I am preoccupied with Trump, and what he means for our nation. He is single-handedly destroying the Republican Party. We haven’t seen a political party collapse in this country in well over a century. It’s happening now. Institutions that are strong don’t collapse overnight. I don’t know that even Trump saw the rot in the GOP. But it was rotten, and that’s why it’s collapsing.
A Clinton email leaked by a Romanian hacker in March 2013 reveals that French and Libyan intelligence agencies had evidence that the Benghazi attacks were funded by Saudi Arabia. The four emails, released by a hacker calling himself Guccifer, were sent between Hillary Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal – a close friend and adviser to the Clinton family who worked in an unofficial capacity on intelligence matters to Hillary Clinton during her time as Secretary of State.
Republican leaders have given Donald Trump a ferocious pounding over the past week, and have come away with very little to show for their efforts. The Republican front-runner matched or outperformed his polling in the states voting last night, while establishment favorite Marco Rubio saw his support collapse. As anxious anti-Trump eyes turn towards the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the RNC’s rules are turning against them.
The Democratic Party fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders—one likely to extend through the very last primaries if not all the way to the convention—might be compared to the contest between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford in 1976. A beloved movement figure is taking on an exhausted yet entrenched establishment, running much better than anyone expected. But like Reagan, even in defeat, Sanders clearly represents the future of the party.
If 2012 was the presidential election in which data-driven journalism really came into its own, the 2016 Republican nomination contest has been the one in the conventional wisdom has continually been shattered.
Donald Trump has been the bane of everyone from data geeks like Nate Silver and the New York Times’s Nate Cohn to more old school analysts like Ron Brownstein of National Journal. The former television star’s unorthodox background and brash demeanor has upended the conventional wisdom about how American political parties’ nominations are determined.