Thread: Trump takes shots at fellow Republicans: Carly was 'fired viciously,' Rubio is 'a hor

Trump takes shots at fellow Republicans: Carly was 'fired viciously,' Rubio is 'a horror show' and Jeb made 'a total fool out of himself' on Iraq

• Trump mocked Rubio and Bush for hemming and hawing on the value of George W. Bush's Iraq war
• 'We spend $2 trillion, we lost thousands of lives, we've got wounded warriors ... And you can't say if it was a bad thing?'
• Savaged Carly Fiorina's business career, saying Hewlett-Packard's stock 'went up 7 points the day she got fired – that's not a good sign'
• Sarasota County Republican Party named Trump its 'Statesman of the Year' for the second time
• Other than large-scale campaign launch events, Trump drew a larger turnout than any other speech this year by a single presidential hopeful

By DAVID MARTOSKO, US POLITICAL EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM IN SARASOTA, FLORIDA
PUBLISHED: 00:16 EST, 22 May 2015 | UPDATED: 00:31 EST, 22 May 2015

Donald Trump isn't looking past the Republican primary and sharpening his manicured claws for Hillary Clinton. Not yet.
In a 70-minute speech before an audience of 1,500 in Sarasota, Florida on Thursday night, the business titan and storied dealmaker took shots at his fellow Republicans.
The crowd went wild and chanted Trump's name even before he took the stage at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Center to receive the 'Statesman of the Year' award from the local Republican party.
And afterward as hundreds streamed out into the muggy Florida night, they surrounded Trump's car like groupies clamoring for a closer look at a movie star.
'There's never been anything like this,' Paige Green of Sarasota told Daily Mail Online as the red-meat conservative audience left. 'Not here.'


+Donald Trump with capmaign button.jpg Source: DailyMail.com Caption: Real estate billionaire Donald Trump, edging closer to launching a presidential campaign, posed with a campaign button on Thursday before delivering a 70-minute speech in Sarasota, Florida



'How would you like him negotiating with the terrorists?' Trump asked Thursday, mocking former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's uncertainty on questions about the Iraq war


Trump is worth an estimated $7 to $10 billion and would self-finance his own presidential campaign if he runs

Other than the large-scale events where some Republican presidential candidates have launched their campaigns, Thursday night's gathering drew a larger turnout than any other speech this year by a single GOP hopeful.
Trump, 68, leveled his aim and fired at Florida's former governor Jeb Bush and the state's junior senator Marco Rubio, along with former tech CEO Carly Fiorina.
His criticism of the Republican competition isn't new, but the intensity of the attacks is. Trump already has a presidential exploratory committee and is expected to launch a campaign in mid-June.
Most of his jabs brought enthusiastic applause.
'It's hard for me,' he said. 'I like these people but they don't have it. It's not gonna happen. Even the people I do like – it’s not going to happen, folks. They’re not doing what I do. I do it better than anybody.'
'It's going to be an election, in my opinion, about competence. And I'm the most competent by far.'
Carly Fiorina 'ran a company and she got viciously fired,' Trump said. 'Viciously.'
'She was walked out of there. And the stock went up 7 points the day she got fired. That's not a good sign.'
Trump, whose signature line 'You're Fired' has propelled him through 14 seasons of 'Apprentice' shows on NBC, said Fiorina's dismissal was one for the history books.
'I know about firing people. I fire people all day long,' he said. 'I make millions of dollars firing people on television. I know more about firing than anybody in the world.'
'She got fired more viciously than anybody I've ever fired.'

WATCH VIDEO AT LINK.

Fiorina's next career turn was a 2010 U.S. Senate campaign against Barbara Boxer, which she lost by ten points.
'She loses in a landslide. A landslide!' Trump boomed. 'And now she says, "Okay, now I'm going to run for president." Give me a break!'
He also slammed Bush and Rubio in front of an assembly of right-leaning Floridians who likely voted for both.
'They're not getting us to the promised land,' Trump said.

He picked at the two for hemming and hawing on the question of whether President George W. Bush's 2004 decision to invade Iraq was the right call.
'I like Jeb Bush. He's a nice person. But when he was asked about Iraq, he couldn't give an answer,' Trump said. 'It took him four days before he got his answer straight.'
Bush endured a painful stretch of days last week following his indecision about whether or not the Iraq war was justified in hindsight.
He replied 'Yes' and 'I don't know' in separate interviews, and claimed he misunderstood the question the first time it was asked.
'How would you like him negotiating with the terrorists?' Trump said of the former governor.
Rubio was tripped up by the same Iraq question on 'Fox News Sunday' last weekend.



'GIMME A BREAK': Trump said former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina 'ran a company and she got viciously fired,' saying the company's stock price climbed 7 points on the day of her ouster



FIGHTING WORDS: 'I don't even know how he could be running for office,' Trump said of Florida's junior senator Marco Rubio

'I still say it was not a mistake because the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction,' he said at first. 'It was governed by a man who had committed atrocities in the past with weapons of mass destruction.'
But moments later he seemed to reverse course.
'Based on what we know now, I think everyone agrees–' Rubio said before the host jumped in.
'So was it a mistake now?'
'I don't understand the question you're asking,' a frazzled Rubio replied.
Trump mocked the interview on Thursday as 'a horror show,' noting that he 'had the benefit of watching Jeb make a total fool out of himself' days earlier.
'I don't even know how he could be running for office,' Trump said. 'We can't put ourselves through this.'
'He couldn't answer "Is the Iraq war a good thing or a bad thing?"'




+6


FIRING LINE: Trump, known to TV viewers as the star of the 'Apprentice' franchise on NBC, said Carly FIorina was fired more viciously than anyone he's ever terminated
Trump offered his own analysis in a stream-of-consciousness argument that sounded like the Jewish comic Jackie Mason.
'Well, I don't know,' he said. 'We spend $2 trillion, we lost thousands of lives, we've got wounded warriors – who I love more than anybody – all over the place. And you can't say if it was a bad thing?'
He also lamented the fact that the U.S. 'got nothing' in return.
'Remember, I said we should keep the oil.'
Trump crowed about his week-long offensive this year that he said drove Mitt Romney out of the 2016 campaign picture.
'Once a choker, always a choker,' he said, explaining why the 2012 Republican candidate needed to go.
'That was an easy election. We had a failed president.'
'Romney had one thing going for him,' Trump claimed. 'He's good-looking. Other than that, there's nothing, okay? Even when he walked around the stage he walked like a penguin.'


THE 2016 FIELD: WHO'S IN AND WHO'S THINKING IT OVER

More than two dozen people from America's two major political parties are considered potential presidential candidates in the 2016 election.
Eight – including two women, an African-American and two Latinos – have formally entered the race. A long list of others are biding their time and assessing their chances.
REPUBLICANS IN THE RACE



Ben Carson Retired Physician
Age: 63
Religion: Seventh-day Adventist
Base: Evangelicals
Résumé: Famous pediatric neurosurgeon, youngest person to head a major Johns Hopkins Hospital division. Created a charity that awards scholarships to children of good character.
Education: B.A. Yale University. M.D. University of Michigan Medical School.
Family: Married to Candy Carson (1975), with three adult sons. The Carsons live in Maryland with Ben's elderly mother Sonya, who was a seminal influence on his life and development.
Claim to fame: Carson hit America's political radar during a 2013 National Prayer Breakfast speech where he railed against political correctness and condemned Obamacare – with President Obama sitting just a few feet away.
Achilles heel: Carson is inflexibly conservative, opposing gay marriage and once saying gay attachments formed in prison provided evidence that sexual orientation is a choice.





Carly Fiorina Former CEO
Age: 60
Religion: Episcopalian
Base: Conservatives
Résumé: Former CEO of Hewett-Packard, former group president of Lucent Technologies, onetime US Senate candidate in California
Education: B.A. Stanford University. UCLA School of Law (did not finish). M.B.A. University of Maryland. M.Sci. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Family: Married to Frank Fiorina (1985), with two adult step-daughters. Divorced from Todd Bartlem (1977-1984).
Claim to fame: Fiorina was the first woman to lead a Fortune 20 company, something that could provide key ammunition against the Democratic Partys' drive to make Hillary Clinton the first female president.
Achilles heel: Fiorina's unceremonious firing by HP's board has led to questions about her management and leadership styles. And her only political experience has been a failed Senate bid in 2010 against Barbara Boxer.





Mike Huckabee Former Arkansas governor
Age: 59
Religion: Southern Baptist
Base: Evangelicals
Résumé: Former governor and lieutenant governor of Arkansas, former Fox News Channel host, ordained minister, author
Education: B.A. Ouachita Baptist University. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (did not finish).
Family: Married to Janet Huckabee (1974), with three adult children. Mrs. Huckabee is a survivor of spinal cancer.
Claim to fame: 'Huck' is a political veteran and has run for president before, winning the Iowa Caucuses in 2008 and finishing second for the GOP nomination behind John McCain. He's known as an affable Christian and built a huge following on his weekend television program.
Achilles heel: Huckabee may have a problem with female voters. He complained in 2014 about Obamacare's contraception coverage, saying Democrats want women to 'believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar.' And in 2015 he earned scorn for hawking herbal supplements in infomercials as a diabetes cure.






Ted Cruz Texas senator
Age: 44
Religion: Southern Baptist
Base: Tea partiers
Résumé:US senator, Texas solicitor general, US Supreme Court clerk, associate deputy attorney general under George W. Bush
Education: B.A. Princeton University. J.D. Harvard Law School.
Family: Married to Heidi Nelson Cruz (2001), with two young daughters. His father is a preacher and he has two half-sisters. One of them, Miriam Cruz, died in 2010 from a fatal combination of prescription drugs while awaiting trial for retail theft and receiving stolen property.
Claim to fame: Cruz spoke on the Senate floor for 21 hours in September 2013 to protest a Obamacare funding in a federal budget bill.
Achilles heel: Cruz's father Rafael, a Texas preacher, is a tea party firebrand who has said gay marriage is a government conspiracy and called President Barack Obama a Marxist who should 'go back to Kenya.'






Rand Paul Kentucky senator
Age: 52
Religion: Presbyterian
Base: Libertarians
Résumé: US senator, board-certified ophthalmologist, congressional campaign manager for his father Ron Paul
Education: Baylor University (did not finish). M.D. Duke University School of Medicine.
Family: Married to Kelley Ashby (1990), with three sons. His father is a former Texas congressman who ran for president three times but never got close to grabbing the brass ring.
Claim to fame: Paul embraces positions that are at odds with most in the GOP, including anti-interventionist foreign policy, criminal drug sentencing reform for African-Americans and limits on government electronic surveillance.
Achilles heel: Paul's politics are aligned with those of his father, whom mainstream GOPers saw as kooky. Both Pauls have advocated for a brand of libertarianism that forces government to stop domestic surveillance programs and limits foreign interventions.





Marco Rubio Florida senator
Age: 43
Religion: Roman Catholic
Base: Conservatives
Résumé: US senator, speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, city commissioner of West Miami
Education: B.A. University of Florida. J.D. University of Miami School of Law.
Family: Married to Jeanette Dousdebes (199, with two sons and two daughters. Jeanette is a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader who posed for the squad’s first swimsuit calendar.
Claim to fame: Rubio's personal story as the son of Cuban emigres is a powerful narrative, and helped him win his Senate seat in 2010 against a well-funded governor whom he initially trailed by 20 points.
Achilles heel: Rubio was part of a bipartisan 'gang of eight' senators who crafted an Obama-approved immigration reform bill in 2013 which never became law – a move that angered conservative Republicans. And he was criticized in 2011 for publicly telling a version of his parents' flight from Cuba that turned out to appear embellished.



DEMOCRATS IN THE RACE



Hillary Clinton Former sec. of state
Age: 67
Religion: United Methodist
Base: Liberals
Résumé: Secretary of state, US senator, US first lady, Arkansas first lady, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville law faculty
Education: B.A. Wellesley College. J.D. Yale Law School.
Family: Clinton's husband Bill was the 42nd President of the United States. Their daughter Chelsea is marreid to investment banker Marc Mezvinsky, whose mother was a one-term Pennsylvania congresswoman in the 1990s.
Claim to fame: Clinton was the first US first lady with a postgraduate degree and presaged Obamacare with a failed attempt at health care reform in the 1990s.
Achilles heel: A long series of financial and ethical scandals has dogged Clinton, including recent allegations that her husband and their family foundation benefited financially from decisions she made as secretary of state. And her performance surrounding the 2012 terror attack on a State Department facility in Benghazi, Libya, has been catnip for conservative Republicans.






Bernie Sanders* Vermont senator
Age: 73
Religion: Judaism
Base: Far-left progressives
Résumé: US senator, US congressman, mayor of Burlington, Vermont
Education: B.A. University of Chicago.
Family: Sanders is married to Jane O’Meara Sanders (198, a former president of Burlington College. They have one child and three more from Mrs. Sanders' previous marriage. His brother Larry is a Green Party politician in the UK and formerly served on the Oxfordshire County Council.
Claim to fame: Sanders is an unusually blunt, and unapologetic pol, happily promoting progressivism without hedging. He is also the longest-serving 'independent' member of Congress – neither Democrat nor Republican.
Achilles heel: Sanders describes himself as a 'democratic socialist.' At a time of huge GOP electoral gains, his far-left ideas don't poll well. He favors open borders, single-payer universal health insurance, and greater government control over media ownership.
* Sanders will run as a Democrat but has no party affiliation in the Senate.


REPUBLICANS IN THE HUNT

Jeb Bush, former Florida governor
Bush has a father and a brother who occupied the Oval Office, and the capacity to raise massive amounts of campaign cash. He has alienated conservatives, though, by embracing immigration reform and 'Common Core' education standards.
Chris Christie, New Jersey governor
Pugnacious and unapologetic, Christie would bring an ego-driven brashness to the race – although his abrasive style and echos of his 'Bridgegate' scandal might ultimately sink him.
Lindsey Graham, South Carolina senator
Graham was a non-factor until a March summit in Iowa where he stole the show and put himself on the map. Arizona Sen. John McCain has praised him as the best person to help right America's foreign-relations ship
Bobby Jindal, Louisiana governor
Jindal's main claim to fame is his strident opposition to federal-level 'Common Core' education standards, which included a federal lawsuit that a judge dismissed in late March.
John Kasich, Ohio governor
Kasich is a popular governor in the battleground Buckeye State, but has little name-recognition elsewhere. He has accommodated liberals on some issues and could be seen as a more palatable version of Jeb Bush for Republicans who are anxious about electing a family dynasty.


DEMOCRATS IN THE HUNT
Joe Biden, U.S. vice president
Biden would be a natural candidate as the White House's sitting second-banana, but his reputation as a one-man gaffe factory will keep Democrats from taking him seriously.
Jerry Brown, California governor
Brown has been a presidential candidate three times and earned the nickname 'Moonbeam' for his liberal policy ideas. Today he's seen as a centrist but is likely leaning against another run.
Lincoln Chafee, former Rhode Island gov.
Chafee is a Republican-turned-Democrat who has launched a presidential exploratory committee and has distinguished himself from most in his party by attacking Hillary Clinton.
Martin O'Malley, former Maryland governor
O'Malley is a guitar-playing everyman who had limited success as his state's chief executive, showing political weakness by failing to secure a victory for his hand-picked successor.




George Pataki, former New York governor
Pataki is a long shot with almost zero name-recognition outside his home state, but he pared down the size of the state government and cut taxes during 12 years in office. He toyed with a run in 2012 but ultimately decided against it.
Rick Perry, former Texas governor
Perry was a top-tier candidate in 2012 until his 'Oops!' moment in a debate, when he couldn't remember one of his own policy positions. He now also faces a criminal indictment in Texas over tenuous claims that he abused his power.
Rick Santorum, former Pennsylvania sen.
Santorum is a perennial White House hopeful who won the GOP Iowa Caucuses in 2012 on the strength of ceaseless retail campaigning. He's best known as a religious-right crusader.
Scott Walker, Wisconsin governor
Walker built his national fame on the twin planks of turning his state's budget shortfalls into surpluses and beating back a labor union-led drive to force him out of office. Both results have broad appeal in the GOP.
Donald Trump, real estate tycoon
Trump, the host of 'Celebrity Apprentice,' could self-fund an entire campaign without spending a life-changing portion of his net worth. He has loudly criticized President Obama and claims he can negotiate with foreign governments better than anyone else.



Mark Warner, Virginia senator
Warner is a former Virginia governor who won a tough Senate race in a battleground state. He's also known as a tough budget negotiator.
Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts senator
Warren is a populist liberal who could give Hillary Clinton headaches by challenging her from the left, but she has said she has no plans to run and is happy in the U.S. Senate.
Jim Webb, former Virginia senator
Webb is a centrist Democrat and a Reagan-appointed former Navy Secretary who's hawkish on defense policy. He has launched a presidential exploratory committee.

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It might be fun to sit in some Washington offices and watch people sweat for hours after being told, "President Trump will be coming by today!" I'd love for every time he said, "You're fired' including two minutes prior and after the order.