Thread: Trump courts tea party voters, hints about decision on third-party run in coming week

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015...run-in-coming/

Politics

Trump courts tea party voters, hints about decision on third-party run in coming weeks

Published August 30, 2015
Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Donald Trump will decide soon whether to mount a third party bid if he loses the Republican nomination for president, the real estate mogul said Saturday.

"I think over the next couple of weeks you're going to see some things that are very interesting," Trump said after a speech in Nashville to a gathering of tea party activists.

"We're going to make a decision very soon," he added, "and I think a lot of people are going to be very happy."

Trump has so far refused to pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee, saying his refusal to commit gains him leverage over the party establishment, which has been caught off-guard by his early dominance in the race. He's also said repeatedly that he'd prefer to run as a Republican as long as the party treats him fairly.

But to appear on the ballot in South Carolina and several other states, he'll have to pledge to support the eventual nominee.

Trump was in Nashville to court tea party-leaning voters at a conference hosted by the National Federation of Republican Assemblies, which describes itself as "a grassroots movement to take back the Republican Party for the vast and disenfranchised majority of its members."

With more than a year before the presidential election, Trump has been leading summertime polls. Many of his supporters' sentiments align with those that fueled the tea party's rise. Trump made clear Saturday that he welcomes tea party support.

"I love the tea party!" he told the crowd during a meandering, hourlong speech at a Christian music venue and skateboard park, making the case that they hadn't been treated fairly.

"The tea party people are incredible people. These are people that work hard and they love the country and then they get just beat up all the time by the media," he added. "You don't know the power that you have."

The event came the day after Trump held a glitzy $100-per-person campaign event -- which he repeatedly insisted wasn't a fundraiser -- outside of Boston.

Trump said the money raised was only to offset the costs of the event and said people attending could choose to pay whatever they wanted.

But multiple signs posted at the property's entrance and along a staffed check-in table told those arriving to "Please have cash ready or make checks payable to: Donald J. Trump for President, Inc." Another read, "Entry Fee $100 Per Person."

On Saturday, Trump expressed frustration that coverage of Friday's event focused on the discrepancy.

"I got so angry at my people because somebody put up a sign saying $100," he said.

Trump also defended a personal attack he launched Friday against Huma Abedin, a top aide to Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has been swept up in the controversy over Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

Trump again speculated that Abedin had shared classified information with her husband, former Congressman Anthony Weiner, who resigned after sending sexually explicit images of himself to women he'd met online.

A spokesman for Clinton's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but said in an emailed statement Friday that there "is no place for patently false, personal attacks towards a staff member" and that Trump "should be ashamed of himself."

Oh my God, it sounds like he's going to do a third party run. Oh Geez! Is that what it sounds like to others? South Carolina, you need to fix this and fix it now.

Has Republican "Establishment" considered what it means if Trump does a third party run now? If he runs third party, he won't have to waste money or time on the Republican Primary. He doesn't have to fiddle with the peculiar platform issues he may not agree with or at least not agree with wholeheartedly. He can attack both parties equally gaining support from members of both parties, while everyone else is scrambling to get the nomination under labels that are frankly somewhat negative at this point because both parties have let down our American citizens. He'll be scheduling his events to compete with yours and no one will watch yours, hell, no one may even show up at yours to have an event. He doesn't need your money, you forgot about that. He doesn't have to kiss your bum to get your RNC contributions for the general election.

You may think you're coy, RNC and James Bopp, because you think you can twist this into the Perot scenario, but again you're forgetting something, Periot while a good man and right on almost everything across the board, was not Donald Trump, he was not a household name, he was not ... a Rock Star.

This is a whole new ball-game, and you're about to blow it, seems to me.

Maybe I'm reading this "your going to see some things that are very interesting" the wrong way, but that's what it says to me.

Judy, thanks for the smiles, loved your run-down of how many ways he could harass the two primary parties. In addition he could run adds of Boehner lying in 2014, "We will get'em next year." Just watching the adds he cold run against both parties would be hilarious.

At this moment it just might be a race between Trump and Sanders. They are both strong personalities, good debates?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...p-endgame.html

What Is the Trump Endgame?

August 30, 2015 8:00 p.m

By Jonathan Chait
Follow @jonathanchait

The media’s obsessive coverage of Donald Trump has been stalked by a cloud of self-imposed shame. The Huffington Post made an early decision to relegate Trump coverage to its entertainment section, reflecting a wide sense that Trump’s contribution to the race was diversionary. It is almost certainly true that Trump will not win the Republican nomination, and even more certainly true that he will not be elected president. But the Trump candidacy — and, in particular, its endgame — will have an enormous impact on the outcome of the presidential race. The question is not whether Trump will affect the outcome of the race, but how.

Trump could change the race by stamping his image upon the Republicans in a way they cannot escape. Trump has made himself the symbol of racism against Latinos in the United States. He is absolute brand poison. Democrats are already airing television ads connecting other Republican candidates to Trump:

Another, more potent way Trump could determine the outcome of the race is by running a third-party candidacy. An independent Trump is the perfectly designed Republican-killer. He appeals to a constituency (white nativists) that forms a crucial component of the Republican base, but which bears almost no authentic support for the party’s anti-government domestic-policy agenda. He has the celebrity and money to sustain such a run. An independent Trump run would virtually eliminate any chance of Republican victory.

Republicans’ success requires the party to steer a course between these two outcomes — one damaging, the other ruinous. They must keep Trump within the party without allowing him to contaminate the party. Such an outcome is certainly possible. It will not be easy. More unnerving for Republican power brokers is the fact that the success of their project lies mainly in Trump’s hands. And what Trump is even trying to achieve is difficult to ascertain.

There are two broad possibilities that explain Trump’s campaign. The first is that he has no real plan. His presidential run is the extension of his broader public persona — a bid for attention and to carry out grudges. Trump is running to spite the reporters and pundits who predicted he would never actually enter the race. Or perhaps he started out trying to grab attention, and simply kept going. Or he actually wants to be president in some vague way, and believes or hopes the force of his personality will carry him through. Or he just hates Jeb Bush a lot — one “Trump associate” told the Washington Post that Trump “has two goals: One, to be elected president, and two, to have Jeb not be president” — and would drop out of the race if Scott Walker or Marco Rubio supplants Bush.

If this is the case, then sooner or later — probably later — Trump will come to grips with the reality that he cannot win the Republican nomination. The field will narrow, the voters will get more realistic, and he will have to defeat a candidate who can be relied upon to carry out the Republican policy agenda.

I’ve seen some loose speculation that Trump could win the nomination without getting a majority, but this is not how the process works. You need a majority of delegates to win the nomination. If nobody has a majority going into the convention, then some process of horse-trading will go on until a majority combination forms. (In this case, the non-Trumps would unite around somebody other than Trump.) Much more likely, as the race went on, all the serious contenders who aren’t Trump and Trump’s most successful rival would drop out, allowing the leading non-Trump to win a majority of delegates in the primaries. Either way, Trump won’t get the nomination.

What happens when the party ends? The usual ritual calls for a show of unity, as the loser sublimates his ego and endorses the winner for the sake of the party’s success. It is not easy to envision Trump doing this. Nobody likes doing it, and all politicians have egos. Trump has, to say the least, an unusually large ego. What’s more, the usual incentive that prods them into swallowing their pride — pressure to stay in the party’s good graces for the sake of their political future — has no application to Trump.

At best, it would require unusual displays of flattery for Republicans to defuse Trump’s pride. But just as Trump would be unusually reluctant to defer to the party nominee, the nominee is going to be unusually reluctant to defer to Trump, given his poisonous associations. Add it all up — an egomaniacal candidate who refuses to accept the role of a loser; a party justifiably leery of sucking up to him in a public way — and what do you get? One very strong possibility is that you get Trump declaring a third-party run. Remember, we are gaming out the scenario where Trump entered the race without much planning, more as a way to keep the media circus going from one day to the next than as a long-term strategy. And the most logical endpoint of that assumption is that he bolts the party, claiming some slight (more on this later), and keeps the circus going all through November.

The second possibility is that Trump actually has a plan. If you analyze his behavior from the premise that he has in mind a specific destination, and not just a journey, then it is possible to make sense of it. Trump is running to the right of the rest of the Republican field on immigration, but to its left on role-of-government issues. He is not talking much about Obamacare (and he has praised single-payer insurance). He has assailed his opponents for proposing to cut social-insurance programs. (“They're attacking Social Security — the Republicans — they're attacking Medicare and Medicaid, but they're not saying how to make the country rich again.”) He’s called his opponents “puppets” of the Koch brothers, and proposed to raise taxes on the rich.

If all this is indeed the result of a considered plan, then the plan is probably not to become the Republican candidate for president. The plan is probably to run an independent campaign. Trump needs to initially declare himself as a Republican, because the primaries are the source of the media attention at this stage of the race. Running as a Republican gives him access to Iowa state fairs, nationally televised debates, and other venues for attention. But Trump is, at best, going through the motions of making himself acceptable to the party regulars. At worst he is actively antagonizing them. By this line of thought, Trump’s strategy is to provoke a break that would allow him to claim he has been driven out of the GOP, or that the party is not worthy of him, setting the stage for an independent candidacy.

In other words, both assumptions — that Trump has a plan, and that he has no plan — lead to the same outcome: Trump runs a third-party race. These are not foregone conclusions, of course. But the looming prospect of an independent Trump campaign is already serious enough to have set off frantic maneuvering. Fox News began its debate by trying to pressure Trump to rule out an independent candidacy, which he refused to do. Conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt tried to do the same. State Republican parties in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina are contemplating some form of a loyalty oath.

This is a smart play by the Republicans, and one that is entirely within their rights — parties have no obligation to open themselves to candidates who want to take them apart. But would any such pledge actually bind Trump? He made an informal pact with Fox News, but, as Gabriel Sherman reported, proceeded to violate it unprovoked. Or consider the defense Trump proffered at the debate of the way he stiffed various business partners in the past: “Let me just tell you about the lenders. First of all, these lenders aren't babies. These are total killers. These are not the nice, sweet little people that you think, okay?” All Trump needs is some insult to his oceanic ego to declare any previous agreement null and void. And if Trump does run as an independent, that is the ball game. He wouldn’t even need to appear on the ballot everywhere. A few key states could swing the outcome. For that matter, he could swing the outcome without even making the ballot. All Trump would need to do is campaign as a write-in candidate, and if he persuades a couple percent of the voters to go along, that could make all the difference in a polarized electorate.

The scenarios described here cannot be calculated with the precision of the hard sciences; Trumpology is a field bearing more resemblance to abnormal psychology than, say, physics. Any number of things could change the equation. In deference to the chaotic possibilities, assume a Trump independent run is not probable. Maybe it’s a one-in-five chance. Or one-in-ten. Whatever probability of each party winning you drew up at the beginning of the summer, it needs to be rewritten at the end of the Summer of Trump.

http://time.com/4016510/donald-trump...re-republican/

Fear, Loathing and Disbelief as Donald Trump Looms Large Over New Hampshire

Philip Elliott / Manchester, N.H. @Philip_Elliott

August 30, 2015 9:27 PM ET

The Summer of Trump is on the cusp of becoming The Autumn of The Donald. Just don’t expect everyone in the party to like it.

Talk to New Hampshire Republicans and the conversations eventually turn to Trump, the billionaire braggart who is atop national and local polls. This public fascination with Trump, GOP voters say with a mix of disbelief and disgust, was not supposed to have lasted this long. But as summer comes to a close, they cannot avoid it. Candidates now are adjusting their plans for a fall campaign, trying to keep their heads down and avoiding Trump’s signature barbs.

“Don’t get me started,” Manchester resident Vasoulla Demos said as she waited to meet New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at a weekend Greek festival. “I cannot even talk about it. Here’s Chris Christie, talking with voters. And Donald Trump,” she trails off, shaking her head. “Don’t we have enough troubles in this country already?”

As Demos chatted with TIME, Christie was making his way through a church parking lot, hugging some admirers and kissing others at the end of a long day of campaigning. He had conducted two marathon Q&A sessions where he answered questions about anything voters brought up: gun rights, veterans’ benefits, drug abuse and addiction, foreign aid, even his kids’ summer jobs. Now, he was talking about loukoumades and gyros at that Greek festival. To an aide, he kept passing a seemingly endless supply of sweets.

“You just run your race. Because as it stands, right now, nothing and no one is having an influence on Donald anyway. Right? So why try to? It doesn’t make any sense,” Christie tells TIME in an interview. “I can’t worry about anyone else. I have enough to do on my own.”

His keep-your-head down approach is one shared by his rivals. A day earlier, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina met with small-business owners to talk about his White House hopes. And a day later, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas visited a bee farm, a church and a roadside lobster stand.

Despite embracing the traditional New Hampshire way of campaigning—person-to-person pitches, organizing grassroots leaders and recruiting volunteers—each of these candidates is badly trailing Trump. Christie, a onetime establishment favorite, has not yet caught fire but is quietly building a list of potential supporters. Graham is tailor-made for conservatives who place national security atop their list but isn’t connecting with voters. (Graham is at risk of being excluded from an upcoming CNN debate.)

And Cruz, a Tea Party firebrand, is counting on Trump’s support to flame out and his backers to turn to him. “We’re running a grassroots campaign, one that goes person to person, one house at a time. That’s the New Hampshire way,” Cruz said.

This trio, which spent the weekend in New Hampshire, embodies the constituencies that form the modern GOP. But they have been sidelined. The campaign’s traditions and rules have been upended by celebrity and bombast.

Take Trump’s trip to New England this weekend. He skipped New Hampshire and opted for a 2,000-person confab behind high fences and velvet ropes on Friday evening near Boston. Three helicopters circled overhead as though they were covering the Super Bowl and not a showy annual event organized by a car dealer.

Again, he promised to build a massive wall along the U.S.-Mexican border. It won him cheers. “The Great Wall of China is 13,000 miles. This wall is 2,000,” he said. “Give me a break. It’s so easy, it will be great.” He then pivoted to an unfounded attack on a longtime senior adviser to Clinton; Huma Abedin, Trump suggested without any evidence, was passing classified information to her husband.

There is no predicting what is to come next from Trump. The never-before-elected candidate is tapping into voters’ frustrations with Washington and career politicians. His take-no-prisoners approach is attracting the attention of previously uninvolved potential voters; that is a potential boon for the GOP that has struggled to attract newcomers. One senior adviser to a rival candidate acknowledged that the 24 million viewers who tuned in to the campaign’s first debate was a win not just for Fox and Trump, but also for others candidates, whom most Americans had never met.

Trump’s never-ending criticism of the nation’s immigration system—and at times incendiary language about immigrants themselves—also complicates the Republican Party’s efforts to win over Hispanics, a voting bloc that is crucial in picking the President. Trump’s criticism of women, too, is turning off female voters who are unaccustomed to White House hopefuls being so personally disparaging to a gender.

“He’s a builder. He’s building a wall—between us and Hispanics. The wall is not the Trump Wall with the border. It’s a political wall,” Graham tells TIME. “He’s driving a wedge between us and women, calling young women ‘bimbos’ and calling immigrants ‘rapists‘ and ‘drug dealers.’ That’s the last thing we should be doing.”

Yet Graham and the others are being challenged by the same voters Trump is energizing. During one event this weekend, Graham told voter Euclid Dupuis that he understood his frustration. “No, not frustration,” the 76-year-old former CPA interrupted. “Disgust. Disgust.”

“We’re disgusted with politicians telling us they’re going to do one thing and then we never see it happen,” the Bedford resident said after the event, pointing to Republican promises to defund Democrats’ health care law and to block Obama’s executive actions that spared some immigrants deportation. “Don’t tell us you’re going to do something if you’re never going to do it.”

Yet Dupuis is leaning toward Cruz or Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, both first-term Senators. What about Trump? “He’s too in your face,” the retiree said. “There is no way people stick with him once they start imagining him actually doing the job. This is all a distraction.”

Similarly, Adam Lord is measuring Trump’s time in the spotlight in hours, not weeks. “He’ll self-destruct, implode at some point,” the 30-year-old accountant from Manchester said after the same Graham event. “Trump is not going to be the nominee.”

After a Christie event a day later, 66-year-old Bess Arnold had a similar view as she gave her contact information to a Christie aide at the Greek event so she could volunteer. “People are going to see him for what he is,” the Merrimack retiree said of Trump. “This can’t last.”

And Sandra Sanborn waited after Cruz at a shabby seafood shack on Sunday afternoon. The 67-year-old Seabrook woman said Cruz is her favorite candidate but she gets the appeal of Trump. “He’s saying what we’re all thinking. He’s giving us a voice,” she said. “I just think people are still watching and waiting, and they’ll see that Ted Cruz is saying the same things but with a better chance of winning.”

Winning is the often implicit—and at times the explicit—pitch these underdog candidates are trying to use. Imagine, Graham says, a Trump campaign against Clinton. “The balloon pops itself,” Graham said. “This is an entertaining man, but he’s all over the board. He doesn’t understand America’s political or legal system.”

So these candidates continue to visit New Hampshire in the traditional manner. Take Christie. He spent his Saturday morning at a VFW hall in Laconia and then went to a farm where Mitt Romney previously campaigned in the final days of his 2012 primary. When one voter asked about his slouching poll numbers, Christie urged them to keep the faith.

“You know what things looked like at this point four years ago? Herman Cain was at 30%. You know who was in second? Michele Bachmann,” Christie told supporters, asking them to keep talking to their neighbors. “No one is voting for five-and-a-half months. That’s a lifetime.”

But in the back of the barn, one Trump ally was only half-listening. He went to the Christie event in case Trump could be persuaded to have an event in Center Tuftonboro. “We can put the press in that barn,” he said. “The crowd can be out there. And we can land his helicopter over there.”

That larger-than-life approach to campaigning is part of Trump’s appeal. It also might be his undoing in New Hampshire, a state where the cranky yankee voters are fiercely protective of their traditions.

Traditions, it is worth noting, might be off-limits to Trump even if he wanted to try his hand at a sustained small-event campaign. “We’re not doing house parties any more,” said state Rep. Stephen Stepanek, Trump’s co-chairman for New Hampshire. “The crowds are too phenomenal. Finding a venue big enough to handle Mr. Trump’s phenomenal crowds is tough.”

It’s also unclear if Trump’s public support will remain steady. Even those who forked over $100 on Friday see Trump—he insisted it was not a fundraiser despite instructions at the front gate about on how to write a check to his campaign—not everyone was necessarily a Trump backer. Cindy Liquori, a 49-year-old small-business owner, drove to the Norwood, Mass., event from Suffield, Conn. “We love him,” she said, giddy to see the former reality star. But, she adds, she had planned to back Clinton before Trump got into the race. If he isn’t the nominee, Liquori said she might go back to supporting Clinton.

And therein lies the unknown for Republicans, who are watching the race with plenty of amusement and even more apprehension. After all, it’s one thing to tell a pollster in August that Trump is the favorite; it’s quite another to have that view when the ballots start being cast.

“I want to see what the hoopla is about,” said Laura Hausle, a 50-year-old Newton, Mass., resident. She also attended Trump’s New England event even though she is backing Rubio and has donated to his campaign. She didn’t want to miss the spectacle of Trump’s campaign while it lasts, though. “You only live once, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime candidate,” she said, before laughing at her party’s unexpected summer fling with Trump. “I hope.”

Do people not realize that when you have a strong third party candidate, let alone a Rock Star third party candidate, that they only need a plurality to win? They only need about 38% of the vote to take it home. Trumps already got that if he disassociates with the GOP. There are a lot of Americans who wouldn't have voted for him simply because he was on the Republican ballot. On his own party's ballot, unhappy Republicans, Independents and Democrats can comfortably vote for him.

South Carolina, you may have truly screwed this up for Republicans.

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/firs...mps-strengths/

Iowa Poll Suggests Dangers for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s Strengths

In Iowa, when J. Ann Selzer talks, people listen.

Many surprising findings in a new survey by Ms. Selzer, Iowa’s most respected pollster, are sure to be topics of elated or anxious conversations on campaign conference calls on Monday morning.

Among the findings, released Saturday night: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s lead over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has shrunk to just 7 percentage points; Donald J. Trump’s favorability with Republicans has sharply increased, suggesting he has room to increase his lead; and Democrats are largely untroubled about Mrs. Clinton’s email controversy – suggesting her vulnerabilities are deeper.

With both parties’ nominating races entering a more serious phase after Labor Day, there is room for candidates to move up or down, but the late-summer snapshot in the poll, conducted for The Des Moines Register and Bloomberg Politics, will concentrate the minds of many of the candidates.

Mrs. Clinton’s support among likely Democratic caucus-goers dropped 20 percentage points from Ms. Selzer’s previous Iowa Poll in May; Mr. Sanders’s support grew 25 points since January.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has not said if he will run, polled at 14 percent. If he doesn’t run, his supporters would split equally between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders.

Three other Democrats in the race, Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee, who are at 3 percent or less, would have to forfeit their supporters if the caucuses were held now. Democratic rules require candidates to reach a viability level of around 15 percent for their votes to be counted.

Mr. Trump, who was the choice of 23 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers, was viewed favorably by 61 percent, a startling rise of 34 percentage points since May.

In another eye-opening finding, business-oriented establishment Republicans preferred Mr. Trump to Jeb Bush 30 percent to 16 percent.

The retired surgeon Ben Carson, another outsider candidate, drew 18 percent support, ranking second in the Republican field.

Others who improved since May included Ted Cruz, at 8 percent, and Carly Fiorina, at 5 percent.

Scott Walker, also at 8 percent, continued to slide from earlier in the year when he was the first choice of Iowa Republicans.

Mr. Bush and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, both at 6 percent, had about the same support as in May.

What is driving Mr. Trump’s support?

More than 90 percent of Republicans said they were unsatisfied or “mad as hell” with the United States government and politicians in general.

Here is how The Register put it: “Like Democrats in 2007 who looked for their savior in Barack Obama, Republicans in 2015 seem to be looking for their savior in Trump.’’

Trump Telling GOP Brass He Will Forgo A Third-Party Run: Sources

Trump makes a big move.



Sam SteinSenior Politics Editor, The Huffington Post




Ryan GrimWashington Bureau Chief, The Huffington Post



Posted: 08/26/2015 03:02 PM EDT | Edited: 08/26/2015 05:28 PM EDT
WASHINGTON - Businessman Donald Trump has told several top Republicans that he will swear off the possibility of an independent bid and commit to running his presidential campaign under the party's banner, according to several sources.
Such a move could endear Trump further to Republican voters who have remained skeptical about his allegiance to a political party he joined relatively recently. Trump had drawn sharp criticism from GOP leaders concerned that a third party bid would effectively guarantee a Democratic win in the general election.

"I know you don’t need any advice, but I’m going to give you some. You will do better in the Republican primaries if you just swear off the third party, because a lot of Republicans will never vote for someone who, like Ross Perot, will hand the election to a Democrat," influential radio host Hugh Hewitt told Trump during an interview in early August.

"I’ve never heard it put so strongly," Trump responded. "When you said it the way you said it, that’s very interesting, so I’ll be thinking about that."

Michael Cohen, a top Trump aide, did not go so far as to confirm that the businessman would take the step of forsaking a run as an independent. But he did tell The Huffington Post that Trump never had "any intent" of campaigning as anything other than a Republican.

"He just wanted to ensure that the establishment would treat him as fair as they would treat any of the other candidates," Cohen said. "And I believe, right now, they are treating him fairly. It is my personal belief that the RNC is treating Mr. Trump the same as the other candidates, and he will live up to his agreement not to run as an independent."

Trump, for his part, has long said that he was holding out the possibility of an independent run as leverage. But according to sources, he has since determined that the threat was harmful to his current chances.

A spokesman for the Republican National Committee did not return a request for comment.
A top Republican source, however, cautioned that any decision Trump will reportedly make should be considered a loose commitment at best, since he is known for his political impulsiveness. A stray insult from a fellow Republican could, theoretically, change his calculus.

"[Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger] Ailes thought he had a deal, too. Then Trump called Megyn Kelly a bimbo, again," noted one GOP operative, referencing the supposed truce between the network chief and Trump.
Asked specifically if Trump would be making a formal announcement, Cohen replied, "Only Mr. Trump can sign that oath. And when he does, you can rest assured, he will live by it."

During an interview with Hewitt on Wednesday after this story was published, Trump was asked about it whether he would forgo an independent run. "It’s not something I want to do and at some point I will actually totally commit," he said, in reference to formally running as a Republican.

"I didn’t think it was appropriate to commit during the debate," he went on. "You know, I was a little surprised they even asked me at the debate but that was OK. But at some point, look, I want to run, I’m leading in the polls by a lot, I want to run as a Republican. I want to get the nomination and I want to beat the Democrats."

This story has been updated to include Trump's comments to Hewitt on Wednesday.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b04ae4970577d3