The show is LIVE from Concord, NH. Join the panel for a special edition of Morning Joe! Everyone can send in questions for Governor Chris Christie!
There were no killings or capturing of any Dolphins today/yesterday in Taji, Japan.
RICHARD HAASS (FREQUENT GUEST): Donald, if you were president right now and and you were over in Paris, what is it you would be trying to do on climate change and what is it you would be trying to prevent if you were leading the United States at the conference?
DONALD TRUMP: Well, first of all, I think one of the dumbest statements I've ever heard in politics in the history of politics as I know it, which is pretty good, was Obama's statement that our number one problem is global warming, okay? When we have large groups of people that want to blow up every one of our cities, that want to destroy our country, that want to kill our people. And he's worried about global warming. I think it's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. Or perhaps most naive. He could be naive in a certain way. He actually, I think, is somewhat naive if you want to know the truth, beyond the incompetent part. And I think that his statement the other day that "We're going to show them when we meet that we mean business for the future and global warming and climate change" -- or whatever the new term is because now they have extreme weather. You know, they have so many new terms because the old ones don't work very well. You know it used to be global warming, and then they had a problem when they had some very cool areas and that wasn't working. So you know they call it climate change, now it's extreme weather, so I don't know which one of the many terms he used, all supposedly meaning the same thing. But for him to say that that's more important than stopping countries like -- by the way, North Korea, which is never even mentioned. You know, they made one of the worst deals in history when they made the Iran deal. But Iran probably doesn't have nuclear weapons right now. But what about North Korea? Nobody mentions that. That's like when you have something that you don't want to do, you don't mention it because you sort of don't want to do it, you don't want to talk about it --
JOE SCARBOROUGH (HOST): So Donald, what's your plan on climate change? What would you be saying as a leader of the --
TRUMP: I want to make sure we have clean air and we have clean water. That's what I want to make sure. That's what my thing on climate change is. We want to have clean air to breathe and we want to have beautiful clean water. That's very important to me.
HAASS: Clean air and clean water are also an environmental issue, something narrow --
TRUMP: I've received -- you know, people don't know this about me, but I've built many, many projects all over the world. And I've received many environmental awards. You know, the environmentalists hate to see those awards. Because it really does -- but I've received some of the high awards, and many of them, for the work I've done.
The outcome of his New York meeting didn't seem to faze Trump, however, saying he was "amazed" by today's events and it was a “beautiful thing" that none of the attendees asked him to change the tone of his message.
“I think they want to see victory because it is about we want to win and we want to win together,” he said after the meeting this afternoon.
Trump’s campaign had originally promoted today’s meeting, which reportedly involved nearly 100 African-American pastors, as an endorsement, sending out a news release Wednesday using that language. The meeting was supposed to be followed by a news conference, which was canceled this weekend, and no media was invited to the closed meeting.
But Trump was endorsed by some members of the group, including the Rev. Darrell Scott of the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and Pastor Steve Parson, a Richmond-area minister in Virginia.
“He’s best for not only the country but certainly the black community,” Parson said. “We’re wanting to get off of welfare and we feel that can be done through the information the knowledge of a person like Donald Trump.”
While other participants didn’t outright condone him, they also didn’t endorse him, expressing reservations about comments Trump has previously made that could be construed as offensive.
“We’re deeply disturbed by the lack of empathy that he seems to show,” one participant who was invited by Scott said before the meeting. “I think that’s a real thing to talk about.”
After news of the meeting became public, over 100 leaders in the African-American community published an open letter to the ministers, urging the attendees to consider Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail, which they called “overtly divisive and racist.”
“I was told it was an endorsement,” Trump said today of the meeting on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I have fantastic relationships with the people, but I think pressure was put on them when they heard there was a meeting by people who disagree.”
Katrina Pierson, the Trump campaign's national spokeswoman, said today on CNN's “New Day” that it would be too confusing to label the meeting as an endorsement because the entire group was not endorsing him.
"A lot of the pastors were concerned they might get backlash if they weren't one of the pastors that were endorsing at this time," Pierson explained on “New Day.”
"So the campaign decided, you know what? We want to have the meeting. All the pastors will meet with Mr. Trump and we'll close it to the media."
Trump, 69, also stood by his comments about Muslims cheering on 9/11 in New Jersey, insisting this morning he saw the footage, and did not confuse it with scenes of celebrations from the West Bank. When asked why no one could find the video, Trump said it had not been archived properly.
“Fourteen, 15 years ago, they didn't put it in files. They destroy half the stuff,” Trump asserted.
Trump reiterated that Serge Kovaleski, who wrote the 2001 Washington Post article claiming that authorities detained people “allegedly seen celebrating the attacks,” which Trump had been citing as defense for his claims at rallies, is now trying to pull back his reporting.
Trump is embroiled in a controversy over whether he mocked Kovaleski’s disability during a rally last week. He has denied mocking the reporter.
In the past two weeks, though, Christie’s fortunes seem to have changed. And they hinge on the state where he has invested nearly all his time: New Hampshire.
First, there was the new set of debate criteria from CNN, which will include polls from early-voting states like New Hampshire. Christie has spent 48 days there this year, second only to Sen. Lindsey Graham. He’s averaging 6.3 percent in relevant statewide polls, which would easily carry him back to the main stage.
Then, on Sunday night, the stunner: a full endorsement from the New Hampshire Union Leader. The newspaper is the only one to reach all corners of the state, giving conservative publisher Joseph McQuaid one of the largest bully pulpits around.
“He is the one candidate who has the range and type of experience the nation desperately needs,” McQuaid wrote. “Governor Christie is right for these dangerous times.”
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While many expected the paper to endorse a surging candidate like Sen. Marco Rubio, McQuaid dismissed the notion, declaring Americans “don’t need another fast-talking, well-meaning freshman U.S. senator.”
Rubio hasn’t spent as much time in the state as Carly Fiorina, but the editorial rejected her, too: “We don’t need as president some well-meaning private citizen who has no public experience,” McQuaid wrote.
The pick could alter the trajectory of the Christie campaign, Dartmouth associate professor of government James Russell Muirhead Jr. said.
“The importance of the Union Leader endorsement for Christie can’t be understated,” he told ABC News. “The timing is good. It’s going to take him time to ascend, if he’s going to. If this came in January, it would have come too late.”
The paper’s endorsement isn’t always predictive. Newt Gingrich won its support in 2012 before finishing fifth; John McCain won the state twice despite being picked only once.
It’s not just the Union Leader that has Christie smiling, though. He has picked up several major endorsements from New Hampshire activists and elected officials in recent weeks. Renee Plummer, a well-known real estate developer who officially endorsed Christie today, said she had no idea that her pick would come on the heels of the Union Leader’s.
“I love that he comes to these town halls and says, ‘Ask me anything,’” she said, noting that he has held a whopping 35 such events. “And now with what’s happened in the Union Leader, you’re going to have people looking at him completely differently, saying, ‘Hold on, let’s look at him again.’”
Plummer will be joined by an even bigger pickup Tuesday: Donna Sytek, former speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, according to a source close to the campaign.
Christie, 53, has also been staking out turf when it comes to New Hampshire’s epidemic of heroin overdoses, which has claimed a record number of lives this year.
Rob Wieczorak, board chairman of the Farnum Center for Drug Recovery in Manchester, pledged his support to Christie earlier this month, after a video of the governor’s town hall remarks on addiction went viral.
“He was the first candidate to focus on the drug problem,” said Bill Greiner, a Bedford businessman and Christie supporter. “There are a lot of ‘recovery voters’ who appreciate that.”
Greiner hosted his first Christie house party months ago. (“I jumped on the bandwagon before the wagon had wheels,” he likes to say.)
But he thinks as endorsements – and visits – pile up, voters in New Hampshire will have Christie on the brain as they make their way to voting booths.
New Hampshire’s primary, where Christie is betting it all, is scheduled for Feb. 9.
Professor Muirhead agrees that this could be Christie's moment, but cautions that he'll have to make up a lot of ground.
“He’s really still in that second tier,” he said. “Given where he’s starting from, he’s going to need all of the next eight weeks.”
Donald Trump Touts Successful Meeting With Black Pastors and of course with Amorosa from the Apprentice. Donald Trump said his meeting with African-American pastors on Monday resulted in "lots of good ideas," though it did not end with a consensus endorsement from the group.
The Republican presidential frontrunner said he received "many, many endorsements" from the group of about 100 religious leaders, but declined to put an exact number on it. Prior to the meeting, some of the pastors took issue with Trump's campaign characterizing the sit down as a show of support.
"I don't think I saw backlash. I saw love in that room…[The meeting] went longer because of the love. It didn't go longer for other reasons," Trump told reporters after the meeting.
But others in the room told NBC's Katy Tur that Trump got an earful for his rhetoric, which has come under fire for being racially insensitive.
Last week, Trump's campaign released a statement touting an endorsement from the coalition of black pastors he met with on Monday in Trump Tower in New York City. But backlash from some of the attendees who say the sit down was not meant to be an endorsement forced Trump's campaign to hastily cancel a new conference.
"Probably some of the Black Lives Matter folks called them up and said, 'Oh, you shouldn't be meeting with Trump because he believes that all lives matter,'" Trump said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" earlier Monday. "I believe black lives do matter, but I believe all lives matter very strongly."
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Donald Trump: 'I'm Not Taking it Back' 11:16
Darrell Scott, one of the religious leaders who helped organize the meeting with Trump, told the Associated Press it was "a miscommunication."
A letter published last week in Ebony magazine from leading black religious leaders asked those attending the meeting: "By siding with a presidential candidate whose rhetoric pathologizes Black people, what message are you sending to the world about the Black lives in and outside of your congregations?"
The cancelled press conference is the latest embarrassing hiccup for Trump's campaign when it comes to issues of race relations. A black protester at a Trump event was assaulted earlier this month. Trump later said, "Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing."
He also retweeted inaccurate murder statistics which greatly exaggerated the number of whites killed by blacks.
Attendees said those issues were talked about in the meeting, but Trump afterward told reporters he doesn't plan to change much.
"The tone has taken me to first position in every single poll including state and including national polls," Trump said. "The beautiful thing about the meeting is that they really didn't ask me to change the tone. I think they want to see victory."
“One of the reasons that I continue to set the record straight every day, as many of you know, is because you have a lot of people in the media and the establishment that are trying to bring down Trump with lies,” he told listeners during an evening rally in Macon, Ga.
“I knew Donald Trump before he made the decision to run for president,” Cain said of the GOP presidential front-runner.
“Let me tell you a little something about the definition of an outsider,” the 2012 Republican White House hopeful added.
“If you are born in the United States of America you are an insider, through-and-through. There are no outsiders. If you’re born here, you’re not an outsider.”
The former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza then linked Trump with the principles of the nation’s founding.
“’We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal,’” Cain said, reciting the Declaration of Independence.
“’That they are endowed by their creator – not man’s, not the Democrats – with certain inalienable rights, among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” he continued.
“It says, ‘when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it,” Cain added.
“We have some altering and abolishing to do with a new leader in the White House. My name is Herman Cain.”
Trump has upended the race for next year’s GOP presidential nomination by resonating with voters despite his lack of political experience. The outspoken billionaire has dominated most national polls since launching his Oval Office bid last June.
Cain also attacked former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.) in a blistering op-ed published earlier Monday. He took issue with the establishment Republican comparing his 2016 White House run with Cain’s four years earlier.
“At least I was once winning,” Cain wrote of Bush on his website. "Jeb Bush has been losing throughout his entire campaign. His problem is him.”
Bush used Cain as an example last week for why outsider political candidates often fade in popularity before reaching the early voting state of Iowa.
Trump has repeatedly defied rumors of his demise by rating high polling numbers despite multiple controversies earlier this year.
Bush, meanwhile, has struggled for traction with voters across multiple national polls.
Trump leads the former Florida governor by approximately 23 points, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of samplings.
Though it remains impossible to count out Donald Trump, who still leads the Republican field of presidential hopefuls, an endless barrage of offensive statements may have dented his iron-clad support. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that enthusiasm for the candidate fell by 12 percentage points in less than a week—the single largest drop since he began leading the pack in July.
According to the poll, Trump has the support of 31 percent of Republican voters. The week prior, he was polling at 42 percent.
Trump has had a banner run in the past few weeks. While Parisians mourned the deaths of scores of innocent civilians gunned down in a series of attacks on the French capitol, Trump said he wouldn’t rule out requiring U.S. Muslims to register in a special database, and said French people would have stood a better chance against the terrorists if they all carried guns.
Then, during a Tuesday speech in South Carolina, Trump mocked a New York Times reporter with physical disability. “Now the poor guy, you ought to see this guy,” Trump said, while jerkily moving his arms. “‘Ah, I don’t know what I said! I don’t remember!’” Rebuke came swiftly, and Trump claimed that he had no idea what the reporter, Serge Kovaleski, looked like—an assertion Kovaleski himself disputed, noting that he had covered Trump for decades.
Trump’s invocation of Kovaleski was flawed from the start: the billionaire was trying to defend his claim that he saw “thousands” of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey as the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001. (Kovaleski cited in an article after the attacks that unconfirmed reports of “a number of people were allegedly seen celebrating”—reports that Kovaleski this week pointed out were never authenticated by authorities.)
Dr. Ben Carson, hammered by a week in which foreign policy came to the forefront of the American political imagination, also saw his numbers dip to 15 percent. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are tied for third place at just over 8 percent a piece, and Jeb Bush is in fourth place, with the support of 7 percent of Republican voters.
Will Trump’s star continue to fade? It’s hard to say: just a week ago, he was riding an ever-rising wave of support that he built while insulting Mexican immigrants, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, the entire media, Iowa voters, Rubio’s sweat glands, and basically anyone and anything that otherwise got in his way.
Transcript via Meet The Press:
CHUCK TODD: All right. Well, let’s back up here a minute. Let’s go to this Jersey City comment. You said you saw this. Nobody can find evidence of this. And, more importantly, the article that you tweeted out that’s backed you up, that in itself, there were three or four different reports that month in New Jersey that said it was a myth that was spread, that it was a false rumor. F.B.I., you name it. Where did you see this?
DONALD TRUMP: Chuck, I saw it on television. So did many other people. And many–
CHUCK TODD: In Jersey City–
DONALD TRUMP: –many people. I said hundreds. In the area. I–
CHUCK TODD: –you saw during Jersey City? Okay.
DONALD TRUMP: –heard Patterson. Excuse me. I’ve heard Jersey City. I’ve heard Patterson. It was 14 years ago. But I saw it on television. I saw clips. And so did many other people. And many people saw it in person. I’ve had hundreds of phone calls to the Trump Organization saying, “We saw it. It was dancing in the streets.” Now, by the way The Washington Post I tried to pull back, but the Washington Post reported tailgate parties and reports of tailgate parties.
Tailgate parties means, like, for a football game where you have hundreds and hundreds, and maybe even thousands, of people having tailgate parties. I saw it at the time. I stick by it. Hundreds of people have confirmed it.
CHUCK TODD: This didn’t happen in New Jersey. There were plenty of reports. And you’re feeding that stereotype.
DONALD TRUMP: Chuck, it did happen in New Jersey. I have hundreds of people that agree with me.
CHUCK TODD: But they want to agree with you that doesn’t make it true.
DONALD TRUMP: Chuck, you have a huge Muslim population over there. And that’s fine. But you have a huge Muslim population, between Patterson and different places and Jersey City, an unbelievable large population. If they’re going to be doing it at soccer games, if they’re going to be doing it all around the world, it was being done.
When the Trade Center came down, it was done all around the world. And you know that because that has been reported very strongly. Why wouldn’t it have taken place? I’ve had hundreds of people call in and tweet in on Twitter, saying that they saw it, and I was 100% right.
Now, the Washington Post also wrote about tailgate parties. We’re looking for other articles. And we’re looking for other clips. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we found them, Chuck. But for some reason, they’re not that easy to come by. I saw it. So many people saw it, Chuck. And, so, why would I take it back? I’m not going to take it back.
CHUCK TODD: Well just because somebody repeats something doesn’t make it true. And I guess that’s actually–
DONALD TRUMP: Chuck, I’ve had hundreds. I don’t mean I had two calls, Chuck. Even yesterday, I was in Sarasota, Florida. And people were saying they lived in Jersey, they–
CHUCK TODD: People weren’t saying. If I said people–
DONALD TRUMP: –moved down to Florida because taxes are a lot lower in Florida. They told me there that they saw it.
CHUCK TODD: Mr. Trump. If I said, “Well, people have said Mr. Trump’s net worth is $10 billion,” you would say that was crazy. You wouldn’t make a business deal–
DONALD TRUMP: But that’s a very different. It’s much different.
CHUCK TODD: –based on re-tweets and based on hearsay. You’re running for president of the United States. Your words matter. Truthfulness matters. Fact-based stuff matters.
DONALD TRUMP: Take it easy, Chuck. Just play cool….
Donald Trump is selling himself as a big bad dealmaker who will get things done in Washington, but he couldn’t handle Chuck Todd questioning him with facts.
Trump was so far on the defensive that he tried to get Todd to calm down, even though the Meet The Press host was clearly not upset. Chuck Todd has been rightly criticized for his performance in the past, but during the Trump interview he did something that more members of the media should emulate.
Chuck Todd demanded facts and pressed Trump to back up his claims with evidence. Donald Trump doesn’t have any evidence of Muslims tailgating and celebrating in the streets of New Jersey. All he has is a memory of something that he thinks he saw on television almost 15 years ago.
If Trump wins the nomination, it will be a disaster for the Republican Party. If Donald Trump can’t handle Chuck Todd, he is completely unfit to be president.
Hillary Clinton was joined by 13 of the 14 Democratic women of the U.S. Senate at a fundraiser that amounted to a Monday night pep rally for the candidate who could become the first female president.
The Washington event was an attempt by the front-runner's campaign to flex its establishment muscle as the first caucuses and primaries draw closer, but one Democratic leader was notably missing from the stage that hosted all the women: Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Clinton never mentioned Warren's absence -- and ignored the questions when asked about it after the event, instead choosing to focus on her platform and the future of women in the Senate.
"We are going to do everything we can to put our country on the right track," Clinton said. "And I am hoping that because of the election next year, this time we will be able to celebrate more Democratic senators and maybe even taking the majority of the Senate back."
Despite signing a letter that urged Clinton to run for president in 2013, Warren has so far declined to officially endorse her campaign. The senator, who liberal organizers failed to draft into a presidential campaign for much of 2014 and 2015, told CNN earlier this year that the letter she signed was not an endorsement for the Clinton campaign.
But on Monday night, Warren stood alone.
Sens. Tammy Baldwin, Barbara Boxer, Maria Cantwell, Dianne Feinstein, Kirsten Gillibrand, Heidi Heitkamp, Mazie Hirono, Amy Klobuchar, Claire McCaskill, Barbara Mikulski, Patty Murray, Jeanne Shaheen and Debbie Stabenow -- every other Democratic woman senator -- spoke on Clinton's behalf, offering praise of the woman many of them once served with.
"It is without a doubt that the single most qualified, by far, of any person in this race for president, is Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton," said Heitkamp of North Dakota.
"When women vote, women win and Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States," added Gillibrand of New York.
New Hampshire's Shaheen pledged that Clinton would in her state's early nominating primary. And Klobuchar, of Minnesota, assured the audience of nearly 1,000 people that Clinton is "going to win Iowa," the first in the nation caucus.
"Just like all of us, she still puts her pant suits on one leg at a time," said Washington's Murray, winning laughs from the other women.
Clinton has a stranglehold on the U.S. Senate, with 38 of the 46 -- or 83% -- of senators who caucus with the Democrats have already endorsed Clinton. That despite one of their own -- Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders -- running against the former first lady.
Warren is one of the few who has yet to endorse and her spokeswoman did not respond to questions about why the senator was not attending.
"I am not sure why she wasn't (here). Maybe she has a cold," Sen. Barbara Mikulski said after the event, her tongue firmly in cheek.
The event was a symbolic one for Clinton, a former member of the Senate. Her campaign has looked to give supporters a chance to attend the gathering, too, blasting out an email from Gillibrand earlier this month that asked supporters to enter for a chance to attend.
Clinton told the audience that she would spend more on infrastructure, affordable education and fighting climate change, and pledged not to raise taxes on middle-class Americans.
"I will not raise taxes on middle-class families because they have to get back to where they were before they fell into that ditch of the great recession," she said.
The campaign also rolled out a new video -- titled "44 Boys Is Too Many" -- that featured young girls reading letters they wrote to Clinton and speaking about the need for a woman president.
"If Hillary Clinton was the president," says one girl, "then a lot of girls could be the president. Then I could be president, and all the girls after that could be president."
Tickets to the event ran between $250 to $2,700, the max donation for a primary campaign. Hosts were being asked to raise $27,000.
The fundraiser is also unique in that it is the first of 153 such events that's open to the press.
With just 71 days to go until the New Hampshire primary, public polls are offering little guidance on the state of the Democratic race in the first-in-the-nation primary. A slew of surveys in recent weeks suggests everything from a narrow Hillary Clinton advantage to a comfortable lead for Bernie Sanders.
It’s been that way for much of the year. Clinton posted large leads through Memorial Day — until Sanders suddenly emerged here as a legitimate threat to the Clinton juggernaut. By early August, Sanders finally passed the front-runner — first in a poll conducted for the Boston Herald, but then in the subsequent eight public surveys up until mid-October.
The Vermont senator’s leads in those polls varied wildly — Sanders posted double-digit leads in live-caller surveys but also registered a gaping 22-percentage-point advantage in an online, CBS News/YouGov poll in early September. Things changed again after Clinton was buoyed by a strong performance in the first Democratic debate, her winning testimony before the House Benghazi Committee, and Vice President Joe Biden’s decision not to enter the race.
It’s a level of volatility and uncertainty that the campaigns need to become accustomed to, said Terry Shumaker, a former state co-chairman for both of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns.
“The polling at this stage in New Hampshire has always been unreliable, going back the 1960s,” he said. “New Hampshire primary voters have numerous opportunities to see the candidates close to the primary; they have no pressure to decide early.”
Those careening polls served as the backdrop Sunday night when the three Democratic candidates appeared for the state party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, in front of a pro-Clinton establishment audience to which Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Gov. Maggie Hassan voiced their support for Clinton during the program.
The candidates, including Martin O’Malley, took the opportunity to sell a positive pitch to voters, rather than rip into one another, in keeping with the evening’s cordiality. But the frequency of the veiled swipes at rivals provided an ever-present reminder of the unease enveloping the race at the moment.
Clinton, who spoke last, gave one of the most rousing renditions of her everything-but-the-kitchen sink stump speech, ticking through her support for universal pre-k; making tuition at public colleges debt-free; expanding voting rights; supporting and expanding the Affordable Care Act; overturning Citizens United; and fighting the National Rifle Association.
Her supporters, waving blue glow sticks, cheered along for a well-known line in her stump speech — that if Republicans think playing the gender card means fighting for women’s rights and equal pay, they can “Deal! Me! In!”
Clinton, who never mentions Sanders on the trail, singled out “the special immunity Congress gave the gun industry — that was a mistake, plain and simple” — a nod to a Sanders vote in 2005 for a statute that gives gun manufacturers immunity in state and federal courts.
She also used the occasion to dismiss the aspirational nature of the Sanders campaign. “Some candidates may be running to make a point,” she said. “I’m running to make a difference.”
For his part, Sanders spoke at length about his 2002 vote to oppose the war in Iraq — a stark point of contrast with Clinton. “Now is not the time for more establishment foreign policy,” he said.
In an election recently redefined by the terror attacks across Paris earlier this month, Sanders was forced to alter his standard stump speech to include a new emphasis on foreign policy.
“We cannot and should not attempt to do it alone,” he said of confronting the Islamic State. “We cannot and should not be trapped in perpetual warfare in the Middle East. We need to put together a broad coalition including the strong participation of the Muslim countries in the region.”
Still, Sanders managed to frame his foreign policy agenda in terms of his campaign theme of income inequality. “It has been reported that Qatar will spend $200 billion on the 2022 World Cup,” he said, “$200 billion on hosting a soccer event, yet very little to fight against ISIS.”
With the candidates unwilling to go beyond subtle swats at one another, it’s possible that the race here will remain opaque until voters go to the polls Feb. 9 — and Clinton knows it better than anyone.
On the eve of the 2008 primary, the final RealClearPolitics polling average showed Barack Obama with an 8.3-point lead, based on a surge of support following his victory in the Iowa caucuses five days earlier. But that bump in the polls proved illusory: Clinton won New Hampshire by nearly 3 points.
The result was, in the words of former Gallup and Pew Research Center head Andy Kohut, “one of the most significant miscues in modern polling history.”
That 2008 failure led to a thorough autopsy from the polling community, which concluded that pollsters sufficiently captured Obama’s post-Iowa bump but failed to measure a subsequent boost for Clinton in the final day before the primary.
That boost was credited, in part, to a New Hampshire happenstance that the polls were unable to pick up so close to primary day — an emotional moment for the then-New York senator at a coffee shop in Portsmouth.
Obama Ignores 'Wrap-It-Up' Beeps, Talks and Talks at Climate Summit.
President Barack Obama was met with what appeared to be the U.N.'s version of the Oscars' "wrap-it-up" music Monday after he significantly overran his allotted time to speak at a global climate change summit.
Obama was one of 147 world leaders given a three-minute slot at the COP21 conference to outline their vision for the future of the planet.
The president of the free world, however, had other ideas.
More than eight and a half minutes into Obama's address — and with no sign he was stopping soon — three beeps sounded across the auditorium, clearly audible to everyone present and watching on TV.
Organizers did not respond to NBC News' requests for comment on the beeps, but the punctuating sounds appeared to be the conference's not-so-subtle attempt to get Obama to wrap it up.
"I've come here personally, as the leader of the world's largest economy and the second-largest emitter, to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our responsibility in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it," Obama told the summit.
The beeps continued every 30 seconds, but the president plowed on.
"One of the enemies that we'll be fighting at this conference is cynicism, the notion we can't do anything about climate change," he continued, seemingly undeterred by the regular interruptions over his speech.
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Shocking Facts About the Rising Sea Level 1:23
He called for the talks to work toward "a world that is worthy of our children" and also took time to pay tribute to the victims of this month's Paris attacks.
After 11 minutes, whoever was manning the "beep" button had clearly given up, and no more prompts were heard until Obama ended his epic discourse just shy of 14 minutes.
By the time he was done, he had spoken for nearly the length of time set aside for four world leaders. If all 147 speakers had taken as long as Obama, their combined addresses would have lasted more than 33 hours.
And it was not as if he went off on a tangent in the heat of the moment; his prepared remarks released by the White House ran to more than 1,700 words.
With climate at 'breaking point', leaders urge breakthrough in Paris.
World leaders launched an ambitious attempt on Monday to hold back rising temperatures, with the United States and China leading calls for the climate summit in Paris to mark a decisive turn in the fight against global warming.
In a series of opening addresses to the U.N. talks, heads of state and government exhorted each other to find common cause in two weeks of bargaining to steer the global economy away from its dependence on fossil fuels. French President Francois Hollande said the world was at a "breaking point".
The leaders arrived in Paris with high expectations and armed with promises to act. After decades of struggling negotiations and the failure of a summit in Copenhagen six years ago, some form of agreement - likely to be the strongest global climate pact yet - appears all but assured by mid-December.
"What should give us hope that this is a turning point, that this is the moment we finally determined we would save our planet, is the fact that our nations share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about it," said U.S. President Barack Obama, one of the first leaders to speak at the summit.
The leaders gathered in a vast conference center at Le Bourget airfield. In all, 195 countries are part of the unwieldy negotiating process, with a variety of leadership styles and ideologies that has made consensus elusive in the past.
Key issues, notably how to divide the global bill to pay for a shift to renewable energy, are still contentious.
"Climate justice demands that the little carbon space we still have, developing countries should have enough room to grow," said India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a key player because of his country's size and its heavy dependence on coal.
One difference this time may be the partnership between the United States and China, the two biggest carbon emitters, who between them account for almost 40 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Resources Institute think-tank.
Once far apart on climate issues, they agreed in 2014 to jointly kick-start a transition away from fossil fuels, each at its own speed and in its own way.
The United States and China "have both determined that it is our responsibility to take action," Obama said after meeting his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the summit.
"Tackling climate change is a shared mission for mankind," Xi responded in his own remarks.
Obama said the two countries would work together at the summit to achieve an agreement that moves toward a low-carbon global economy this century and "robust" financial support for developing countries adapting to climate change.
Flying home to Rome on the papal plane after a visit to Africa, Pope Francis told journalists: "Every year the problems are getting worse. We are at the limits. If I may use a strong word I would say that we are at the limits of suicide."
Most scientists say failure to agree on strong measures in Paris would doom the world to ever-hotter average temperatures, deadlier storms, more frequent droughts and rising sea levels as polar ice caps melt.
SMOG OVER CHINA AND INDIA
Facing such alarming projections, the leaders of nations responsible for about 90 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions have come bearing pledges to reduce their national carbon output, through different measures at different rates.
As the summit opened in Paris, the capitals of the world's two most populous nations, China and India, were blanketed in hazardous, choking smog, with Beijing on an "orange" pollution alert, the second-highest level.
The deal will mark a momentous step in the often frustrating quest for global agreement, albeit one that on its own is not believed to be enough to prevent the earth's temperatures from rising past a damaging threshold. How and when nations should review their goals - and then set higher, more ambitious ones - is another issue to be resolved at the talks.
"The Paris conference is not the finishing line but a new starting point," Xi said.
The gathering is being held in a somber city. Security has been tightened after Islamist militants killed 130 people on Nov. 13, and Hollande said he could not separate "the fight with terrorism from the fight against global warming". Leaders must face both challenges, leaving their children "a world freed of terror" as well as one "protected from catastrophes", he said.
On the eve of the summit, an estimated 785,000 people around the world joined the biggest day of climate change activism in history, telling world leaders there was "No Planet B" in the fight against global warming.
Signaling their determination to resolve the most intractable points, senior negotiators sat down on Sunday, a day earlier than planned, to begin their work.
The last attempt to get a global deal collapsed in chaos and acrimony in Copenhagen in 2009.
Anxious to avoid a re-run of the Copenhagen disaster, major powers have tried this time to smooth some of the bumps in the way of an agreement before they arrive.
The presidents, prime ministers and princes were making their cameo appearances at the outset of the conference rather than swooping in at the end.
The old goal of seeking a legally binding international treaty, certain to be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress, has been replaced by a system of national pledges to reduce emissions.
Some are presented as best intentions, others as measures legally enforced by domestic laws and regulations.
WHO WILL PAY?
If a signed deal now appears likely, so too is the prospect that it will not be enough to prevent the world's average temperature from rising beyond 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. That is widely viewed as a threshold for dangerous and potentially catastrophic changes in the planet's climate system.
Obama called for an "enduring framework for human progress", one that would compel countries to steadily ramp up their carbon-cutting goals and openly track progress against them.
The U.S.-China agreement has been a balm for the main source of tension that characterized previous talks, in which the developing world argued that countries which had grown rich by industrializing on fossil fuels should pay the cost of shifting all economies to a renewable energy future.
The question of how richer nations can help cover the cost of switching to cleaner energy sources and offset climate-related damage must still be resolved,
A handful of the world's richest entrepreneurs, including Bill Gates, have pledged to double the $10 billion they collectively spend on clean energy research and development in the next five years.
"The climate bill has finally come due. Who will pay?" said Baron Waqa, president of the Pacific island nation Nauru. (Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, John Irish and Roberta Rampton; Editing by Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Roche)
Obama, Putin meet at COP21 summit in Paris. President Barack Obama met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Paris, on the sidelines of an international summit to combat climate change, according to a White House official.
The two leaders discussed their roles in the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine.
"President Obama expressed his regret for the recent loss of a Russian pilot and crew member and reiterated the United States' support for de-escalation between Russia and Turkey," the official said.
Meeting with Turkish leader, Obama calls for lowering tensions with Russia after plane downing. President Barack Obama is calling for a reduction in tensions between Turkey and Russia following Turkey's shoot-down of a Russian warplane.
Obama is meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Paris on the sidelines of global climate talks.
Obama says Turkey is a NATO ally and has a right to defend itself. He says the U.S. is very interested in accelerating its military relationship with Turkey.
Obama says the Islamic State group is the common enemy. He's alluding to U.S. efforts to persuade Russia to focus its airstrikes in Syria against IS.
The president is also addressing the refugee crisis stemming from Syria's civil war. Obama is praising Turkey for generously accepting Syrian refugees. He says border security has been strengthened.
The Immigration Questions Ted Cruz Won't Answer. The Texas senator doesn't like to discuss what to do with the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the country.
Even as he makes immigration a central issue in his presidential campaign, there are two important questions on the topic that Republican Senator Ted Cruz has repeatedly declined to answer.
The first is what to do about the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. illegally. The second is whether granting them some form of legal status (even something short of a path to citizenship) amounts to “amnesty.”
“I consider amnesty to be forgiving the law-breaking of those who come here illegally and having no consequences and in particular, a path to citizenship,” he told reporters in Clinton, Iowa, before a campaign event, when asked to define the term.
Pressed on whether legal status for undocumented immigrants amounted to amnesty, Cruz moved on and took a different question. As the news conference ended, the Texan was asked that question again, and declined to say.
Cruz has proposed what he calls the “most aggressive” plan to crack down on illegal immigration, but it's silent on how to handle the current undocumented population. One of his rivals, Donald Trump, has proposed mass deportation, an idea criticized for being wildly expensive (more than $400 billion, according to one conservative estimate). Another rival, Senator Marco Rubio, is open to a path to eventual citizenship, a position Cruz has blasted as “amnesty” (though Cruz hasn't said if he believes legal status without a path to citizenship also counts as “amnesty”).
An e-mail to reporters by Rubio's campaign declared that “Senator Cruz is proving to be rather consistent only in dodging questions.”
Cruz has struggled to find a safe place in between, and said in recent months he won’t discuss what to do about people in the country illegally until the border is “secure.”
So Bloomberg Politics put the question to Cruz in an exclusive interview Monday afternoon between campaign events in Iowa: What will it take to achieve a “secure border” and therefore address undocumented immigrants?
In response, Cruz deflected and attacked Democrats as soft on illegal immigration. Asked in a follow-up if he'd be willing to address the question of what to do about the undocumented population once all the security measures he has proposed—including a border wall, tripling the border patrol, and a biometric entry-exit visa tracking system—are in place, Cruz pivoted to insisting he’ll prioritize securing the border and stopping illegal immigration.
The Texan's challenge is that he’s boxed in: Any hint of support for normalizing the status of undocumented immigrants risks turning off the conservative voters he’s relying on, while mass deportation is widely viewed as impractical—and inhumane by some Republicans. Cruz's progressive critics say his demurrals are a red herring, that he's setting up obstacles that will never be met.
What Cruz preferred to discuss is his vote against comprehensive immigration reform in 2013, a bill despised by many conservatives, and that Rubio supported but has since backed away from. During the press conference in the town of Clinton, Cruz said his record and Rubio’s record are as different as “the arsonist and the fireman,” adding: “Marco Rubio led the fight standing shoulder to shoulder with Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama for a massive amnesty plan.”
Speaking to Bloomberg, Cruz made clear he would, as president, immediately end President Barack Obama’s 2012 program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, to grant deportation relief and two-year work permits to roughly 650,000 young people brought to the country illegally as children. Cruz also said he’d end Obama’s 2014 actions to expand deportation relief.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has promised to protect and expand on both programs, a stance that is popular with Hispanic voters, who could decide a close election if it comes down to key swing states like Florida, Colorado, and Nevada.
There were no killings or capturing of any Dolphins today/yesterday in Taji, Japan.
One of the issues beingtalked about after yesterday's Interview with Donald Trump is when he cited his "Many Environmental Awards" As Answer To Climate Change.
DONALD TRUMP: Well, first of all, I think one of the dumbest statements I've ever heard in politics in the history of politics as I know it, which is pretty good, was Obama's statement that our number one problem is global warming, okay? When we have large groups of people that want to blow up every one of our cities, that want to destroy our country, that want to kill our people. And he's worried about global warming. I think it's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. Or perhaps most naive. He could be naive in a certain way. He actually, I think, is somewhat naive if you want to know the truth, beyond the incompetent part. And I think that his statement the other day that "We're going to show them when we meet that we mean business for the future and global warming and climate change" -- or whatever the new term is because now they have extreme weather. You know, they have so many new terms because the old ones don't work very well. You know it used to be global warming, and then they had a problem when they had some very cool areas and that wasn't working. So you know they call it climate change, now it's extreme weather, so I don't know which one of the many terms he used, all supposedly meaning the same thing. But for him to say that that's more important than stopping countries like -- by the way, North Korea, which is never even mentioned. You know, they made one of the worst deals in history when they made the Iran deal. But Iran probably doesn't have nuclear weapons right now. But what about North Korea? Nobody mentions that. That's like when you have something that you don't want to do, you don't mention it because you sort of don't want to do it, you don't want to talk about it --
JOE SCARBOROUGH (HOST): So Donald, what's your plan on climate change? What would you be saying as a leader of the --
TRUMP: I want to make sure we have clean air and we have clean water. That's what I want to make sure. That's what my thing on climate change is. We want to have clean air to breathe and we want to have beautiful clean water. That's very important to me.
HAASS: Clean air and clean water are also an environmental issue, something narrow --
TRUMP: I've received -- you know, people don't know this about me, but I've built many, many projects all over the world. And I've received many environmental awards. You know, the environmentalists hate to see those awards. Because it really does -- but I've received some of the high awards, and many of them, for the work I've done.
Donald Trump also claimed that Black Pastors Didn’t Tell Him to Change His Tone at Meeting. GOP front-runner Donald Trump concluded a meeting today of African-American pastors with the backing of some of the participants, but not the blanket endorsement he had initially advertised.
The outcome of his New York meeting didn't seem to faze Trump, however, saying he was "amazed" by today's events and it was a “beautiful thing" that none of the attendees asked him to change the tone of his message.
“I think they want to see victory because it is about we want to win and we want to win together,” he said after the meeting this afternoon.
Trump’s campaign had originally promoted today’s meeting, which reportedly involved nearly 100 African-American pastors, as an endorsement, sending out a news release Wednesday using that language. The meeting was supposed to be followed by a news conference, which was canceled this weekend, and no media was invited to the closed meeting.
But Trump was endorsed by some members of the group, including the Rev. Darrell Scott of the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and Pastor Steve Parson, a Richmond-area minister in Virginia.
“He’s best for not only the country but certainly the black community,” Parson said. “We’re wanting to get off of welfare and we feel that can be done through the information the knowledge of a person like Donald Trump.”
While other participants didn’t outright condone him, they also didn’t endorse him, expressing reservations about comments Trump has previously made that could be construed as offensive.
“We’re deeply disturbed by the lack of empathy that he seems to show,” one participant who was invited by Scott said before the meeting. “I think that’s a real thing to talk about.”
After news of the meeting became public, over 100 leaders in the African-American community published an open letter to the ministers, urging the attendees to consider Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail, which they called “overtly divisive and racist.”
“I was told it was an endorsement,” Trump said today of the meeting on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I have fantastic relationships with the people, but I think pressure was put on them when they heard there was a meeting by people who disagree.”
Katrina Pierson, the Trump campaign's national spokeswoman, said today on CNN's “New Day” that it would be too confusing to label the meeting as an endorsement because the entire group was not endorsing him.
"A lot of the pastors were concerned they might get backlash if they weren't one of the pastors that were endorsing at this time," Pierson explained on “New Day.”
"So the campaign decided, you know what? We want to have the meeting. All the pastors will meet with Mr. Trump and we'll close it to the media."
Trump, 69, also stood by his comments about Muslims cheering on 9/11 in New Jersey, insisting this morning he saw the footage, and did not confuse it with scenes of celebrations from the West Bank. When asked why no one could find the video, Trump said it had not been archived properly.
“Fourteen, 15 years ago, they didn't put it in files. They destroy half the stuff,” Trump asserted.
Trump reiterated that Serge Kovaleski, who wrote the 2001 Washington Post article claiming that authorities detained people “allegedly seen celebrating the attacks,” which Trump had been citing as defense for his claims at rallies, is now trying to pull back his reporting.
Trump is embroiled in a controversy over whether he mocked Kovaleski’s disability during a rally last week. He has denied mocking the reporter.
As far as people in new Jersey dancing on the roof tops after 9/11, "It didn't happen, and the fact is people can say anything but the facts are the facts, that did not happen in N.J. that day and it hasn't happened since," is what Chris Christie said. He also went on to say that there is no video footage of it when Trump doubled down by saying that 2001 were ancient times and that there would be no footage of it. Even though he said that he saw it. And, that thousands of other people have emailed him and tweeted to him to let him know that they had seen that footage too.
Chris Christie's New Hampshire Resurgence. When Chris Christie was relegated to November’s GOP “undercard debate,” many assumed it would be the last they saw of the New Jersey governor. Four months into his presidential campaign, his national poll numbers had barely budged, languishing behind those of Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Sen. Ted Cruz.
In the past two weeks, though, Christie’s fortunes seem to have changed. And they hinge on the state where he has invested nearly all his time: New Hampshire.
First, there was the new set of debate criteria from CNN, which will include polls from early-voting states like New Hampshire. Christie has spent 48 days there this year, second only to Sen. Lindsey Graham. He’s averaging 6.3 percent in relevant statewide polls, which would easily carry him back to the main stage.
Then, on Sunday night, the stunner: a full endorsement from the New Hampshire Union Leader. The newspaper is the only one to reach all corners of the state, giving conservative publisher Joseph McQuaid one of the largest bully pulpits around.
“He is the one candidate who has the range and type of experience the nation desperately needs,” McQuaid wrote. “Governor Christie is right for these dangerous times.”
New Hampshire Union Leader Endorses Chris Christie
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While many expected the paper to endorse a surging candidate like Sen. Marco Rubio, McQuaid dismissed the notion, declaring Americans “don’t need another fast-talking, well-meaning freshman U.S. senator.”
Rubio hasn’t spent as much time in the state as Carly Fiorina, but the editorial rejected her, too: “We don’t need as president some well-meaning private citizen who has no public experience,” McQuaid wrote.
The pick could alter the trajectory of the Christie campaign, Dartmouth associate professor of government James Russell Muirhead Jr. said.
“The importance of the Union Leader endorsement for Christie can’t be understated,” he told ABC News. “The timing is good. It’s going to take him time to ascend, if he’s going to. If this came in January, it would have come too late.”
The paper’s endorsement isn’t always predictive. Newt Gingrich won its support in 2012 before finishing fifth; John McCain won the state twice despite being picked only once.
It’s not just the Union Leader that has Christie smiling, though. He has picked up several major endorsements from New Hampshire activists and elected officials in recent weeks. Renee Plummer, a well-known real estate developer who officially endorsed Christie today, said she had no idea that her pick would come on the heels of the Union Leader’s.
“I love that he comes to these town halls and says, ‘Ask me anything,’” she said, noting that he has held a whopping 35 such events. “And now with what’s happened in the Union Leader, you’re going to have people looking at him completely differently, saying, ‘Hold on, let’s look at him again.’”
Plummer will be joined by an even bigger pickup Tuesday: Donna Sytek, former speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, according to a source close to the campaign.
Christie, 53, has also been staking out turf when it comes to New Hampshire’s epidemic of heroin overdoses, which has claimed a record number of lives this year.
Rob Wieczorak, board chairman of the Farnum Center for Drug Recovery in Manchester, pledged his support to Christie earlier this month, after a video of the governor’s town hall remarks on addiction went viral.
“He was the first candidate to focus on the drug problem,” said Bill Greiner, a Bedford businessman and Christie supporter. “There are a lot of ‘recovery voters’ who appreciate that.”
Greiner hosted his first Christie house party months ago. (“I jumped on the bandwagon before the wagon had wheels,” he likes to say.)
But he thinks as endorsements – and visits – pile up, voters in New Hampshire will have Christie on the brain as they make their way to voting booths.
New Hampshire’s primary, where Christie is betting it all, is scheduled for Feb. 9.
Professor Muirhead agrees that this could be Christie's moment, but cautions that he'll have to make up a lot of ground.
“He’s really still in that second tier,” he said. “Given where he’s starting from, he’s going to need all of the next eight weeks.”
The Republican presidential frontrunner said he received "many, many endorsements" from the group of about 100 religious leaders, but declined to put an exact number on it. Prior to the meeting, some of the pastors took issue with Trump's campaign characterizing the sit down as a show of support.
"I don't think I saw backlash. I saw love in that room…[The meeting] went longer because of the love. It didn't go longer for other reasons," Trump told reporters after the meeting.
But others in the room told NBC's Katy Tur that Trump got an earful for his rhetoric, which has come under fire for being racially insensitive.
Last week, Trump's campaign released a statement touting an endorsement from the coalition of black pastors he met with on Monday in Trump Tower in New York City. But backlash from some of the attendees who say the sit down was not meant to be an endorsement forced Trump's campaign to hastily cancel a new conference.
"Probably some of the Black Lives Matter folks called them up and said, 'Oh, you shouldn't be meeting with Trump because he believes that all lives matter,'" Trump said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" earlier Monday. "I believe black lives do matter, but I believe all lives matter very strongly."
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Donald Trump: 'I'm Not Taking it Back' 11:16
Darrell Scott, one of the religious leaders who helped organize the meeting with Trump, told the Associated Press it was "a miscommunication."
A letter published last week in Ebony magazine from leading black religious leaders asked those attending the meeting: "By siding with a presidential candidate whose rhetoric pathologizes Black people, what message are you sending to the world about the Black lives in and outside of your congregations?"
The cancelled press conference is the latest embarrassing hiccup for Trump's campaign when it comes to issues of race relations. A black protester at a Trump event was assaulted earlier this month. Trump later said, "Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing."
He also retweeted inaccurate murder statistics which greatly exaggerated the number of whites killed by blacks.
Attendees said those issues were talked about in the meeting, but Trump afterward told reporters he doesn't plan to change much.
"The tone has taken me to first position in every single poll including state and including national polls," Trump said. "The beautiful thing about the meeting is that they really didn't ask me to change the tone. I think they want to see victory."
Herman Cain slams media, establishment ‘lies’ on Trump. Former GOP presidential contender Herman Cain said late Monday that the media and establishment Republicans are plotting Donald Trump’s downfall.
“I knew Donald Trump before he made the decision to run for president,” Cain said of the GOP presidential front-runner.
“Let me tell you a little something about the definition of an outsider,” the 2012 Republican White House hopeful added.
“If you are born in the United States of America you are an insider, through-and-through. There are no outsiders. If you’re born here, you’re not an outsider.”
The former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza then linked Trump with the principles of the nation’s founding.
“’We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal,’” Cain said, reciting the Declaration of Independence.
“’That they are endowed by their creator – not man’s, not the Democrats – with certain inalienable rights, among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” he continued.
“It says, ‘when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it,” Cain added.
“We have some altering and abolishing to do with a new leader in the White House. My name is Herman Cain.”
Trump has upended the race for next year’s GOP presidential nomination by resonating with voters despite his lack of political experience. The outspoken billionaire has dominated most national polls since launching his Oval Office bid last June.
Cain also attacked former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.) in a blistering op-ed published earlier Monday. He took issue with the establishment Republican comparing his 2016 White House run with Cain’s four years earlier.
“At least I was once winning,” Cain wrote of Bush on his website. "Jeb Bush has been losing throughout his entire campaign. His problem is him.”
Bush used Cain as an example last week for why outsider political candidates often fade in popularity before reaching the early voting state of Iowa.
Trump has repeatedly defied rumors of his demise by rating high polling numbers despite multiple controversies earlier this year.
Bush, meanwhile, has struggled for traction with voters across multiple national polls.
Trump leads the former Florida governor by approximately 23 points, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of samplings.
I agree with Mika because Trump will start to fall now. I think that Donald trump has had an awful two weeks that he will not be able to rebound from. He is just getting caught in lie after lie and now he is standing side by side with the likes of Amorosa and with Herman Caine.
Donald Trump Falls 12 Percentage Points in One Week.
According to the poll, Trump has the support of 31 percent of Republican voters. The week prior, he was polling at 42 percent.
Trump has had a banner run in the past few weeks. While Parisians mourned the deaths of scores of innocent civilians gunned down in a series of attacks on the French capitol, Trump said he wouldn’t rule out requiring U.S. Muslims to register in a special database, and said French people would have stood a better chance against the terrorists if they all carried guns.
Then, during a Tuesday speech in South Carolina, Trump mocked a New York Times reporter with physical disability. “Now the poor guy, you ought to see this guy,” Trump said, while jerkily moving his arms. “‘Ah, I don’t know what I said! I don’t remember!’” Rebuke came swiftly, and Trump claimed that he had no idea what the reporter, Serge Kovaleski, looked like—an assertion Kovaleski himself disputed, noting that he had covered Trump for decades.
Trump’s invocation of Kovaleski was flawed from the start: the billionaire was trying to defend his claim that he saw “thousands” of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey as the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001. (Kovaleski cited in an article after the attacks that unconfirmed reports of “a number of people were allegedly seen celebrating”—reports that Kovaleski this week pointed out were never authenticated by authorities.)
Dr. Ben Carson, hammered by a week in which foreign policy came to the forefront of the American political imagination, also saw his numbers dip to 15 percent. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are tied for third place at just over 8 percent a piece, and Jeb Bush is in fourth place, with the support of 7 percent of Republican voters.
Will Trump’s star continue to fade? It’s hard to say: just a week ago, he was riding an ever-rising wave of support that he built while insulting Mexican immigrants, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, the entire media, Iowa voters, Rubio’s sweat glands, and basically anyone and anything that otherwise got in his way.
Donald Trump also fell apart After Chuck Todd Goes Off On Him For His 9/11 Lies.
CHUCK TODD: All right. Well, let’s back up here a minute. Let’s go to this Jersey City comment. You said you saw this. Nobody can find evidence of this. And, more importantly, the article that you tweeted out that’s backed you up, that in itself, there were three or four different reports that month in New Jersey that said it was a myth that was spread, that it was a false rumor. F.B.I., you name it. Where did you see this?
DONALD TRUMP: Chuck, I saw it on television. So did many other people. And many–
CHUCK TODD: In Jersey City–
DONALD TRUMP: –many people. I said hundreds. In the area. I–
CHUCK TODD: –you saw during Jersey City? Okay.
DONALD TRUMP: –heard Patterson. Excuse me. I’ve heard Jersey City. I’ve heard Patterson. It was 14 years ago. But I saw it on television. I saw clips. And so did many other people. And many people saw it in person. I’ve had hundreds of phone calls to the Trump Organization saying, “We saw it. It was dancing in the streets.” Now, by the way The Washington Post I tried to pull back, but the Washington Post reported tailgate parties and reports of tailgate parties.
Tailgate parties means, like, for a football game where you have hundreds and hundreds, and maybe even thousands, of people having tailgate parties. I saw it at the time. I stick by it. Hundreds of people have confirmed it.
CHUCK TODD: This didn’t happen in New Jersey. There were plenty of reports. And you’re feeding that stereotype.
DONALD TRUMP: Chuck, it did happen in New Jersey. I have hundreds of people that agree with me.
CHUCK TODD: But they want to agree with you that doesn’t make it true.
DONALD TRUMP: Chuck, you have a huge Muslim population over there. And that’s fine. But you have a huge Muslim population, between Patterson and different places and Jersey City, an unbelievable large population. If they’re going to be doing it at soccer games, if they’re going to be doing it all around the world, it was being done.
When the Trade Center came down, it was done all around the world. And you know that because that has been reported very strongly. Why wouldn’t it have taken place? I’ve had hundreds of people call in and tweet in on Twitter, saying that they saw it, and I was 100% right.
Now, the Washington Post also wrote about tailgate parties. We’re looking for other articles. And we’re looking for other clips. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we found them, Chuck. But for some reason, they’re not that easy to come by. I saw it. So many people saw it, Chuck. And, so, why would I take it back? I’m not going to take it back.
CHUCK TODD: Well just because somebody repeats something doesn’t make it true. And I guess that’s actually–
DONALD TRUMP: Chuck, I’ve had hundreds. I don’t mean I had two calls, Chuck. Even yesterday, I was in Sarasota, Florida. And people were saying they lived in Jersey, they–
CHUCK TODD: People weren’t saying. If I said people–
DONALD TRUMP: –moved down to Florida because taxes are a lot lower in Florida. They told me there that they saw it.
CHUCK TODD: Mr. Trump. If I said, “Well, people have said Mr. Trump’s net worth is $10 billion,” you would say that was crazy. You wouldn’t make a business deal–
DONALD TRUMP: But that’s a very different. It’s much different.
CHUCK TODD: –based on re-tweets and based on hearsay. You’re running for president of the United States. Your words matter. Truthfulness matters. Fact-based stuff matters.
DONALD TRUMP: Take it easy, Chuck. Just play cool….
Donald Trump is selling himself as a big bad dealmaker who will get things done in Washington, but he couldn’t handle Chuck Todd questioning him with facts.
Trump was so far on the defensive that he tried to get Todd to calm down, even though the Meet The Press host was clearly not upset. Chuck Todd has been rightly criticized for his performance in the past, but during the Trump interview he did something that more members of the media should emulate.
Chuck Todd demanded facts and pressed Trump to back up his claims with evidence. Donald Trump doesn’t have any evidence of Muslims tailgating and celebrating in the streets of New Jersey. All he has is a memory of something that he thinks he saw on television almost 15 years ago.
If Trump wins the nomination, it will be a disaster for the Republican Party. If Donald Trump can’t handle Chuck Todd, he is completely unfit to be president.
Oh and also, I forgot to mention how every female in the Senate stepped forward to back Hillary Clinton however, Elizabeth Warren was not on that list. Which may be more news than whomever back her is news. I think she will eventually back Hillary when she gets the nomination, but for now, she has to align herself more with Bernie Sanders than say a Hillary. But what is she going to do? Back a person in the GOP when all is said an done?
The Washington event was an attempt by the front-runner's campaign to flex its establishment muscle as the first caucuses and primaries draw closer, but one Democratic leader was notably missing from the stage that hosted all the women: Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Clinton never mentioned Warren's absence -- and ignored the questions when asked about it after the event, instead choosing to focus on her platform and the future of women in the Senate.
"We are going to do everything we can to put our country on the right track," Clinton said. "And I am hoping that because of the election next year, this time we will be able to celebrate more Democratic senators and maybe even taking the majority of the Senate back."
Despite signing a letter that urged Clinton to run for president in 2013, Warren has so far declined to officially endorse her campaign. The senator, who liberal organizers failed to draft into a presidential campaign for much of 2014 and 2015, told CNN earlier this year that the letter she signed was not an endorsement for the Clinton campaign.
But on Monday night, Warren stood alone.
Sens. Tammy Baldwin, Barbara Boxer, Maria Cantwell, Dianne Feinstein, Kirsten Gillibrand, Heidi Heitkamp, Mazie Hirono, Amy Klobuchar, Claire McCaskill, Barbara Mikulski, Patty Murray, Jeanne Shaheen and Debbie Stabenow -- every other Democratic woman senator -- spoke on Clinton's behalf, offering praise of the woman many of them once served with.
"It is without a doubt that the single most qualified, by far, of any person in this race for president, is Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton," said Heitkamp of North Dakota.
"When women vote, women win and Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States," added Gillibrand of New York.
New Hampshire's Shaheen pledged that Clinton would in her state's early nominating primary. And Klobuchar, of Minnesota, assured the audience of nearly 1,000 people that Clinton is "going to win Iowa," the first in the nation caucus.
"Just like all of us, she still puts her pant suits on one leg at a time," said Washington's Murray, winning laughs from the other women.
Clinton has a stranglehold on the U.S. Senate, with 38 of the 46 -- or 83% -- of senators who caucus with the Democrats have already endorsed Clinton. That despite one of their own -- Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders -- running against the former first lady.
Warren is one of the few who has yet to endorse and her spokeswoman did not respond to questions about why the senator was not attending.
"I am not sure why she wasn't (here). Maybe she has a cold," Sen. Barbara Mikulski said after the event, her tongue firmly in cheek.
The event was a symbolic one for Clinton, a former member of the Senate. Her campaign has looked to give supporters a chance to attend the gathering, too, blasting out an email from Gillibrand earlier this month that asked supporters to enter for a chance to attend.
Clinton told the audience that she would spend more on infrastructure, affordable education and fighting climate change, and pledged not to raise taxes on middle-class Americans.
"I will not raise taxes on middle-class families because they have to get back to where they were before they fell into that ditch of the great recession," she said.
The campaign also rolled out a new video -- titled "44 Boys Is Too Many" -- that featured young girls reading letters they wrote to Clinton and speaking about the need for a woman president.
"If Hillary Clinton was the president," says one girl, "then a lot of girls could be the president. Then I could be president, and all the girls after that could be president."
Tickets to the event ran between $250 to $2,700, the max donation for a primary campaign. Hosts were being asked to raise $27,000.
The fundraiser is also unique in that it is the first of 153 such events that's open to the press.
It’s been that way for much of the year. Clinton posted large leads through Memorial Day — until Sanders suddenly emerged here as a legitimate threat to the Clinton juggernaut. By early August, Sanders finally passed the front-runner — first in a poll conducted for the Boston Herald, but then in the subsequent eight public surveys up until mid-October.
The Vermont senator’s leads in those polls varied wildly — Sanders posted double-digit leads in live-caller surveys but also registered a gaping 22-percentage-point advantage in an online, CBS News/YouGov poll in early September. Things changed again after Clinton was buoyed by a strong performance in the first Democratic debate, her winning testimony before the House Benghazi Committee, and Vice President Joe Biden’s decision not to enter the race.
It’s a level of volatility and uncertainty that the campaigns need to become accustomed to, said Terry Shumaker, a former state co-chairman for both of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns.
“The polling at this stage in New Hampshire has always been unreliable, going back the 1960s,” he said. “New Hampshire primary voters have numerous opportunities to see the candidates close to the primary; they have no pressure to decide early.”
Those careening polls served as the backdrop Sunday night when the three Democratic candidates appeared for the state party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, in front of a pro-Clinton establishment audience to which Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Gov. Maggie Hassan voiced their support for Clinton during the program.
The candidates, including Martin O’Malley, took the opportunity to sell a positive pitch to voters, rather than rip into one another, in keeping with the evening’s cordiality. But the frequency of the veiled swipes at rivals provided an ever-present reminder of the unease enveloping the race at the moment.
Clinton, who spoke last, gave one of the most rousing renditions of her everything-but-the-kitchen sink stump speech, ticking through her support for universal pre-k; making tuition at public colleges debt-free; expanding voting rights; supporting and expanding the Affordable Care Act; overturning Citizens United; and fighting the National Rifle Association.
Her supporters, waving blue glow sticks, cheered along for a well-known line in her stump speech — that if Republicans think playing the gender card means fighting for women’s rights and equal pay, they can “Deal! Me! In!”
Clinton, who never mentions Sanders on the trail, singled out “the special immunity Congress gave the gun industry — that was a mistake, plain and simple” — a nod to a Sanders vote in 2005 for a statute that gives gun manufacturers immunity in state and federal courts.
She also used the occasion to dismiss the aspirational nature of the Sanders campaign. “Some candidates may be running to make a point,” she said. “I’m running to make a difference.”
For his part, Sanders spoke at length about his 2002 vote to oppose the war in Iraq — a stark point of contrast with Clinton. “Now is not the time for more establishment foreign policy,” he said.
In an election recently redefined by the terror attacks across Paris earlier this month, Sanders was forced to alter his standard stump speech to include a new emphasis on foreign policy.
“We cannot and should not attempt to do it alone,” he said of confronting the Islamic State. “We cannot and should not be trapped in perpetual warfare in the Middle East. We need to put together a broad coalition including the strong participation of the Muslim countries in the region.”
Still, Sanders managed to frame his foreign policy agenda in terms of his campaign theme of income inequality. “It has been reported that Qatar will spend $200 billion on the 2022 World Cup,” he said, “$200 billion on hosting a soccer event, yet very little to fight against ISIS.”
With the candidates unwilling to go beyond subtle swats at one another, it’s possible that the race here will remain opaque until voters go to the polls Feb. 9 — and Clinton knows it better than anyone.
On the eve of the 2008 primary, the final RealClearPolitics polling average showed Barack Obama with an 8.3-point lead, based on a surge of support following his victory in the Iowa caucuses five days earlier. But that bump in the polls proved illusory: Clinton won New Hampshire by nearly 3 points.
The result was, in the words of former Gallup and Pew Research Center head Andy Kohut, “one of the most significant miscues in modern polling history.”
That 2008 failure led to a thorough autopsy from the polling community, which concluded that pollsters sufficiently captured Obama’s post-Iowa bump but failed to measure a subsequent boost for Clinton in the final day before the primary.
That boost was credited, in part, to a New Hampshire happenstance that the polls were unable to pick up so close to primary day — an emotional moment for the then-New York senator at a coffee shop in Portsmouth.
President Barack Obama was met with what appeared to be the U.N.'s version of the Oscars' "wrap-it-up" music Monday after he significantly overran his allotted time to speak at a global climate change summit.
Obama was one of 147 world leaders given a three-minute slot at the COP21 conference to outline their vision for the future of the planet.
The president of the free world, however, had other ideas.
More than eight and a half minutes into Obama's address — and with no sign he was stopping soon — three beeps sounded across the auditorium, clearly audible to everyone present and watching on TV.
Organizers did not respond to NBC News' requests for comment on the beeps, but the punctuating sounds appeared to be the conference's not-so-subtle attempt to get Obama to wrap it up.
"I've come here personally, as the leader of the world's largest economy and the second-largest emitter, to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our responsibility in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it," Obama told the summit.
The beeps continued every 30 seconds, but the president plowed on.
"One of the enemies that we'll be fighting at this conference is cynicism, the notion we can't do anything about climate change," he continued, seemingly undeterred by the regular interruptions over his speech.
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Shocking Facts About the Rising Sea Level 1:23
He called for the talks to work toward "a world that is worthy of our children" and also took time to pay tribute to the victims of this month's Paris attacks.
After 11 minutes, whoever was manning the "beep" button had clearly given up, and no more prompts were heard until Obama ended his epic discourse just shy of 14 minutes.
By the time he was done, he had spoken for nearly the length of time set aside for four world leaders. If all 147 speakers had taken as long as Obama, their combined addresses would have lasted more than 33 hours.
And it was not as if he went off on a tangent in the heat of the moment; his prepared remarks released by the White House ran to more than 1,700 words.
World leaders launched an ambitious attempt on Monday to hold back rising temperatures, with the United States and China leading calls for the climate summit in Paris to mark a decisive turn in the fight against global warming.
In a series of opening addresses to the U.N. talks, heads of state and government exhorted each other to find common cause in two weeks of bargaining to steer the global economy away from its dependence on fossil fuels. French President Francois Hollande said the world was at a "breaking point".
The leaders arrived in Paris with high expectations and armed with promises to act. After decades of struggling negotiations and the failure of a summit in Copenhagen six years ago, some form of agreement - likely to be the strongest global climate pact yet - appears all but assured by mid-December.
"What should give us hope that this is a turning point, that this is the moment we finally determined we would save our planet, is the fact that our nations share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about it," said U.S. President Barack Obama, one of the first leaders to speak at the summit.
The leaders gathered in a vast conference center at Le Bourget airfield. In all, 195 countries are part of the unwieldy negotiating process, with a variety of leadership styles and ideologies that has made consensus elusive in the past.
Key issues, notably how to divide the global bill to pay for a shift to renewable energy, are still contentious.
"Climate justice demands that the little carbon space we still have, developing countries should have enough room to grow," said India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a key player because of his country's size and its heavy dependence on coal.
One difference this time may be the partnership between the United States and China, the two biggest carbon emitters, who between them account for almost 40 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Resources Institute think-tank.
Once far apart on climate issues, they agreed in 2014 to jointly kick-start a transition away from fossil fuels, each at its own speed and in its own way.
The United States and China "have both determined that it is our responsibility to take action," Obama said after meeting his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the summit.
"Tackling climate change is a shared mission for mankind," Xi responded in his own remarks.
Obama said the two countries would work together at the summit to achieve an agreement that moves toward a low-carbon global economy this century and "robust" financial support for developing countries adapting to climate change.
Flying home to Rome on the papal plane after a visit to Africa, Pope Francis told journalists: "Every year the problems are getting worse. We are at the limits. If I may use a strong word I would say that we are at the limits of suicide."
Most scientists say failure to agree on strong measures in Paris would doom the world to ever-hotter average temperatures, deadlier storms, more frequent droughts and rising sea levels as polar ice caps melt.
SMOG OVER CHINA AND INDIA
Facing such alarming projections, the leaders of nations responsible for about 90 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions have come bearing pledges to reduce their national carbon output, through different measures at different rates.
As the summit opened in Paris, the capitals of the world's two most populous nations, China and India, were blanketed in hazardous, choking smog, with Beijing on an "orange" pollution alert, the second-highest level.
The deal will mark a momentous step in the often frustrating quest for global agreement, albeit one that on its own is not believed to be enough to prevent the earth's temperatures from rising past a damaging threshold. How and when nations should review their goals - and then set higher, more ambitious ones - is another issue to be resolved at the talks.
"The Paris conference is not the finishing line but a new starting point," Xi said.
The gathering is being held in a somber city. Security has been tightened after Islamist militants killed 130 people on Nov. 13, and Hollande said he could not separate "the fight with terrorism from the fight against global warming". Leaders must face both challenges, leaving their children "a world freed of terror" as well as one "protected from catastrophes", he said.
On the eve of the summit, an estimated 785,000 people around the world joined the biggest day of climate change activism in history, telling world leaders there was "No Planet B" in the fight against global warming.
Signaling their determination to resolve the most intractable points, senior negotiators sat down on Sunday, a day earlier than planned, to begin their work.
The last attempt to get a global deal collapsed in chaos and acrimony in Copenhagen in 2009.
Anxious to avoid a re-run of the Copenhagen disaster, major powers have tried this time to smooth some of the bumps in the way of an agreement before they arrive.
The presidents, prime ministers and princes were making their cameo appearances at the outset of the conference rather than swooping in at the end.
The old goal of seeking a legally binding international treaty, certain to be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress, has been replaced by a system of national pledges to reduce emissions.
Some are presented as best intentions, others as measures legally enforced by domestic laws and regulations.
WHO WILL PAY?
If a signed deal now appears likely, so too is the prospect that it will not be enough to prevent the world's average temperature from rising beyond 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. That is widely viewed as a threshold for dangerous and potentially catastrophic changes in the planet's climate system.
Obama called for an "enduring framework for human progress", one that would compel countries to steadily ramp up their carbon-cutting goals and openly track progress against them.
The U.S.-China agreement has been a balm for the main source of tension that characterized previous talks, in which the developing world argued that countries which had grown rich by industrializing on fossil fuels should pay the cost of shifting all economies to a renewable energy future.
The question of how richer nations can help cover the cost of switching to cleaner energy sources and offset climate-related damage must still be resolved,
A handful of the world's richest entrepreneurs, including Bill Gates, have pledged to double the $10 billion they collectively spend on clean energy research and development in the next five years.
"The climate bill has finally come due. Who will pay?" said Baron Waqa, president of the Pacific island nation Nauru. (Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, John Irish and Roberta Rampton; Editing by Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Roche)
The two leaders discussed their roles in the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine.
"President Obama expressed his regret for the recent loss of a Russian pilot and crew member and reiterated the United States' support for de-escalation between Russia and Turkey," the official said.
Meeting with Turkish leader, Obama calls for lowering tensions with Russia after plane downing. President Barack Obama is calling for a reduction in tensions between Turkey and Russia following Turkey's shoot-down of a Russian warplane.
Obama is meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Paris on the sidelines of global climate talks.
Obama says Turkey is a NATO ally and has a right to defend itself. He says the U.S. is very interested in accelerating its military relationship with Turkey.
Obama says the Islamic State group is the common enemy. He's alluding to U.S. efforts to persuade Russia to focus its airstrikes in Syria against IS.
The president is also addressing the refugee crisis stemming from Syria's civil war. Obama is praising Turkey for generously accepting Syrian refugees. He says border security has been strengthened.
The Immigration Questions Ted Cruz Won't Answer. The Texas senator doesn't like to discuss what to do with the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the country.
Even as he makes immigration a central issue in his presidential campaign, there are two important questions on the topic that Republican Senator Ted Cruz has repeatedly declined to answer.
The first is what to do about the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. illegally. The second is whether granting them some form of legal status (even something short of a path to citizenship) amounts to “amnesty.”
“I consider amnesty to be forgiving the law-breaking of those who come here illegally and having no consequences and in particular, a path to citizenship,” he told reporters in Clinton, Iowa, before a campaign event, when asked to define the term.
Pressed on whether legal status for undocumented immigrants amounted to amnesty, Cruz moved on and took a different question. As the news conference ended, the Texan was asked that question again, and declined to say.
Cruz has proposed what he calls the “most aggressive” plan to crack down on illegal immigration, but it's silent on how to handle the current undocumented population. One of his rivals, Donald Trump, has proposed mass deportation, an idea criticized for being wildly expensive (more than $400 billion, according to one conservative estimate). Another rival, Senator Marco Rubio, is open to a path to eventual citizenship, a position Cruz has blasted as “amnesty” (though Cruz hasn't said if he believes legal status without a path to citizenship also counts as “amnesty”).
An e-mail to reporters by Rubio's campaign declared that “Senator Cruz is proving to be rather consistent only in dodging questions.”
Cruz has struggled to find a safe place in between, and said in recent months he won’t discuss what to do about people in the country illegally until the border is “secure.”
So Bloomberg Politics put the question to Cruz in an exclusive interview Monday afternoon between campaign events in Iowa: What will it take to achieve a “secure border” and therefore address undocumented immigrants?
In response, Cruz deflected and attacked Democrats as soft on illegal immigration. Asked in a follow-up if he'd be willing to address the question of what to do about the undocumented population once all the security measures he has proposed—including a border wall, tripling the border patrol, and a biometric entry-exit visa tracking system—are in place, Cruz pivoted to insisting he’ll prioritize securing the border and stopping illegal immigration.
The Texan's challenge is that he’s boxed in: Any hint of support for normalizing the status of undocumented immigrants risks turning off the conservative voters he’s relying on, while mass deportation is widely viewed as impractical—and inhumane by some Republicans. Cruz's progressive critics say his demurrals are a red herring, that he's setting up obstacles that will never be met.
What Cruz preferred to discuss is his vote against comprehensive immigration reform in 2013, a bill despised by many conservatives, and that Rubio supported but has since backed away from. During the press conference in the town of Clinton, Cruz said his record and Rubio’s record are as different as “the arsonist and the fireman,” adding: “Marco Rubio led the fight standing shoulder to shoulder with Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama for a massive amnesty plan.”
Speaking to Bloomberg, Cruz made clear he would, as president, immediately end President Barack Obama’s 2012 program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, to grant deportation relief and two-year work permits to roughly 650,000 young people brought to the country illegally as children. Cruz also said he’d end Obama’s 2014 actions to expand deportation relief.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has promised to protect and expand on both programs, a stance that is popular with Hispanic voters, who could decide a close election if it comes down to key swing states like Florida, Colorado, and Nevada.
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