push for 15,000 naturalizations. This year, Unite Here wants to help 2,500 people naturalize by June 1, so they can become U.S. citizens before the election — in addition to registering 10,000 new voters.
The list goes on: The Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition (CIRC) wants to help naturalize 1,500 people, along with five to seven partner organizations. SEIU Florida has helped almost 1,000 people already through citizenship workshops the union does in churches, where people are more trusting of immigration-related services. The Florida Immigrant Coalition — which works with SEIU, AFL-CIO, and other groups — hopes to add 1,500 to that number along with its partners.
And then there’s Mi Familia Vota, an advocacy group with a long history of voter registration and naturalization efforts, aiming to help 300 people begin the months-long naturalization process at their first event of the year. Along with partner organizations, the group will help launch the effort in Las Vegas two days before the Republican primaries begin. The nationwide effort led by iAmerica, labor groups like SEIU, and Mi Familia Vota will include events in Colorado, Florida, Texas, and California.
"We've seen more people this year that want to become citizens and specifically because they want to vote against Trump," said Mi Familia Vota executive director Ben Monterroso.
There is a tremendous universe of potential citizens and voters out there. Between 2012 and 2016, the 1.2 million Latinos who had become naturalized citizens were the second-largest driver for the growth in the Latino vote, according to a Pew Research study from last week. And, citing Department of Homeland Security data from 2012, one national organization sees a total universe of 40,000 legal permanent residents eligible to vote in Nevada; 40,000 in Colorado; 80,000 in Arizona; and a whopping 369,000 in Florida.
The White House, which has pushed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to make the naturalization process easier will on Thursday announce a series of regional convenings beginning in Los Angeles and featuring L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti and USCIS director Leon Rodriguez.
How high the ultimate number of newly naturalized citizens will go is unclear, but there is a precedent for immigration rhetoric driving large numbers of people to naturalize — and likely affecting decisions at the ballot box in a presidential year.
In 1994, former California Gov. Pete Wilson, his restrictionist immigration policies, and his controversial ads about illegal immigration became a high-profile campaign issue in a state home to millions of Hispanic voters.
During his re-election campaign, Wilson championed a ballot measure called Prop 187, which denied undocumented immigrants and their children access to public education and health care. The proposition passed (it was later found unconstitutional by a federal district court), but California’s Latino voter registration went up 50%.
Two years later, then Vice President Al Gore led a nationwide naturalization effort. At the conclusion of the 1996 campaign, the Hispanic share of the electorate had more than doubled — and delivered huge support to the Democratic nominee, Bill Clinton. Gore's CitizenshipUSA initiative led to the naturalization of more than 1 million people, and Latinos went from 10% to 16% of Texas voters, and from 5% to 12% of Florida voters. Bob Dole, Bill Clinton’s opponent, received an anemic 6% of the Hispanic vote in California.
Trump has vowed to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants, including young people brought to the country as children. His campaign has emphasized endorsements like Joe Arpaio on Tuesday, and aired ads in the style of Wilson — one shows immigrants perched atop the border and video of them scurrying towards a border (later revealed to be the Moroccan border).
Antonio Gonzalez has led influential policy and Latino vote organizations the William C. Velazquez Institute and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project since the 1980s. He wrote an analysis of the effect of anti-immigrant politicians on the Latino vote in November — spanning Pete Wilson to Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio — to understand what Trump's effect could be.
Wilson has the honor of producing midterm elections that looked like presidential elections in terms of Latino turnout, "the only two in California state history in which the percent share of Latino votes cast matched the percent share of Latino registered voters," he wrote.
During the rise of Arpaio, Arizona Latino registered voters grew 135% and Hispanic voting increased 162.6%.
"In both cases there is a measurable, substantial increase in Latino voter registration and voting when there is a clear villain perceived as anti-Latino," Gonzalez told BuzzFeed News.
"We have a new boogeyman," said 20-year Nevada veteran Democratic strategist Andres Ramirez, referring to Trump. "We’ve had boogeymen in past years but now we have one at unprecedented levels."
Even conservative groups are aware of the opportunity presented. Daniel Garza, executive director of conservative Latino group the LIBRE Initiative, said his own parents became U.S. citizens after Prop 187, at a time when they felt anti-immigrant sentiment was sweeping the country. His organization has done citizenship events at churches and with local organizations in Miami, Orlando, and Arizona with plans to ramp up efforts in the coming months.
While labor groups have become interested in naturalization in the last four years, the work and manpower that goes into them is substantial. At the Vegas offices of Mi Familia Vota in mid-January, ahead of their event to help 300 people become citizens, the group gathered around a table for one of those interminable 90-minute conference calls that many companies are familiar with, to learn about the capabilities of Citizenship Works, an app that cuts down the time it takes to fill out an N-400 form.
Fees, language barriers, and misinformation can be significant obstacles to naturalization. The fee for the citizenship process is $680 — and $595 if the person is 75 and older — which is often prohibitive for poor immigrants. In Colorado, organizations like CIRC are partnering with community credit unions for 0% "American Dream" loans to help them.
Some, like Mi Familia Vota, tell immigrants they may qualify for waivers, or they can use a credit card or take out loans at low interest rates. They stress that renewing a green card costs $485 every 10 years, but for $200 more, they can become a citizen with a one-time payment.
Nicole Melaku, at CIRC, who ran the national Cities for Citizenship program last year, said that due to misinformation, immigrants sometimes mistakenly think they might be renouncing their Mexican citizenship, for example, if they become an American citizen. (The Mexican consulate has recently begun new efforts to let people know dual citizenship is a possibility.)
The rhetoric coming from Trump and others in the Republican field has also led new citizens to enlist in helping others naturalize. Beatriz Garcia-Waddell, of Alamosa, Colorado, became a citizen in December. She had worked with the San Luis Valley Immigrant Legal Resource Center, and has since joined the board of the organization. Calling them some of the "hardest working patriots in this country," she said she hopes to vote and fight for aspiring citizens.
In Florida, where operatives often repeat that there are more legal permanent residents eligible to vote than undocumented immigrants (Pew told BuzzFeed News there are a bit more undocumented), activists see a major opportunity.
The AFL-CIO and Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC) partnered with Miami-Dade County for the Cities for Citizenship program. Maria Rodriguez, executive director of the FLIC, said all the work is tied together.
"We work to get the undocumented documented, and the documented to become citizens, the citizens to become voters and the voters to run for office," she said. "It enriches our democracy."
She said her group has worked with Catholic and evangelical churches — both Latino and Haitian — on naturalization work. Trump, she said, has agitated people both in fear and anger. She sees the "Trump effect" in anti-immigrant bills in the Tallahassee state house.
"There's a sense of defending our community, people are coming to the defense of our community through becoming a citizen and voting,” she said.
The efforts also have a broad, event-like approach. In March, at Marlins Stadium, the group and the Catholic Church plan a mega clinic with a goal of helping 1,200 people become citizens. (The event is similar to one held in June 2013 at the height of the debate over the Gang of 8 immigration bill.) A thousand people willing to stand in a long line in the middle of the summer in Miami for six hours showed the potency of a pitched immigration debate in spurring people to become citizens, organizers believed.
Because of the election, Democratic campaigns are more than ready to take advantage of any extra energy Trump is creating among Hispanic voters.
In a Vegas office known as the 'Latino office,' Emilia Pablo, the Nevada communications director for Sen. Bernie Sanders campaign said canvassers are always ready if Hispanics in the state say they want to vote but are unable to, with information and forms. She said the campaign hears about Trump's rhetoric most on college campuses. "They hear Sanders has come out strong against his rhetoric, that Trump wants to divide us with anti-Muslim and anti-Latino rhetoric, but Sanders wants to unite us," she said.
Hillary Clinton's Nevada state director Emmy Ruiz and organizing director Jorge Neri, said the campaign also helps legal permanent residents and they see a more motivated base on the ground because of Trump and Republican rhetoric "not on the side of Latinos."
"Folks realize what's at stake," Neri said, pointing to families with mixed immigration statuses. "One of their siblings has [Obama's deferred action], that's going to expire if we don't elect someone who is going to win and going to protect it."
The strength of the Latino vote has often been tied to immigration. It was in 2006 (and again in 2008) that activists chanted, "Hoy marchamos, mañana votamos." Or "today we march, tomorrow we vote." And the same Pew report from last week that detailed the growth of young voters among Latinos and naturalized citizens, noted that Hispanics turn out to vote at a much lower rate than other demographic groups; that young people vote less than older people; and that not many states outside of Colorado, Nevada and Florida both have large Hispanic electorates and are battleground states.
But to activists in those states, the ceaseless drip of demography ensures they will matter in 2016 and beyond.
The Culinary Union's political director, Yvanna Cancela, noted that because naturalization takes months and different factors can lead to delays, some of the people may not become citizens in time to vote in 2016, but they will be able to vote in 2018 and 2020.
"That wave is like throwing a pebble in a lake, at first it’s a couple of ripples, but eventually it becomes more," she said. "This election is a catalyst not just for naturalization, but also for the power of the immigrant vote."
The union members who work at Trump's hotel have been galvanized to show just that.
"Donald Trump has said he’s going to take out millions of immigrants," said Carla Menjivar, a 16-year U.S. resident. "I have come to fight for the American dream for my children and will become a citizen to show my vote matters."
"I am not a second-class citizen," said Mendoza, her fellow union members nodding in agreement. "I have the rights like anyone else of becoming a citizen — my voice and my vote will count."
Brian Frank / Reuters
OTTUMWA, Iowa — Iowa evangelical powerbroker Bob Vander Plaats publicly hit back at Donald Trump on Tuesday after Trump attacked him on Twitter.
"Donald Trump and I got into a little bit of a spat today on Twitter," Vander Plaats told an audience while introducing Ted Cruz, who he has endorsed, at a campaign event here. Vander Plaats said he was bringing it up because of questions of "judgment and discernment."
"Why would the frontrunner of a presidential campaign be coming after Bob Vander Plaats in Iowa? Seriously, why would you do that?" said Vander Plaats, the CEO of the Family Leader.
Vander Plaats then slammed Trump on his past statements and record.
"When he said back in July, 'I've never asked God for forgiveness,' that’s an issue," Vander Plaats said, also mentioning "when he said on that same stage 'I like veterans who weren’t captured,' disparaging all prisoners of war."
Vander Plaats said his third son has severe disabilities and "it bothered me greatly, just a couple months ago, when Donald Trump was up on stage insulting and mocking people with disabilities." Trump appeared to mock a New York Times reporter with a physical disability in November.
Vander Plaats then riffed on Trump's book title The Art of the Deal, saying "Right, now Donald Trump is saying, Listen, the establishment is warming up to me. Why? Because I know how to deal."
"The sanctity of human life is not up for the art of the deal," Vander Plaats said. "God's design for marriage is not up for the art of the deal. A U.S. Supreme Court trying to make law is not up for our art of the deal."
Earlier, Trump had attacked Vander Plaats on Twitter:
Vander Plaats replied on Twitter, "You know that's not true. I gave you an introduction and opportunity and you charged the guy $100K. May work in NY not IA." And, "Still consider you a friend and you still can't have my endorsement. My friendship isn't phony."
"My friendship does not have conditions," Vander Plaats said in Ottumwa. "My friendship does not require an endorsement at the end of the friendship."
The race in Iowa has come down to a tight two-man contest between Trump and Cruz, with Trump recently pulling ahead in some polls. The two have increasingly fought publicly as voting approaches.
Vander Plaats told BuzzFeed News after the Ottumwa appearance that Trump's tweets "show he's desperate."
"People need to know what they’re choosing here," Vander Plaats said. "Because Donald Trump's record is very muddy — as a matter of fact, it might even be very clear on being pro choice. Saying the courts have spoken, the marriage debate is over."
Vander Plaats said Trump had invited him and his family to stay at his hotels "a total of maybe four to six overnight stays, which cost him basically nothing, but he believes that constitutes loyalty, and that you’re going to be a blind endorsement. He may be able to control Hillary Clinton like that, he’s not controlling me like that."
Vander Plaats also said that the $100,000 speaking fee was to Trump, not to him. The Des Moines Register reported that Trump did charge a fee to appear at a January 2015 real estate conference in Iowa.
"That’s how Donald Trump plays," Vander Plaats said. "He likes to make an accusation, but the fact is it’s actually him who received a hundred grand. I talked to him significantly to say don’t do that, don’t accept money to come into Iowa, it's a bad first impression. He did it anyhow."
Asked if he was truly still friends with Trump, Vander Plaats said, "Yeah, I’ll be a friend to him. And part of being a friend is speaking the truth to him."
Before Iowa votes.
Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz challenged Donald Trump to a one-on-one debate before the Iowa caucuses.
Cruz made the comments after Trump's campaign manager said on Tuesday that Trump would "definitely not" participate in the Fox News debate on Thursday evening.
"The fact that Donald is now afraid to appear on the debate stage, that he doesn't want his record his questioned, I think that reflects a lack of respect for the men and women of Iowa," Cruz told radio host Mark Levin on Tuesday.
Cruz noted polls in Iowa showed a "dead heat" between Cruz and Trump in Iowa. He challenged Trump to a one-on-one debate on the radio.
"So, if Donald is afraid of Megyn Kelly, I would like to invite him on your show to participate in a one-on-one debate between me and Donald, mano a mano," said Cruz.
"We could do it a number of ways, we could have you moderate it, Mark. We could have Sean Hannity moderate it. We could have Rush Limbaugh, but you know what if he's afraid of Megyn Kelly, if he's afraid of you, and afraid of Hannity, and afraid of Rush, then we could do without any moderators whatsoever. I'm happy to go an hour-and-half mano a mano me and Donald with no moderators anytime before the Iowa caucuses."
"I would invite Donald," added Cruz, noting Trump has been calling him stupid all week.
LINK: Donald Trump Says He Will Skip Republican Debate
IOWA CITY, Iowa — Supporters of Mike Huckabee are launching a TV attack ad here in the final days of the race that casts Ted Cruz as a charlatan feigning intense Christian devotion to win votes.
The ad, which is being aired by the pro-Huckabee super PAC Pursuing America's Greatness and was previewed for BuzzFeed News, depicts two women chatting prior to a group Bible study about the upcoming Iowa caucuses. The women are shown discussing recent leaked comments in which Cruz privately told donors he wouldn't prioritize fighting same-sex marriage if he was elected; they also talk about Cruz's reportedly meager record of charitable giving.
The super PAC says it is spending just over $400,000 to get the ad on TV in the final six days of the race. Paired with another commercial that attacks both Cruz and Trump as unserious, the group will spend over $1.1 million in a last-ditch effort to shake up the field in hopes that Huckabee — currently polling at around 2% in the state — will benefit.
The commercial is a TV adaptation of a radio ad that was launched last week by a new anti-Cruz group, as first reported by Politico. (Both ads were produced by Ohio-based Republican strategist Nick Everhart.)
"He doesn't tithe?" one woman says in the ad. "A millionaire that brags about his faith all the time?"
"Just what we need — another phony," the second woman responds.
The ad ends with the first woman concluding, "Guess we've narrowed down our list. Can't caucus for Cruz," while her friends nods solemnly in agreement.
Nick Ryan, who runs Pursuing America's Greatness, said the goal of the new ad is to expose Cruz as disingenuous when it comes to matters of faith and conservative values.
"They think they own the evangelical vote," Ryan said of the Cruz campaign. "I think it's important that those voters, as they go through their final discernment, really look at who Ted Cruz is, and how he's chosen to live his life."
Ryan said he believed evangelical voters would find it especially revealing that Cruz donated less than 1% of his income to charity between 2006 and 2010, according to tax returns he released.
"We're talking about someone who's not scraping by on a fixed income or something like that. We're talking about someone whose spouse was an executive in Goldman Sachs and who was a successful attorney," Ryan said, adding that Cruz was willing to contribute a sizable amount of money to his own campaign when he decided to run for Senate. "When the time came to choose to promote himself, he had no trouble coming up with ample resources."
As BuzzFeed News reported last week, some evangelicals are questioning Cruz's lack of charitable giving. But when Huckabee himself gave voice to those questions — first in an interview with BuzzFeed News, then on Fox News's The O'Reilly Factor — many critics said the line of attack was unfair, and perhaps even un-Christ-like.
Ryan disagreed, arguing that Cruz has invited a debate about these issues by making his faith an overt part of his candidacy. "That's the campaign he chose to run," Ryan said.
"I think that authenticity is something that the caucus-goers should struggle with in the final week as they prepare to vote," he said, adding, "Hopefully [this ad] allows Iowans to see a full picture of who Ted Cruz is."
A spokesman for Cruz did not respond to a request for comment.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
ST. PAUL, Minnesota — The surging Bernie Sanders campaign approached their last days before Iowa caucuses the way the campaign began.
At two huge rallies in Minnesota on Tuesday, Sanders put his unlikely but so far unstoppable rise to top-tier Democratic contender on display. Before thousands of adoring fans, he railed against corporate power, corporate media, corporate leaders, and the political establishment at the top of his lungs, his voice growing hoarse. (Hours earlier he spoke in Duluth at that city’s entertainment and convention center.)
There were 10,000 people in the audience, according to the campaign. There were another 4,500 people in the overflow room, the campaign said. Duluth had 6,000 people in the audience. The St. Paul speech was vintage Sanders: an hour of wonky details about the woes of the economy, criminal justice system, criminal justice system, and overall political tenor of the age.
A Sanders campaign aide noted that Minnesota is a Super Tuesday state, making it one on the list of states choosing delegates March 1. One of Sanders’s highest profile endorsers is Rep. Keith Ellison, who represents a Minnesota district. Ellison was on hand during the Minnesota swing, introducing Sanders at both stops.
But the jaunt through Minnesota a week before caucus day gave Sanders an opportunity to return to the roots of his grassroots campaign.
Sanders gained steam through the summer with events like the one in St. Paul, packed with thousands of supporters who flocked to his stripped down public events, which featured little more than a lectern, an introductory speaker or two, and Sanders. Things are different for the Sanders campaign now — there is the chartered plane, the Sanders tour bus, the hundreds of campaign staff, and the flood of TV commercials filling Iowa airwaves — but his aides insist the candidate, and his message, is the same.
Sanders holds large events everywhere he goes, but the really huge events like the one in St. Paul have mostly fallen by the wayside in favor of multiple events with hundreds or or just over a thousand in the audience across the early states.
There was a retro feel in St. Paul, a step back to the earliest days of the campaign. There were even a smattering of the Black Lives Matter protests that disrupted his presidential campaign in its earliest days. (On Tuesday, they made noise but they didn’t stop Sanders from plowing through his stump speech.) The Iowa stuff from his recent stump speeches was gone in Minnesota, replaced by the old version of his campaign message.
These huge crowds were once unexpected, and only a harbinger of the year to come. A win in Iowa was almost unfathomable the first few times Sanders took the stage for his big rallies.
But the crowds stayed huge.
Back in Iowa Tuesday morning, Sanders cautioned his supporters not to expect too much from his Iowa operation, which he put together some months after Hillary Clinton.
But in St. Paul, before thousands, Sanders once again asked progressives to believe.
Trump wanted to know: How could they stand up to China if they were afraid to debate?
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Donald Trump announced he's skipping Thursday's night Fox News debate — five years after he slammed candidates who skipped a debate calling them cowards.
During the 2012 election, Trump and Newsmax scheduled a debate for December 2011, but several high-profile candidates backed out of the debate; Trump planned to moderate the debate. Only Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich agreed to participate.
"Romney doesn't look courageous" Trump when Mitt Romney decided not to do the debate, according to the Washington Post.
"Some of them don't have the courage to do," Trump told Imus in the Morning. "I don't want to say who."
Trump said some called to say they were too nervous to do his debate, "We have guys who are afraid to go into a debate." How would they stand up to China if afraid to debate? he asked.
Trump backed out of the debate on Tuesday, based on a his contentions with Fox News. Trump has objected to the presence of Fox host Megyn Kelly, who challenged the billionaire during the first Republican debate in August 2015. Fox News contends that Trump's campaign manager threatened Kelly during a call about the debate.
Things were much different in 2011!
When candidates declined to participate in his debate then, he told Kelly, "We're not seeing a lot of courage, are we, not lots of courage, these Republicans are supposed to be brave."
"You have a done great job by the way," Trump added, in reference to Kelly's debate moderation.
The debate was eventually canceled.
Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Some of the hawkish figures who Ted Cruz recently dismissed as “crazy neo-con invade-every-country-on-earth and send our kids to die in the Middle East” … say they’d consider supporting Cruz anyway if he’s the last man between Donald Trump and the Republican presidential nomination.
Cruz, it turns out, hasn’t fully burned his bridges with that set of advisers and supporters of George W. Bush — figures like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and former National Security Council official Elliott Abrams, who aren't closed off to Cruz, especially in the case of Abrams. Indeed, despite some lingering resentment and suspicion, there are even glimmers of rapprochement as the Republican primary looks like it could become a two-man race.
“I would not hesitate to back Cruz as the nominee,” Abrams — who not long ago told National Review that Cruz’s use of the word neocon invoked “warmongering Jewish advisers” — told BuzzFeed News. “If it’s a two man race, it’s really extraordinary to see Republican office holders in some cases or former office holders saying they don’t like Cruz or they would go for Trump, who is from my perspective not a Republican, not a conservative, has no policy views on anything that you can actually describe or get a handle on.”
In an interview on his campaign bus in Iowa last week, Cruz told BuzzFeed News that, despite his jabs at neocons, he has “good relations with a great many foreign policy thinkers.” Cruz has in the past cited Abrams along with former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton and former CIA director James Woolsey as trusted foreign policy experts.
The neocons’ willingness to consider Cruz stands in sharp contrast with a new line of current conventional wisdom in Washington that Cruz, who is the object of particularly intense personal dislike from establishment Republicans, is actually less acceptable to the establishment than Trump. The logic of many of the Republican interventionists: Cruz, according to this argument, doesn’t really mean his criticism, or at least might change his mind; Trump, by contrast, has longstanding, if sometimes incoherent, isolationist impulses. And campaigns don’t always determine foreign policy, they note: George W. Bush promised a “humble” foreign policy free of nation-building, and look what happened.
There are three reasons why Cruz is attracting some soft support from neoconservatives. To start, it’s Cruz's pedigree. With degrees from Harvard and Princeton, some think he can't possibly be serious about some of his more extreme statements. (During his first campaign, he launched a scathing attack on the Council on Foreign Relations as a “pit of vipers,” neglecting to note that his wife had been an active member of the group.)
“What gives people pause is the credentials. That is, wait a minute, this guy went to Princeton and Harvard Law School and you have Alan Dershowitz saying he’s one of the most brilliant students I ever had in 30 years at Harvard Law School, and you’re telling me he sees the world the way Donald Trump does? Is that really credible?” Abrams asked rhetorically.
Cruz also has skillfully kept channels to key neoconservatives open throughout the campaign season. His top foreign policy adviser, Victoria Coates, is a former aide to Donald Rumsfeld and is respected inside the party.
And finally, when compared to Trump's rhetoric about foreign affairs, Cruz is considered the lesser of two evils.
Cruz has sought to position himself as a kind of foreign policy centrist — defined neither by the retreat from foreign entanglement advocated by Rand Paul, nor by the interventionism that brought the Iraq War — though he would compensate with sheer ferocity, promising to “carpet bomb” ISIS to see if “sand can glow in the dark.”
His use of the term “neocon” last year in a Bloomberg interview and on the campaign trail, followed by a Heritage Foundation speech which again criticized hawkish elements and portrayed Cruz as occupying a sensible position in between them and the isolationists, caused a mini-uproar. “Enough with the nutty ‘neocon’ charge, Ted Cruz,” wrote Jonah Goldberg in the New York Post. And one Jewish Republican operative said Cruz’s attack on Trump’s “New York Values” had also rankled. "This New York values thing, I think a lot of right-wing Jews did read that, fairly or not, as he’s talking about the Jews,” the operative said.
But both Abrams and Kristol said they gave Cruz some leeway considering he’s in the midst of a contested primary.
“I‘ve seen people turn out to be somewhat different as president than they said they were going to be when they were running,” said Kristol. “Not because they misled anyone, just because when you’re president things look a little different from when you’re giving speeches in Iowa and New Hampshire and so forth.”
“I think at the end of the day a Ted Cruz administration would follow a foreign policy that I would be pretty happy with,” Kristol said. “I’m more relaxed about Cruz than some of my neoconservative friends.”
Their words represent a real change for a group that has long felt particular warmth for the campaign of Florida Senator Marco Rubio.
“A couple months ago, establishment Republicans were confidently saying, 'No way will we ever support Cruz,’” said a foreign policy-focused conservative operative familiar with the establishment Republican donor and activist world. “But now that they're confronted with reality that Trump could actually be the nominee, suddenly Ted Cruz doesn’t look so bad by comparison."
Ideologically, the GOP foreign policy establishment is more in tune with Rubio or Jeb Bush. Bush, for example, announced a list of heavyweight advisors back when he launched his campaign that includes George W. Bush administration figures such as Paul Wolfowitz and Meghan O’Sullivan. But as both of those candidates struggle in the middle of the pack, a reckoning is underway with reality.
And so Republican foreign policy thinkers are making a serious attempt to understand both frontrunners’ foreign policy views. Some lump Cruz in with Trump when it comes to foreign policy; Max Boot recently argued in Commentary that it’s “possible to detect the outlines of what might be called a Trump-Cruz foreign policy” based on the two candidates’ shared opposition to nation-building, tough rhetoric on terrorism, and immigration hawkishness. But there are key differences that make it an imperfect comparison — Trump, for example, is suspicious of existing American military alliances and is more tolerant of Vladimir Putin. And he has said that the U.S. should be paid for military aid that has long been viewed as strategic.
“But at the end of the day, this should not be a battle of personalities,” Cruz told BuzzFeed News, and added an oblique reference to the Iraq War, and perhaps one to the U.S. intervention in Libya. “The focus should be how do we defend America, how do we keep America safe? We should be willing to learn from the mistakes of the past.”
Earlier that day, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had gone on television and obliquely attacked Cruz, saying that anyone who calls for “carpet bombing” doesn’t know what they are talking about and shows disregard for civilian lives.
Cruz brushed off the criticism, telling BuzzFeed News “I will apologize to nobody for the vigorousness with which I will wage war on Islamic terrorism.” Asked to specify how exactly he would change the current air campaign against ISIS, Cruz said he would “increase it to the level of saturation bombing targeting ISIS” and cited Operation Desert Storm as a model.
“Now folks in the media like to twist that to suggest you’re targeting civilians,” he said. “The United States has never targeted civilians and we’re not going to begin to do so.”
Still, Cruz’s combination of tough talk and his shots at “aggressive neocons” have engendered mistrust among the foreign policy elite. "For the more hawkish wing of the party, it's not that he's burned bridges, which implies permanence,” said the foreign-policy focused conservative operative. “What he has done is sown suspicion and mistrust, a sense that he'll say irresponsible things and attack his friends to gain temporary advantage.”
Cruz’s tough rhetoric, in fact, sometimes obscures a more realist attitude toward, in particular, dictators. Cruz, for example, does not support a policy of regime change in Syria, and he thinks Egypt would be better off under Hosni Mubarak. “Bashar Assad is a bad man,” Cruz told BuzzFeed News. “But if Obama and Clinton, with the support of the establishment Republicans like Marco Rubio, toppled Assad, the result will be that ISIS will take over Syria.”
“The conundrum that Ted Cruz has sort of presented to the foreign policy establishment is that he on the one hand can be quite hawkish, talk a lot about the need for American power and American influence around the globe, but at the same time he can be extremely cautious about how he’s actually going to implement that power,” Cruz national security adviser Victoria Coates said.
“If you go back to his Heritage speech in December, heads were exploding all over town because he had the audacity to invoke [Reagan’s U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.] Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was the queen of the neocons,” Coates said. “But at the same time, that term, he used it more to talk about the interventionists of the last 10 years and specifically said Hillary Clinton, so he was using that term a little bit differently.”
“These efforts to make it an anti-Semitic smear tactic or to be overly critical of the Bush administration, I just don’t think it’s borne out by the rest of what he said in that Bloomberg interview,” Coates said.
For Coates, Cruz stands “closer to Reagan’s twin goals of peace through strength” than the other candidates, who, she said, lean much more heavily on the “strength” side of the dictum or on the “peace” side.
Republican politicians often cite Reagan, and Cruz is characteristically on-message on this point. Asked by BuzzFeed News to cite his greatest foreign policy influence apart from Reagan, Cruz cited Reagan anyway.
“If you ask the question, the answer is Ronald Reagan,” Cruz said. “You might not like that answer, but that is the truth.” Cruz then mentioned his Heritage speech about the “Reagan-Kirkpatrick view of foreign policy” and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who wrote an influential 1979 essay in favor of letting pro-American dictatorships remain in place instead of pushing for regime change.
(Reagan himself didn’t hew to Kirkpatrick’s view on this, and pressured dictators like Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to step down.)
But regardless of differences on specifics, while Trump seems at times to just say whatever comes to mind — “Nobody knows,” Cruz said when asked by BuzzFeed News if Trump has a coherent foreign policy — Cruz is well-versed on the issues and can argue, which makes him easier to grapple with.
“I think most neocons think he’s persuadable and he’s shrewd politically, he had to get the libertarian folks, the Rand Paul folks on board,” said a former Bush administration Pentagon official.
Certainly, there is still hope for a Rubio or Bush resurgence.
“That’s where the neocons will be until the bitter end,” said the former Pentagon official. “Foreign policy people have the worst political instincts.”
“The national security, foreign policy elite establishment has gone with Jeb or with Marco,” said Robert O’Brien, a lawyer and former foreign policy adviser to Scott Walker who is now neutral in the race but has informally advised Cruz and other candidates. If it does come down to a two-person race, O’Brien said, “You’re gonna have some people who go to Trump, some to Cruz. I personally think more of the hawks, the neocons, will go to Cruz than will go to Trump.”
Trey Radel will tell his life story and give a behind-the-scenes look at his time in Congress in a new book for Blue Rider Press.
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
Trey Radel, the congressman from Florida who resigned his seat in 2013 after pleading guilty to cocaine possession, is writing a book offering a behind-the-scenes look at his time in Congress.
The book, which will be announced on Wednesday by Blue Rider Press, the imprint of Penguin Group USA, is expected to heavily revolve around Radel's life story.
"I hope to share my inside look at how Congress works – and sometimes doesn't work— for the American people," Radel said in an announcement on the book. "Look: having grown up in the funeral industry, my earliest days were surrounded by death. While that may sound heavy, it shaped my love of life and created an undying optimism in me, I hope my wild ride can be a learning experience for others."
In 2013, Radel was the target of police sting when law enforcement became aware he bought cocaine on a number of occasions in Washington D.C. The then-congressman was busted attempting to buy 3.5 grams of cocaine, commonly known as an 8-ball, from an undercover police officer.
Radel noted at the time of his arrest that he had struggled with substance abuse for a number of years, and after seeking treatment, ultimately resigned his seat in Congress. Radel has since launched The Trey Radel Media Group, a public relations firm.
Publication for the book is tentatively set for early 2017.
