Blog: Latest Reports from The Washington Posts ‘Plum Line’

Top Democrats to Sanders: Don’t drop out. But tone it down.

Now that Donald Trump has the GOP nomination wrapped around his stubby little finger, should Bernie Sanders get out and let Hillary Clinton and Democrats focus all their energy on turning to the general election? With John Kasich and Ted Cruz dropping out, that means Trump will likely face a far less contentious GOP convention […]

The GOP awakens to a Trump nightmare come true

THE MORNING PLUM: Only 12 hours after Donald Trump effectively sealed the GOP nomination with his big Indiana win, the presumptive GOP nominee immediately reminded Republicans that the nightmare otherwise known as Trumpism — from which they had hoped to awaken — is now all too real. On Morning Joe today, Trump doubled down on […]

Happy Hour Roundup
* Caitlin MacNeal reports that Ted Cruz has just about had it with Donald Trump: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) seemed to hit a personal breaking point Tuesday, going off on Donald Trump and calling on Indiana voters to save the country from the current Republican presidential frontrunner. Heading into the make-or-break Indiana primary, Cruz did […]

A top adviser to Bernie Sanders makes a key concession about the race

Bernie Sanders vows that the Democratic convention in Philadelphia will be “contested.” He means that neither he nor Hillary Clinton can win a majority of delegates to the convention through winning pledged delegates alone, so super-delegates will have to ultimately decide the outcome. Sanders will compete for those super-delegates, even if he trails in the […]

The unification of the GOP has begun at last

As everyone knows, the GOP is a party at war with itself, riven by resentments and anger, destined to be divided all the way to November. Right? Well maybe not so much. The resentments and anger are still there, and it surely is an unhappy band of allies. But the unification of the Republican Party […]

Trump says beating Clinton will be ‘easy.’ He’s delusional. Literally.

THE MORNING PLUM: If the polls are right, Donald Trump will deal the Never Trump forces a potentially fatal blow in Indiana today, and Hillary Clinton will divide the state’s delegates with Bernie Sanders — reinforcing the sense that Trump and Clinton are hurtling towards an epic general election battle. Trump is very excited about […]

Happy Hour Roundup
* Steve Peoples and Jill Colvin report on the gaping void at the heart of the Trump campaign: The Republican presidential nomination may be in his sights, yet Donald Trump has so far ignored vital preparations needed for a quick and effective transition to the general election. The New York businessman has collected little information […]

Why Trump’s ‘woman card’ attack on Clinton is sheer lunacy

I have no idea what kind of discussions go on when Donald Trump is talking to his campaign advisers, though I suspect there’s a lot of “You were terrific, Mr. Trump!” and “That’s a great idea, Mr. Trump!” But it’s hard not to wonder what they’re telling him about how enthusiastically he’s been going after […]

Republicans are digging themselves into a deeper hole with Latinos (again)

Barely three years after the 2012 election led Republicans to vow to fix their problems with Latino voters, they are on the verge of nominating someone who (at best!) rules out legalization for the 11 million forever (Ted Cruz), or (at worst!) has promised to carry out mass deportations and describes Mexican immigrants as rapists […]

Bernie Sanders insists he can still win. The math says otherwise.

THE MORNING PLUM: Bernie Sanders has now threatened perhaps more directly than ever before to take the Dem nominating contest all the way to the floor of the convention in Philadelphia in July, arguing that while this may be a real long shot, he can still win the nomination by flipping super-delegates to his side. […]

Sunday Open Thread
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Open Thread
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Happy Hour Roundup
* Ted Cruz has finally found the magic formula for stopping Donald Trump: As Senator Ted Cruz of Texas seeks every possible edge to stop Donald J. Trump, he has seized on a once-obscure issue with a proven power to inflame conservatives: letting transgender women use women’s bathrooms. Mr. Cruz mentions it constantly in Indiana, […]

Stop sneering at Bernie Sanders

Kevin Drum, in what he admits is an attempt to “provoke,” explains why he never warmed to Bernie Sanders. It isn’t just that he is offering “skimpy” policy proposals — worse, he’s basically running a scam on his voters that could end up harming progressivism: If you want to make a difference in this country, […]

Trump’s strategy for beating Clinton among female voters: Humiliation

THE MORNING PLUM: Top Republicans appear increasingly resigned to Donald Trump as their nominee, and a number of them are morbidly wondering just how extensive a down-ballot disaster his candidacy will unleash for the party, in a pondering-the-iceberg-from-the-decks-of-the-Titanic kind of way. Here’s something that might not inspire any additional confidence: The New York Times reports […]

Happy Hour Roundup

* Donald Trump has apparently decided that this sexism thing is working great for him: A day after his chief rival picked a woman as a running mate, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump defended comments he made about Hillary Clinton playing “the woman card” saying the Democrat couldn’t even win a local election if she […]

Trump presents himself as a scourge of the elites. That won’t last.

Buzzfeed reports that Paul Manafort, who is Donald Trump’s new rhetorical, political and procedural fixer, said today that Trump has not decided yet whether he will accept money from big donors as the GOP presidential nominee: “The point that Donald Trump has been making on the campaign trail is that he’s financing his own campaign,” […]

Trump and Clinton are telling two radically different stories about the economy. Only one is based in reality.

In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, there’s an interview with President Obama in which he assesses his economic legacy, and as you might expect, he has a complicated view of things. He thinks his administration did an excellent job pulling us out of the Great Recession: “I actually compare our economic performance to how, […]

The end is near: Clinton and Sanders camps quietly signal resolution

THE MORNING PLUM: The signs are everywhere this morning: The Clinton and Sanders camps are now signaling how the Democratic primaries might wind down without too much noise, contentiousness, disruption, and anger. Could things still get very ugly? Yes. But at this point, that’s looking less likely than the alternative. In an interview with me, […]

Happy Hour Roundup

* The Ted Cruz presidency is getting more and more appealing all the time: Ted Cruz, in an apparent act of desperation, announced Wednesday that Carly Fiorina will be his vice presidential running mate if he is the Republican nominee for president. Announcing a running mate is an unusual step that comes as he trails […]

The Trump Doctrine

If you want to try to make sense of Donald Trump’s big foreign policy speech today — and that isn’t easy to do — it’s worth going back and reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s remarkable cover package for the Atlantic, which is entitled “The Obama Doctrine.” Goldberg conducts a series of long interviews with the president, and […]

The coming struggle over policy between Donald Trump and the GOP

Now that Donald Trump has nearly secured the GOP presidential nomination, Republicans everywhere have to start thinking seriously about how they’re going to deal with him and how having him as their party’s leader affects their own plans for the future. And here’s the basic challenge that will create for Republicans: How can they keep […]

Donald Trump tries to project strength, but reveals his brittle glass jaw

THE MORNING PLUM: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton rolled to big victories in last night’s primaries, stomping towards their respective nominations and boosting the odds of a Trump-Clinton showdown this fall. Trump swept all five states, and Clinton won four of them, rendering Bernie Sanders’s odds all but impossible — and both leading candidates are […]

Happy Hour Roundup

* Kenneth Vogel and Eli Stokols report that there’s trouble in Trumpland: Donald Trump is bristling at efforts to implement a more conventional presidential campaign strategy, and has expressed misgivings about the political guru behind them, Paul Manafort, for overstepping his bounds, multiple sources close to the campaign tell POLITICO. Trump became upset late last […]

A top Clinton supporter explains how how Hillary and Bernie can make peace

As the bad feelings between the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders camps continue to get worse, one person worth keeping an eye on is Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio. He is a Clinton supporter, but he also has a great deal of credibility among economic progressives — he supports breaking up the big banks and […]