“I feel confident that Hillary will be the nominee, and I feel confident she’ll be the next president.”
— Vice President Joe Biden, in an interview with ABC News.
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Trump Gives Sanders a Nickname
Politico notes that Donald Trump unveiled a new moniker for yet another political adversary: “Crazy Bernie.”
Said Trump: “Big wins in West Virginia and Nebraska. Get ready for November – Crooked Hillary, who is looking very bad against Crazy Bernie, will lose!”
Trump Won’t Invest In Campaign Data
Donald Trump told the Associated Press that he “does not plan to invest heavily in a data-driven effort to target voters in the fall campaign … spurning the kind of sophisticated data operation that was a centerpiece of Barack Obama’s winning White House runs.”
Said Trump: “I’ve always felt it was overrated. Obama got the votes much more so than his data processing machine. And I think the same is true with me.”
Is It Safe to Eat Your Words?
“Dana Milbank will fulfill a promise tomorrow and eat one of his Washington Post columns, after wrongly predicting that Trump would never win the GOP nomination. So reporters at STAT wondered, just what does eating 18 inches of newsprint do to your insides — and is there actually any nutritional value?”
Why Trump Won’t Make Peace with GOP Leaders
Dan Balz: “Trump is an unpredictable presidential candidate, predictable only in the sense that what he says one day can change the next. Whatever reassurances he might try to offer in the face-to-face meetings — and Trump knows how to be charming in his personal encounters — could easily be washed away by his determination to keep running the way he has run throughout the primaries, as a political provocateur of no fixed ideology.”
“Trump’s constituency is not that of the GOP leaders. His voters distrust Republican congressional leaders, almost as much as they dislike President Obama. Trump has had near-perfect pitch with the resentment emanating from a portion of the electorate. In fact, he has fed the anger with his calls to build a wall between the United States and Mexico and to shut down U.S. borders to Muslims seeking to enter the country. Any effort to modulate his style as a way to try to satisfy the wishes of party leaders comes with the risk of lessening the enthusiasm of his core constituency.”
Paul Ryan’s Predicament
Politico: “So here’s the House speaker’s play, according to multiple people in Ryan’s inner circle: he wants Trump to understand where he is coming from. Ryan wants to try to steer the party’s national political dialogue — as embodied by Trump’s barbed rhetoric — in a better direction. He wants an open line of communication between his operation and Trump’s. He isn’t going to try to extract policy concessions from Trump — he understands they are unlikely to ever agree on trade or immigration — but he wants some recognition that Ryan has 247 members of the House that need to be re-elected, and they can’t do so while wincing through the general election in November.”
“It might work, it might not. Ryan could endorse Trump at some point — but there are no guarantees. His posture: at least I tried to make things work.”
Quote of the Day
“Well this is the ultimate reality show, it’s the presidency of the United States.”
— Paul Manafort, quoted by The Hill, on whether the GOP convention will resemble a reality television show.
Cruz Has a Choice to Make
Washington Post: “This week, the Texas senator returns to his day job on Capitol Hill facing a decision that carries perhaps just as much weight: whether to continue being an obstructor to official Washington or to try to work within official Washington.”
“What tack Cruz decides to take could shape his political future. There are political benefits to Cruz if he doubles down on the brand that Washington loves to hate, and there are plenty of benefits to him if he makes friends in this town after the failure of a presidential campaign without them.”
“Cruz’s reputation, after all, is what brought him to the dance. But his lack of likability wound up hurting him toward the end.”
Trump Claims a Mandate to be Provocative
Donald Trump’s “behavior in recent days — the political threats to the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan; the name-calling on Twitter; the attacks on Hillary Clinton’s marriage — has deeply puzzled Republicans who expected him to move to unite the party, start acting presidential and begin courting the female voters he will need in the general election,” the New York Times reports.
“But Mr. Trump’s choices reflect an unusual conviction: He said he had a ‘mandate’ from his supporters to run as a fiery populist outsider and to rely on his raucous rallies to build support through “word of mouth,” rather than to embrace a traditional, mellower and more inclusive approach that congressional Republicans will advocate in meetings with him on Thursday.”
Sanders Wins West Virginia and Prolongs Race
Sen. Bernie Sanders “captured the West Virginia primary on Tuesday, forcing Hillary Clinton to continue a costly and distracting two-front battle: to lock down the Democratic nomination and to take on Donald J. Trump in the general election,” the New York Times reports.
“Mrs. Clinton has a nearly insurmountable lead in delegates, which Mr. Sanders’s victory, one week after he won Indiana, did little to narrow. But by staying in the race, as he has vowed to do until the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in July, Mr. Sanders continues to tug Mrs. Clinton to the left.”
Brazil Moves to Impeach President
“After months of public tirades, secret maneuvering and legal appeals, the effort to impeach President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil is heading toward an outcome on Wednesday, when the nation’s Senate begins voting on whether to suspend her and put her on trial,” the New York Times reports.
“The vote is a watershed in the power struggle that has consumed Brazil, a country that experienced a rare stretch of stability over the last two decades as it strengthened its economy and achieved greater prominence on the world stage.”
Trump Would Like to Keep Ryan as Convention Chair
Donald Trump said he would “love” for House Speaker Paul Ryan to remain as chairman of the Republican National Convention this summer in Cleveland, Politico reports.
“Trump and Ryan are scheduled to meet Thursday to try and squash tensions that broke into public view last week when the House speaker said he was not ready to endorse the presumptive GOP nominee. In response, Trump then said he was ‘not ready to support Speaker Ryan’s agenda.'”
Trump Blames Computer Error for Delegate Mix-Up
Donald Trump’s campaign that “a computer problem resulted in a prominent white nationalist being mistakenly included on a list of his potential California delegates, an embarrassment for a candidate who has been criticized before for being too slow to distance himself from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke,” the AP reports.
“The campaign said in a statement that the name has been withdrawn and a corrected list resubmitted to state officials.”
Tonight’s Primary Results
There are primaries in Nebraska and West Virginia today.
GOP Megadonor Denounces Trump
Paul Singer, one of the Republican party’s most influential donors, signaled that he will support neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton in the November election, National Review reports.
Singer said that it’s unclear what Trump stands for and characterized his views as a “blizzard” of contradictions.
Texas GOP Chair Accused of ‘Homosexual Agenda’
The race for chairman of the Texas Republican Party has spawned charges that the party’s current leader, Tom Mechler, supports a “disgusting homosexual agenda,” the Dallas Morning News reports.
“A supporter of Jared Woodfill, a Houston lawyer and former chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, has sent out campaign mailers blasting Mechler for allowing a gay and lesbian GOP group to have a booth at the upcoming state convention and not doing enough to move the event out of Dallas, which they call a ‘homosexual friendly location.'”
Trump’s Veep Shortlist Down to 5 or 6
Donald Trump told the Associated Press that he has whittled down his list of potential running mates to “five or six people.”
He says he has not ruled out New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former rival who has embraced the billionaire’s campaign with gusto.
