Donald Trump will try to work his magic on wary Republican lawmakers
Donald Trump arrives Thursday on Capitol Hill for a Republican congressional confab that’s looking more like a showdown than a kumbaya moment for the party’s presumed presidential nominee.
Billed as an opportunity to unify the GOP after a blistering primary season, the morning meet-and-greets will be anything but that.
House Speaker Paul Ryan has surprised many by refusing to endorse Trump. Their open friction led to speculation earlier this week that Ryan might not serve as chairman of the Republican National Convention this summer, though Trump said Wednesday morning he hoped Ryan would.
Don’t expect to see Donald Trump’s tax returns this election cycle
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, does not plan to release his tax returns ahead of the November general election — a move that’s drawing scorn from Democrats and Republicans alike.
“There’s nothing to learn from them,” the billionaire real estate mogul told the Associated Press this week.
Trump cited an ongoing audit of his finances as his reasoning for not releasing the returns.
While campaigning in New Jersey on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, raised questions about Trump’s refusal to release his tax information.
“When you run for president, especially when you become the nominee, that is kind of expected,” Clinton said. “My husband and I have released 33 years of tax returns.”
Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, detailed $27.9 million in adjusted gross income in 2014, and $3 million in charitable gifts, based on recent tax returns.
Earlier this year, Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee and a staunch critic of Trump, raised questions about Trump’s tax returns.
“I think we have good reason to believe that there’s a bombshell in Donald Trump’s taxes,” Romney said on Fox News. “Either he’s not anywhere near as wealthy as he says he is, or he hasn’t been paying the kind of taxes we would expect him to pay.”
Bernie Sanders loses his California director
Bernie Sanders’ plan to win an upset victory in California was dealt another setback Wednesday when the staffer directing all of the insurgent’s California operations left the campaign.
California state director Michael Ceraso, who has been working with the Sanders campaign since the early days of the race, parted ways with it on Wednesday. The Sanders campaign did not respond to questions about the reasoning for the staff change.
In a two-sentence email, spokesman Michael Briggs wrote the position has been taken over by Robert Becker, who was the campaign’s state director in Iowa.
“Becker is one of the most seasoned and savvy people working on our campaign,” Briggs wrote.
The news was first reported by Politico.
Ceraso’s departure comes as Sanders faces a fundraising slowdown that already threatened to severely diminish his impact with voters in California. Sanders told the Sacramento Bee this week that he may not do any television advertising in the state.
While Sanders has drawn spirited crowds at large rallies in California, he has struggled to match front-runner Hillary Clinton in campaign infrastructure. Most of the state’s seasoned Democratic operatives who are involved in the race are working with Clinton.
Sanders has relied more heavily on progressive activists with experience organizing in California, including leaders of the National Nurses United union. They have helped him draw large crowds to events. But catching Clinton in the biggest state in the country will prove difficult without a robust advertising campaign and an extensive, well-organized ground game.
Donald Trump would ‘love’ for Paul Ryan to remain as convention chairman
Donald Trump wants Paul Ryan to stay as the Republican National Convention chairman, he said Tuesday night.
Despite jabs exchanged in the past week between the House speaker and the presumptive nominee, Trump found himself defending both his relationship with Ryan and Ryan’s dedication to the Republican Party.
“I’d love, frankly, for him to stay and be chairman,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Ryan offered to step down as convention chairman on Monday, but Trump argued that Republicans need to consider what’s good for the party. That means unifying to win.
Trump and Ryan will meet face to face Thursday and are expected to discuss their comments from last week about not supporting each other.
“I have a lot of respect for Paul, and I think we’re going to have a very good meeting, I hope,” Trump said.
Marco Rubio: A Clinton-Trump matchup presents a ‘quandary’ for voters
Marco Rubio will uphold his pledge to support the nominee, but refused to formally endorse Donald Trump as the Republican candidate in a Wednesday interview.
“Whether we like it or not, he has earned the right to make his case to the American people,” the Florida senator and former Republican presidential candidate said on NBC’s “Today.” “He earned it at the ballot box, and I’ll respect that.”
Rubio said he still has reservations and disagreements with Trump on behavior and policy, but he added he doesn’t want to spend the next six months before the general election fighting the presumptive nominee.
When asked whether he plans to cast a vote for Trump, Rubio skated around the question. He called the choice between Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton and Trump in a potential general election a “quandary” for voters. An abstention, though, will automatically offer support for Clinton, he argued.
“I’m even more scared about [Clinton] being in control of the U.S. government,’’ Rubio said. “I think it’s pretty clear that this is the position obviously I didn’t want us to be in. Donald Trump obviously wasn’t my first choice.”
Bernie Sanders wins West Virginia and vows to stay in Democratic race ‘until the last vote is cast’
Bernie Sanders renewed his commitment to campaign “until the last vote is cast” in the Democratic presidential race, saying his victory in Tuesday’s West Virginia primary showed economically distressed voters “want real change.”
Sanders, the Vermont senator, appeared headed toward a solid win in the night’s lone Democratic contest, a result that pointed to the liabilities of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s candidacy heading into the general election.
Republican Donald Trump cruised to victory in Nebraska and West Virginia, contests sapped of any drama after a succession of make-or-break primaries in recent weeks cleared the GOP field. But exit polls in both states indicated some voter concern about Republican unity heading into the fall, underscoring the reservations about Trump expressed by party leaders in Washington.
Now Ann Coulter likes Donald Trump so much she’s writing a book, ‘In Trump We Trust’
Ann Coulter has never been one to shy away from controversy. The conservative author has urged America to bring back literacy tests and poll taxes for voters, referred to Muslims with a racist slur and has suggested that soccer brings about “moral decay.”
So on the one hand, it’s not surprising that she’s found her political soulmate in Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee with a penchant for making controversial statements.
Coulter will release a new book praising the candidate, “In Trump We Trust: The New American Revolution,” this summer, her publisher Sentinel announced.
“In Trump We Trust” will be Coulter’s 12th book. Her previous work includes “Godless: The Church of Liberalism,” “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama” and “Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole.”