Facing a prospective tab of more than $1 billion to finance a general-election run for the White House, Donald Trump reversed course Wednesday and said he would actively raise money to ensure his campaign has the resources to compete with Hillary Clinton’s fundraising juggernaut.
His campaign also is beginning to work with the Republican National Committee to set up a joint fundraising committee after his last two rivals—Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich—dropped out in the wake of Trump’s resounding Indiana win on Tuesday.
“I’ll be putting up money, but won’t be completely self-funding,” the presumptive Republican nominee said in an interview Wednesday. Trump, who had largely self-financed his successful primary run, added that he would create a “world-class finance organization.” The campaign will tap his expansive personal Rolodex and a new base of supporters who aren’t on party rolls, two Trump advisers said.
The new plan represents yet another flip-flop for Trump, who has for months portrayed his Republican opponents as “puppets” for relying on super PACs and taking contributions from wealthy donors that he said came with strings attached.
Mr. Trump’s creation of a joint fundraising committee comes eight months behind that of his likely general-election foe, Clinton. She and the Democratic National Committee reached an agreement last August to create the Hillary Victory Fund, which raised more than $60 million through the end of March. Of that, about $13 million has been transferred to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, while nearly $6 million has gone to the DNC.
The former secretary of state raised more than $213 million for her campaign through the end of April, on top of more than $67 million raised by her allied super PACs.
With the many other flip-flops since becoming the Republican party’s nominee, he’s rejected almost every stance that his supporters loved which separated him from the other candidates.
Donald Trump alleged that Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, was with John F. Kennedy’s assassin shortly before he murdered the president. Trump claimed that Rafael Cruz was pictured with Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets in New Orleans in 1963.
His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it. But I think it’s horrible. It’s absolutely horrible.
As the anchor mentioned the photo that allegedly included Cruz, Trump continued:
I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.
Gus Russo, an author and journalist who has written extensively about the JFK assassination and Oswald, is dubious. Russo told [the reporter] in an interview that Oswald, who was living in New Orleans in 1963, was not connected to the Cuban community there and would not have had a Cuban supporter helping him. “He was the ultimate loner,” said Russo. Another man seen in the video handing out leaflets had been hired by Oswald to do so at an unemployment office, according to the Warren Commission. Rafael Cruz also lived in New Orleans, but it was later in the 1960s. As for the photo “evidence,” Russo said, “It’s very subjective. It’s not proof. It’s just an opinion. To charge something this big, you’d better have better proof than that ‘it looks like him.’”
Donald Trump hit back hard Tuesday at Ted Cruz’s father after he made an appeal to “every member of the body of Christ” to vote for his son, and not the “wicked” – calling the comments “disgraceful” and “horrible.”
The Examiner reported that Rafael Cruz had been meeting for days with Indiana pastors, many of whom have since endorsed the Texas senator.
Speaking with the head of the American Family Association of Indiana, the elder Cruz had warned of the “wicked electing the wicked” and urged fellow Christians to come out to vote.
I implore, I exhort every member of the body of Christ to vote according to the word of God, and vote for the candidate that stands on the word of God and on the Constitution of the United States of America. And I am convinced that man is my son, Ted Cruz. The alternative could be the destruction of America.
But Trump unleashed on the Cuban-born Rafael Cruz, a pastor, after he made his religious appeal to Indiana and other voters to support his son in the Republican presidential nominating contest. Indiana is voting Tuesday.
I think it’s a disgrace that he’s allowed to do it. I think it’s a disgrace that he’s allowed to say it … You look at so many of the ministers that are backing me, and they’re backing me more so than they’re backing Cruz, and I’m winning the evangelical vote. It’s disgraceful that his father can go out and do that. And just — and so many people are angry about it. And the evangelicals are angry about it, the way he does that. But I think it’s horrible. I think it’s absolutely horrible that a man can go and do that, what he’s saying there.
In a sharp turn, the Republican presidential front-runner then abruptly invoked a tabloid story about Rafael Cruz’s supposed connection to John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
Trump has made the statement before that people shouldn’t be “allowed” to say negative things about him and that he would like to limit the freedom for people who disagree with him through litigation.
Also by claiming that Pastor Rafael Cruz shouldn’t preach about supporting a candidate (who happens to be his son) is the definition of a double-standard in the purest sense. Trump has had support from so many pastors who have used their position as a church leader to publicly preach about voting for Donald Trump that a new word was coined, “Trumpvangelicals“. These include Mike Murdock, Paula White, Robert Jeffress, and Joel Osteen, join the list of Kenneth Copeland, and 40 others who met with Trump at Trump Tower in September 2015.
At Trump’s Cleveland rally, Pastor Darrell Scott of New Spirit Revival Center Ministries performed a sermon to introduce Trump to the stage. Pastor Scott called Trump humble, blamed “liberal media for brainwashing” you for thinking Trump could possibly be an out-and-out racist, and directed people to vote for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump’s march to the GOP nomination picked up steam last week, with dominant primary victories in the northeast.
After the wins, several news outlets reported that the New York billionaire could break the record for most Republican primary votes in history — if Trump scores big in Indiana, New Jersey and California. Those states have yet to vote.
Trump, apparently not wanting to wait, declared he’s already achieved the voting record.
“In the history of Republican primaries, I’ve gotten the most votes in the history of the Republican party,” Trump said during his speech on Friday, April 29 at the California Republican Party Convention south of San Francisco.
Trump went on to say he’s broken the record without needing to wait for big states like California.
Reality
Donald Trump said he’s already earned the most Republican primary votes in history. However Politifact contacted Eric Ostermeier, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota and founder of the number-crunching blog Smart Politics, has taken a look at the data.
“He is on pace to break the record, but he hasn’t yet,” Ostermeier told PolitiFact California. “I’ve seen no possible configuration of numbers that show he’s already broken it.”
Ostermeier placed Trump’s primary vote total at about 10 million so far. That’s still short of the 10.8 million votes George W. Bush received in the 2000 GOP primaries.
If one counts both primaries and caucuses, Trump would still be short of Bush’s overall tally, the professor said. Bush’s total is considered closer to 12 million if both types of elections are counted, he said.
Ostermeier estimated Trump would likely achieve the primary vote record if he earns a strong win in California’s primary, where he could pick up more than a million additional primary votes. He said Trump’s large vote totals can be attributed to the relatively close match-up he’s had with Cruz late into the primary season.
Several news articles, including by the Washington Post and Politico, used primary vote totals logged by RealClearPolitics.com. Its data show Trump has yet to break the record.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to our request for comment.
During his speech at the Pacific Amphitheater in Orange County, California, Donald Trump made the claim that there was 31,000 in attendance. Trump later tweeted his claim.
Trump claims there were 31,000 people in attendance, however the Pacific Amphitheater can only hold 8,000. OC Weekly, which has covered events at the Amphitheater for the past 20 years, called his claim, “full of crap“.
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump lashed out at what he called the party’s “rigged” delegate selection rules on Monday after rival Ted Cruz swept all of Colorado’s 34 delegates over the weekend.
The New York billionaire, who has been outmaneuvered by Cruz in a series of recent state meetings to select national convention delegates, said the process was set up to protect party insiders and shut out insurgent candidates.
“The system is rigged, it’s crooked.”
Trump said on Fox News on Monday, alleging the Colorado convention results showed voters were being denied a voice in the process.
“There was no voting. I didn’t go out there to make a speech or anything, there’s no voting. The people out there are going crazy, in the Denver area and Colorado itself, and they’re going absolutely crazy because they weren’t given a vote. This was given by politicians – it’s a crooked deal.”
Again at a rally in Rome, NY, he accused party leaders of maneuvering to cut his supporters out of the process:
“Our Republican system is absolutely rigged. It’s a phony deal,” “They wanted to keep people out. This is a dirty trick.”
Trump has 743 bound delegates to 545 for Cruz, according to an Associated Press count, in the battle for the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination on the first ballot and avoid a messy floor fight at the Republican National Convention from July 18-21.
But both are at risk of not acquiring enough delegates for a first-ballot victory, leaving many free to switch their votes on later ballots.
That has set off a fierce scramble by Republican candidates to get their supporters chosen as convention delegates and brought new scrutiny to the selection rules, which vary by state.
Trump, who has brought in veteran strategist Paul Manafort to lead his delegate-gathering efforts, complained about Cruz’s recent success at local and state party meetings where activists pick the actual delegates who will attend the national convention.
Trump accused Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas, of trying to steal delegates in South Carolina. Trump won the state primary in February, but Cruz supporters got four of the first six delegate slots filled at congressional district meetings on Saturday, according to local media.
Cruz also succeeded at getting more of his supporters chosen as delegates in Iowa, where he won the caucuses in January, and at last week’s state convention in North Dakota.
We are unable to locate the chapter in “Art of the Deal” where it instructs you how to whine after you lose.
Trump being surprised about the nomination process, that has currently given him the lead, is an example of how unfamiliar with the process he knows and how unprepared he is.
To put it in more general terms; How Trump is complaining about the nomination process is analogous to listening to someone completely unfamiliar with baseball who is watching a game for the first time:
“Why did that guy run to a base when the batter didn’t hit that ball! It’s called stealing? That’s not fair!”
“I thought there was only four fouls! That guy got more! This game is rigged!”
“Well if that fielder made an error he should get another try. It’s only fair.”
Perhaps a video like this could help him.
Trump has a pattern of claiming fraud when an election does not go his way, like when he claimed voter fraud after losing Iowa. And his critics say this kind of misdirection is his specialty. By blaming the process rather than his own inadequacies as a manager, Mr. Trump is trying to shift focus after Senator Ted Cruz of Texas outmaneuvered him in delegate contests in states like Colorado, North Dakota and Iowa, losses that could end up denying Mr. Trump the nomination.
Chairman of the Republican National Committee Reince Priebus has spent the past few days pushing back over Twitter.
Nomination process known for a year + beyond. It's the responsibility of the campaigns to understand it. Complaints now? Give us all a break
However there might be a tactical reason for Trump’s attacks on the Republican primary process. Every time Donald Trump attacks the establishment he strengthens his position as an “outsider” candidate, which plays to his supporters. So there is no downside in the primary for attacking the nomination process to a group largely unaware of how it works.
During a Wisconsin Town Hall with Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren, Trump again repeated comments long debunked, and never addressing those criticisms.
On immigration, Trump says he is “totally in favor of immigration” but people have to come in legally. He says he will build a wall and Mexico will pay for it. “It’ll be so easy,”
To much applause from the Fox News audience, Trump went on to claim it would take around $10 billion to build.
The claim that he can use a trade deficit with Mexico to force them to pay for a wall should enlighten you that Donald Trump does not understand how the world works. A trade deficit, which is also referred to as net exports, is an economic condition that occurs when a country is importing more goods than it is exporting.
The deficit equals the value of goods being imported minus the value of goods being exported, and it is given in the currency of the country in question. For example, assume that the United States imports from Mexico $800 billion dollars worth of goods, while exporting to Mexico only $750 billion dollars. In this example, the trade deficit, or net exports, with Mexico would be $50 million dollars.
In our example the holder of that $50 million dollars is the private (and probably some public) companies operating in Mexico, not the Mexican government. Essentially Trump is demanding that the Mexican government to pay for a wall with money that he should know it doesn’t have ownership of.
After multiple polls continue to come to the conclusion that he has a massive unfavorable rating with women, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is lashing out at media coverage of his treatment of women in a series of tweets that culminated in the statement:
“The media is so after me on women. Wow, this is a tough business,” Trump tweeted Saturday. “Nobody has more respect for women than Donald Trump!”
The tweets include:
"@Tytan01: Dear @CNN, after doing a quick Google & Twitter search there are over 15,000 women's groups supporting DonaldTrump. Stop Lying."
Yes Donald Trump, it’s the media fault and all of your own comments where you disrespected women have nothing to do with this. Here are just a few examples where it was the media’s fault:
When you joked that Hillary got “shlonged” in 2008.
Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump managed to squeeze a public job interview into a news conference at the site of his upcoming hotel in Washington, D.C.
A woman in the crowd introduced herself as a 9/11 survivor and a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and voiced support for his plans for the U.S. military. Then she asked if work at the Trump International Hotel would be available to veterans.
“What are you talking about here? We are doing some of that actually already,” Trump responded. “We have it very much involved. Why what are you looking for? What kind of a position?”
The real estate magnate invited the woman up to the podium to conduct a job interview for a position at the forthcoming hotel.“So what’s your experience in front of the world?” he asked.
The woman replied, “Well I design. I do wreaths. I do all types of decorations.”
“And you like this building?” Trump said. “So here’s what I’m going to do. There’s the man.”
Trump directed the woman to one of his associates while telling the crowd, “If we can make a good deal on the salary, she’s gonna probably have a job.”
Later on, a reporter pointed out that it’s “pretty remarkable” that Trump just offered a job to a complete stranger and asked what inside his gut led him to that decision.
“I felt good about her. I’ll tell you what, I looked at her, I said she, you know, I have gut instincts, OK? And we’re allowed to have that,” Trump said. “And I looked at her and she asked a question and it was a very positive question… she just seemed like a good person to me.”
He said that maybe she won’t qualify for a position but he thinks she will.
Reality
It was a totally staged publicity stunt.
The reporter who praised Donald Trump’s military policy and inquired about veterans jobs was not a member of the press. Yet somehow, Alicia Watkins, a retired Air Force staff sergeant who has appeared on Oprah, was given media credentials by the Trump campaign and permitted to ask a question of the candidate, a question that (surprise!) turned into an impromptu job interview.
The Trump campaign, which handled credentials for the press conference, initially told CNNMoney that Watkins worked for “a site called Troops Media which focuses on military and veterans issues.”
Later that afternoon Dylan Byers of CNNMoney tweeted that Troops Media did not seem to exist.
When told that there was no evidence of any such site on the Internet, the Trump campaign said it would look into the matter.
CNNMoney then received a call from a woman who identified herself as Alicia Watkins who said she would send an email explaining “why Troop Media is no longer on the Internet as of today.”
The woman, who said her phone was about to run out of battery, hung up while being asked if she still wanted to identify herself as a reporter. The woman called from a blocked number and did not leave any contact information. The promised email has yet to arrive.
When Stop The Donald Trump looked into Troops Media, we can confirm that Troops Media does not exist. We did find a blog called http://troopsmedia.blogspot.com/ with nothing on it except a post from January 5, 2016 stating the blog is rebuilding after a hacker attack. No cached pages can be found on search engines, so it cannot be determined if the site had any content before January 5th. And finally no blogger.com profile id could be retrieved to help identify the owner.
Donald Trump finally shared the name of someone he consults on foreign policy: himself. Asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” who he talks with consistently about foreign policy, Trump responded:
“I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”
“I know what I’m doing and I listen to a lot of people, I talk to a lot of people and at the appropriate time I’ll tell you who the people are,” Trump said. “But my primary consultant is myself and I have a good instinct for this stuff.”
The New York real estate mogul has kept mum on his foreign policy team, despite promising in early February to release a list of his advisers in “about two weeks.”
Trump was also asked on Wednesday morning if his foreign policy was “neoisolationist,” to which he responded “I wouldn’t say that at all.”
Reality
As evidence, Trump claimed he had predicted the rise of Osama bin Laden, a statement which was a total absolute lie.
