Donald Trump continues battle with GOP leaders
A feisty and unscripted Donald Trump traveled to a pair of battleground states on Saturday, assailing not just his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, but members of his own party.
“I’ve had more opposition from the Republican Party than I do from the Democrats,” Trump, drawing boos from supporters, said at a rally in Tampa, Fla. “The Republican Party has to be tough and has to be smart. And if they’re not tough and smart, I’m going to win, but a lot of other people won’t.”
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, battled with members of his party’s establishment – many enraged by his inflammatory rhetoric about, among others, Mexicans, women and Muslims.
In recent days, Trump has faced backlash for his comments directed at a Latino judge overseeing fraud litigation against the now-defunct Trump University. Trump said the ethnicity of U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over the suit, should disqualify him from the case.
Several Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), condemned the comments as racist and some even withdrew endorsements.
At a Republican retreat hosted by 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney on Saturday, Meg Whitman, chief executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, who ran a failed California gubernatorial bid in 2010, questioned Ryan’s endorsement of Trump. Whitman said Trump is the latest in a long line of historic demagogues, comparing him to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, according to the Washington Post.
Romney said Friday that a Trump presidency would lead to “trickle-down racism.”
“I don’t want to see a president of the United States saying things which change the character of the generations of Americans that are following,” Romney said on CNN, reiterating that he will not support Trump in November. ”Presidents have an impact on the nature of our nation, and trickle-down racism, trickle-down bigotry, trickle-down misogyny, all these things are extraordinarily dangerous to the heart and character of America.”
Trump, who on the heels of his Florida rally traveled to the suburbs of Pittsburgh, shot back on Saturday, saying he was not a racist and that Romney “choked like a dog” against President Obama in 2012.
As for Clinton, Trump, said a “war” is on the horizon with the former secretary of State.
“We have a war to win against a very crooked politician named Hillary Clinton, OK?” he said in Tampa. “The Republican Party really should get their act together, they have to come together. We’ve got to win.”
Democrats worried about infighting should remember they’ve been through it before
After all the worrying among Democrats about Bernie Sanders and his supporters going rogue in the general election and refusing to rally behind a nominee who embodies the establishment politics they detest, those concerns are fading rapidly as the presidential primaries wind to a close.
Unity does not look nearly as elusive for the party this year as it did at the end of the bitter primary campaign in 2008, and it is in no small part because the two candidates who went through the bruising process then found themselves in the middle of it again this year. President Obama and Hillary Clinton were determined to see it go more smoothly this time.
The two painstakingly planned how to go about drawing in Sanders supporters before the nomination race was even over. It helped that they had Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), herself a leader of the progressive movement like Sanders, to go along with them. And it helped even more that the alternative to Clinton in November is Donald Trump, a Republican candidate who horrifies even the most steadfast Clinton skeptics on the left.
The race for 270 - who will win?
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will compete in a handful of states in order to win the necessary 270 electoral votes in the general election -- so what states are important?
Check out this Los Angeles Times graphic.
Donald Trump moves to block the release of his video testimony in university lawsuit
Attorneys for Donald Trump are seeking to block the filing of a portion of his video-recorded deposition in a class-action lawsuit by former Trump University students, a move that could prevent the public release of the videos, according to a court document filed Friday.
If made public, the videos could be a powerful weapon in campaign advertisements targeting Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, as he faces off against Hillary Clinton in the general election, experts say.
A partial transcript of Trump’s testimony, which took place in December and January, has already been released at the order of U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel. But the video would illuminate Trump’s remarks in a way that words on a page cannot, said Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.