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TROUP COUNTY, GA (WXIA) – The US Secret Service has arrested a 16-year-old, who has been charged with making death threats against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The idea of a President Donald J. Trump was once so facially absurd that it was little more than a punchline in an episode of The Simpsons. Now, as some of us struggle to make sense of a world in which this casino-magnate-turned-reality-TV-star could very well lead the party of Lincoln, many are casting about looking for a historical analogue to the phenomenon that is Trump. Here at National Review, he has been compared to George Wallace and Ross Perot. Pat Buchanan views him as a successor of sorts. A recent Weekly Standard cover story cast him as a modern-day Aaron Burr. #ad#All of these comparisons have merit. But though they each highlight an important aspect of Trump’s political persona and voter base, they fail to capture the nature of the threat he poses to the Republican party as an institution. With the GOP looking at the possibility of an open convention — complete with floor fights, riots, and the threat that the party will tear itself in two — the best historical analogue seems clear: Donald Trump is Teddy Roosevelt, and this is 1912 all over again. The 1912 Republican National Convention was a battle for the soul of the party. RELATED: On to Cleveland: The Republican Nomination Will Be Decided at the Convention Though President William Howard Taft had been Theodore Roosevelt’s chosen successor in 1908, by 1912, the increasingly radical Roosevelt was dissatisfied with Taft’s relative conservatism in office. In violation of an earlier pledge not to run for a second full term, Roosevelt chose to challenge the president for the Republican nomination. Much like Donald Trump, the progressive Roosevelt was a post-constitutional candidate. There are parallels between Trump’s defense of eminent domain abuse and Roosevelt’s contempt for property rights, and Trump’s strongman tendencies have antecedents in TR’s impatience with the machinery of constitutional government. In the early 20th century, only a handful of states held popular primaries to choose presidential nominees, and the results weren’t even binding. But Roosevelt was a popular figure, and he took advantage of these contests, carrying nine out of twelve primaries. President Taft, however, still controlled the machinery of the party, and in states where convention delegates were chosen by party regulars, Taft’s forces dominated. EDITORIAL: Yes, a Contested Convention Is Legitimate This didn’t stop Roosevelt from crying foul. “I believe in pure democracy,” he had proclaimed at the Ohio Constitutional Convention in February of that year. As the forces of his era’s Republican establishment stood arrayed against him, Roosevelt, in the words of historian Lewis Gould, remained “firm in his conviction that the nomination was being stolen from him.” One can almost imagine the outrage of Trump boosters, such as Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich and others, at the notion that the “will of the people” could be so successfully thwarted by the party apparatus. Unlike Trump, Roosevelt didn’t promise riots if he failed to secure the nomination, but the convention organizers were prepared for them. A thousand policemen patrolled the aisles of the convention, and barbed wire was hidden beneath the bunting of the speaker’s platform in order to prevent assaults. For Roosevelt had cast his battle for the nomination in apocalyptic language, proclaiming to his followers that: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” None of these protests stopped the conservative forces of President Taft from denying Roosevelt the nomination. Taft’s ally Elihu Root defeated Roosevelt’s chosen candidate for convention chairman. Roosevelt’s forces lost important votes on the floor, and the convention awarded contested delegates to Taft. Roosevelt had won more primaries and had entered the convention with a plurality of delegates, but Taft easily wrapped up the nomination on the first ballot. RELATED: There Are No Silver Linings for the GOP This Year Taft and Root knew that denying Roosevelt the nomination would likely lead him and his supporters to bolt the convention and run on a third-party ticket, splitting the GOP vote and virtually guaranteeing a Democratic victory in November. Of course, this is precisely what happened. Combined, Roosevelt and Taft won over 50 percent of the popular vote, but Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the election with just over 40 percent. #share#Why was the Republican establishment of the day so intent on denying Roosevelt the nomination? Didn’t they know that their dirty tricks would “hand the election to the Democrats?” Didn’t they know it was time to “come together as a party?” What Taft, Root, and their allies understood was that, as Root would later put it, “worse things can happen to a party than to be defeated.” In fact, as Root understood the situation before the party, “the result of the convention was more important than the question of the election.” RELATED: The GOP Should Steal the Nomination from Trump In 1912, America’s very system of constitutional government was under attack. Woodrow Wilson, the man who would become the Democratic candidate, had spent his prior academic career attacking the Constitution as outdated and dismissing the eternal truths of the Declaration of Independence as passé. Roosevelt’s progressivism led him to support a variety of radical measures — such as popular recall elections for judges and judicial decisions — that also threatened America’s constitutional order. Had Roosevelt captured the party in 1912, America would have been without a constitutionalist, conservative party. Root and Taft insisted that the party of Lincoln should be maintained as “a nucleus about which the conservative people who are in favor of maintaining constitutional government can gather.” And even though they lost the election, ushering in Wilson’s disastrous presidency, history has proven their wisdom. It is hard to imagine a President Coolidge, a candidate Goldwater, or a “Reagan Revolution” had the Republican party become the vehicle for promoting Roosevelt’s proto-welfare state. In the face of defeat, the losers of the election of 1912 could rest in the knowledge that they had ensured constitutionalism would continue to find a home in one of America’s major parties. The relevance of 1912 to the 2016 GOP primary race should be obvious. Most of the leaders of the Republican party and the conservative movement are busy figuring out the best way to capitulate to Donald Trump’s takeover of their party. At present, most of the leaders of the Republican party and the conservative movement are busy figuring out the best way to capitulate to Donald Trump’s takeover of their party. The Republican National Committee’s communications director, Sean Spicer, has pledged that the party will “100 percent” support Trump should he win the nomination. Republican leadership in Congress alternates between heaping praise on the party’s front-runner to offering tepid rebukes while still pledging to support him as the nominee. Media figures such as Sean Hannity excoriate Republicans for floating the possibility of an open convention, and many are arguing that the convention must hand the nomination to whomever wins the most delegates, even if he fails to secure a majority. The chasm between the cowardice and fecklessness of today’s Republican leaders and the courage and foresight the party’s leaders showed in 1912 couldn’t be wider. If Roosevelt, a former president and lifelong Republican, was a threat to our constitutional order, Trump — a former Democratic party donor who is hideously unprepared for the office he seeks — could prove an unmitigated disaster. At least TR had a legislative program to back up his cult of personality. Trump offers voters little more than his own authoritarian pretensions. Roosevelt had considered the strictures of our Constitution and found them wanting; Trump gives the impression of having never given our founding documents a passing thought. #related#The Grand Old Party recently turned 162 years old. Though it may seem to be on the verge of destruction, the party has been in this position before. The last time a populist figure with celebrity appeal attempted to use a wave of popular support to stage a hostile takeover, the party’s leaders had the wisdom and foresight to deny him the Republican imprimatur. They did this knowing they were overturning the will of many voters, dividing the party, and losing the general election. They understood the challenge history had placed at their feet and chose the long-term survival of constitutional conservatism over a single fleeting victory. Will the leaders of today’s Republican party and the conservative movement be able to meet the Trumpist challenge to their party as well as their predecessors did? I sure hope so. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. — Avi Snyder is director of digital communications at the Claremont Institute. The views expressed here are his alone and do not represent the views of the Claremont Institute.

When environmentalists talk about the plight of endangered species, Republicans tend to roll their eyes (the way they roll their eyes when someone orders something organic or wants to talk about ozone). But if you can overlook a little festering arrogance, you’ll find that conservationists make some good points. Of course, traditionally, conservation belongs among conservatives, who like to conserve things. In fact, the first twelve national parks were all dedicated by Republicans, starting in 1872 with Ulysses Grant and Yellowstone. (Democrats didn’t get into the game until 1915.) Happily, no one is threatening our parks. But our animals are another story. #ad#By “our animals,” of course, I mean mankind’s animals — the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, each living thing that moveth on the earth. When a species of louse or a rare dung beetle goes extinct, no one cares. Understandably. But if elephants or tigers or macaws go extinct, everyone’s going to care, and with good reason. Not all animals are created equal — to hell with mosquitoes — but losing our orangutans would be like losing every copy of The Marriage of Figaro. It would be like someone spraying acid on every Rembrandt in the world, or blowing up Palmyra. Higher animals are the irreplaceable gems of the natural world; letting them die by indifference is unconscionable. But we do anyway. And by we, I mean we the United States. While we spent 70 years keeping the world safe from Russian invasions and genocidal guerrillas, we assumed we could trust the world to handle some of the simpler things — like not shooting the very last Caspian tiger, or the last Japanese river otter (both of which have gone extinct since the end of the Second World War). Frankly, we put too much faith in everyone else. It’s time to take things into our own moon-conquering, atom-splitting hands. RELATED: Pity the Elephants: These Giants Are Gentle and Compassionate; Poaching Them Is Savage A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece in this spot proposing that we import some soon-to-be-extinct African and Indian elephants to the United States. I don’t want to be repetitive, but I still think that’s worth doing — we have climates for elephants; we certainly have room. Having had some time to chew it over — and having seen a story on Drudge this week about new skirmishes between India’s dwindling elephant herd and its exploding human population — I think maybe the elephant-airlift plan didn’t go far enough. #share#The United States has, by far, the most varied climate of any country in the world. We’re the fourth-largest country, and one of the less densely populated. Let’s take advantage of all that, and start importing endangered animals — not to zoos; to the great American outdoors. Think of them as animal refugees — if we leave them where they are, they’ll all be murdered. We won’t import anything very dangerous. Nothing man-eating. Though I think it would be a shame to lose any more tigers, I don’t want to see them eating farmers in Iowa, either. But what’s to stop us bringing in some orangutans, gorillas, elephants, African grey parrots, and blue-eyed cockatoos? Maybe some Rothschild’s giraffes? Think of them as animal refugees — if we leave them where they are, they’ll all be murdered. If we bring them here, we can give them a little protection, let them be fruitful and multiply. And we can turn some of our prairies, a few of our badlands, one or two of our forests into remarkable wilderness menageries. Could any of you look me in the eye and say you wouldn’t enjoy seeing a herd of giraffes browsing acacia trees in East Texas? There would be a few obstacles. Getting the animals in the first place, getting them to the right climate, making sure they won’t accidentally disrupt a local food chain. But nothing insurmountable. In fact, just a few months ago, Zimbabwe decided it could save some of its rhinos from poaching by flying them to Botswana. This would be the same thing, just on a bigger and better scale. Like filling up a 3,000-mile wide Noah’s Ark. Our God-given natural wonders are vanishing. If you’re worried about it, you could give money to an environmental group — but their records are mixed, and this is one of those desperate times that call for desperate measures. Write your congressman and tell him, next time Hillary says we should take 65,000 Syrian refugees, he should suggest we start with 65 elephants. — Josh Gelernter writes weekly for NRO and is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard. He is a founder of the tech startup Dittach.

Continuing to document the vicious hatred of liberals and their death threats and death wishes posted on social media aimed at Donald Trump, here's just a sm...

The group was formed last month to advise him on policies to defend religious liberty domestically and internationally.

A war-game simulation of the upcoming Republican National Convention has Gov. John Kasich winning the nomination with both Sen. [crscore]Ted Cruz[/crscore] and Donald Trump leaving the GOP to run an i

President Reagan's Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security including the SDI - 3/23/83. For more information on the ongoing works of President...

It is time to address the canard that endorsements for Sen. Ted Cruz from establishment Republicans damage his credibility as an outsider.

An economic model suggests everyone loses if America slaps tariffs on China and Mexico.

snivelingcoward.com redirects to Donald Trump's twitter feed

The split-screen told the story: on one side, images of the terror bombing in Brussels; on the other, Barack Obama doing the wave with Raúl Castro at a baseball game in Havana. #ad#On one side, the real world of rising global terrorism. On the other, the Obama fantasy world in which romancing a geopolitically insignificant Cuba — without an ounce of democracy or human rights yielded in return — is considered a seminal achievement of American diplomacy. Cuba wasn’t so much a legacy trip as a vanity trip, vindicating the dorm-room enthusiasms of one’s student days when the Sandinistas were cool, revolution was king, and every other friend had a dog named Che. When Brussels intervened, some argued that Obama should have cut short his trip and come back home. I disagree. You don’t let three suicide bombers control the itinerary of the American president. Moreover, Obama’s next stop, Argentina, is actually important and had just elected a friendly government that broke from its long and corrupt Peronist past. RELATED: Brussels Shows the High Cost of Obama’s Slow-Motion War Strategy Nonetheless, Obama could have done without the baseball. What kind of message does it send to be yukking it up with Raúl even as Belgian authorities are picking body parts off the floor of the Brussels airport? Obama came into office believing that we had vastly exaggerated the threat of terrorism and allowed it to pervert both our values and our foreign policy. He declared a unilateral end to the global War on Terror and downplayed the threat ever since. He frequently reminds aides, reports Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, that more Americans die annually of bathtub accidents. #share#It’s now been seven years. The real world has stubbornly refused to accommodate Obama’s pacific dreams. The Islamic State has grown from JV team to worldwide threat, operating from Libya to Afghanistan, Sinai to Belgium. It is well into the infiltration phase of its European campaign, with 500 trained and hardened cadres in place among the estimated 5,000 jihadists returned from the Middle East. The increasing tempo and sophistication of its operations suggest that it may be poised for a continent-wide guerrilla campaign. Obama seems genuinely unmoved by a menace the rest of the world views, correctly, with horror and increasing apprehension. In the face of this, Obama remains inert, unmoved, displaying a neglect and insouciance that borders on denial. His nonreaction to the Belgian massacre — his 34-minute speech in Havana devoted 51 seconds to Brussels — left the world as stunned as it was after the Paris massacre, when Obama did nothing. Worse, at his now-notorious November news conference in Turkey, his only show of passion regarding Paris was to berate Islamophobes. David Axelrod called Obama’s response “tone deaf.” But that misses the point. This is more than a mere mistake of presentation. Remember his reaction to the beheading of the American journalist James Foley? Obama made a statement expressing his sympathies — and then jumped onto his golf cart for a round of 18. EDITORIAL: After Brussels, Time to Get Serious He later told NBC News’ Chuck Todd that this was a mistake. “Part of this job is also the theater of it,” he explained, “it’s not something that always comes naturally to me.” As if postponing a bucolic recreation was a required piece of political playacting rather than a president’s natural reaction — a mixture of shock and sorrow — to the terrible death of a citizen he could not save. It’s not as if Obama is so super cool that he never shows emotion. Just a few months ago, he teared up when speaking about the Sandy Hook school shooting. That was the work of a psychotic. But when speaking about the work of Islamist terrorists, he offers flat perfunctory words. #related#I cannot fathom why. Perhaps having long seen himself uniquely qualified by background and history to make peace between Islam and the West, to now recognize how badly things have gone on his watch is to admit both failure and the impossible grandiosity of his original pretensions. Whatever the reason, he seems genuinely unmoved by a menace the rest of the world views, correctly, with horror and increasing apprehension. He’s been in office seven years, yet seems utterly fixed on his campaign promises and pre-presidential obsessions: shutting down Gitmo, rapprochement with Iran, engagement with tyrants (hence Havana), making the oceans recede (hence the Paris climate trip). Next we’ll see yet another useless Washington “summit” on yet another Obama idée fixe: eliminating nuclear materials. With the world on fire, the American president goes on ideological holiday. As was said of the Bourbons: “They have learned nothing and have forgotten nothing.” — Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2016 The Washington Post Writers Group.

In four states (New York, California, Massachusetts, and Arizona), it is illegal to carry nunchucks. Oddly, those same states have a total of 60,715 legally registered machine guns.

The 2016 Presidential Election has made a stop in the Fox Cities. 

Across the board, only about a quarter of the voting-age population, and 40% of registered voters, have voted in primaries and caucuses so far this election season.

Ted Cruz has rolled out three optimistic new ads today, with two of them including him speaking directly to the camera. Watch them all below.   Every Day Fighter:   Tax Plan:   Worri…

To cast a vote for Trump is to agree with his sexist, perverted, demeaning, backwards, offensive treatment of women. Learn what's at stake. Join us by wielding your influence. Until Trump is defeated, we don't date, sleep with, or canoodle with Trump supporters. The greeks did it. Women during prohibition did it. This is a tried and true method of getting men’s attention when they’re being dumb. #votetrumpgetdumped

After Donald Trump threatened to “spill the beans” on Heidi Cruz, his campaign reps took to the airwaves and Twitter Friday to indicate that they had done th...

This truly is a year when the rules don’t apply. If they did, John Kasich would be back in Columbus trying to figure out whether he sells his soul to Donald Trump or endorses Ted Cruz. #ad#Instead, the Ohio governor is still out on the trail running a delusional vanity project masquerading as a presidential campaign. There is no appetite for his pragmatic, “can’t we all get along” campaign among Republican-primary voters, who have made that abundantly clear. Kasich must hold the record for the most finishes of 4 percent or below of any candidate who has persisted in saying that he expects to be his party’s nominee. He is the Harold Stassen of primary-season futility. Kasich has limped in at roughly 4 percent or lower in Alaska (4.07 percent), Alabama (4.43 percent), Arkansas (3.71 percent), Iowa (1.86 percent), Nevada (3.6 percent), Oklahoma (3.59 percent), and Texas (4.25 percent). RELATED: A Vote for Kasich Is a Vote for Trump The contests that he has done best in, besides his home state, are Vermont, where he finished a close second to Trump and got eight delegates, and the District of Columbia, where he finished a close second behind Marco Rubio and got nine delegates. This is not exactly an electoral juggernaut. Kasich’s performance on Western Tuesday would have been enough to embarrass any lesser mortal out of the race. In Arizona, he finished in fourth place in a three-man race, which sounds like a setup for a bad joke. Marco Rubio had won enough of the early vote that the anemic Kasich couldn’t catch him. In Utah, Kasich bizarrely sought to keep Ted Cruz beneath 50 percent, the threshold for winning all of the state’s delegates. Instead, he succeeded only in holding Cruz below 70 percent, while he finished second — by 52 points. RELATED: The Insane Campaign of John Kasich Kasich has run as a manic, slightly more entertaining version of Jon Huntsman, limiting his appeal to a slice of the party’s moderates. Kasich is a genuine man of faith, but he is prone to self-righteousness and psychobabble of the sort that you’d expect to hear from an over-talkative yoga instructor, including his advocacy of more hugging. For all his foggy rhetoric of uplift, Kasich is AWOL on Trump. Last week, he pronounced himself “very concerned” about Trump’s remarks about women, but didn’t want to say anything further. There’s nothing worse than a self-professed healer who won’t call out the man who represents everything he should abjure in our politics. #share#Kasich might as well be a de facto member of the Trump team. Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics crunched the numbers and found that with Kasich in the race, Trump gets to 1,237 delegates, and without Kasich in the race, Trump falls short. Since Kasich’s only path is a contested convention, this makes his campaign, on top of everything else, a massive self-contradiction. RELATED: Will Kasich Be the Decider? Kasich believes that an open convention would turn to him, which is certainly possible — the same way a meteor strike at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland is possible. The delegate game at a convention would be, in part, an organizational contest, and Kasich’s organization is all but nonexistent. He’d make an electability case based on his good head-to-head poll numbers against Hillary Clinton, although they are elevated because no one has bothered to attack him. This is all academic unless Trump is slowed. The next chance to do it is in Wisconsin, where Kasich at the very least will make it more difficult for Cruz to beat Trump, and perhaps tip the state to the mogul. #related#There is no excuse for Kasich, a politico for decades, not realizing this. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he is still in the race only because he is less realistic and, sadly, less honorable than the candidates who have dropped out before him. John, spare us your sanctimony and your unifying patter. Take a cold-eyed look at reality, and do what’s best for your party and your cause. No hugs necessary. — Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: [email protected]. © 2016 King Features Syndicate

“Statement I just sent to media re: Trump's continuing temper tantrum.”

Milo Yiannopoulos (journalist) joins Dave Rubin, discussing his support of Donald Trump, his views on the Black Lives Matter movement, and policy vs politics...

Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz sought to gain middle-class support at a rally in Janesville, a major swing voter town in battleground Wisconsin, which he's vying to take in the April primary against rival candidate Donald Trump.

3 RecommendedRecommend Share on Facebook 1 1 SHARES Anyone who listens to Sean Hannity?s radio show or watches his television program knows how pro-Trump he is. He never says anything negative about Trump, nor will he allow others to without interrupting them and shutting them down. As a result, Trump has been friendly in return and has granted Hannity many interviews, which means high ratings. Yesterday, | Read More

His concept DOES make sense! the President BARACK OBAMA: "I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don't hav...

But why would Rubio, with nothing left at stake, sponsor a smear campaign against the one GOPer who can stop Trump?

Republican lashes out at National Enquirer article claiming he has had several affairs.