Trump to Face Three Rivals and His Media Nemesis, Megyn Kelly, in Thursday's GOP Debate

By David A. Fahrenthold, The Washington Post

03 March 16

epublican presidential front-runner Donald Trump will face his three remaining challengers — and his nemesis in the news media, Fox News’s Megyn Kelly — on Thursday evening in Detroit in the 11th GOP candidates’ debate.

The debate will begin at 9 p.m. Eastern time on Fox News Channel.

It comes at a crucial point in this entirely unexpected GOP primary. Trump dominated the primaries of Super Tuesday this week, and now he has a significant lead over his top rival, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) in the race for Republican convention delegates.

But in a divided field, Trump has still won less than half of all the delegates awarded so far. That leaves his opponents with a viable — but risky and destructive — strategy. The only way to stop Trump from winning the nomination may be to stop anyone from winning it: dividing up the delegates so that no one has a majority.

Then, the theory goes, the party would head into a chaotic convention — the first true “floor fight” for any party in decades — and hope that a candidate other than Trump would emerge.

For Trump’s rivals, the next step in that battle will come Thursday.

The front-runner is likely to come under furious attack from Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who have sought to portray Trump as a “con artist” hoodwinking voters with promises he can’t keep. They frequently mention “Trump University,” which was not a school but a series of real-estate seminars and now is the subject of three lawsuits in which students say Trump bilked them with misleading promises.

Rubio and Cruz had given Trump a pass for months before turning on him at the last debate a week ago. A few days later, on Super Tuesday, Rubio said that those last-minute attacks had worked, and that they had cut into Trump’s leads in states such as Virginia.

The problem was that Trump still won Virginia. And six other states.

Cruz, by contrast, won three of the states up for grabs that night. Rubio won just one.

“Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud,” he will say, according to a speech prepared for delivery Thursday morning at the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics. “His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat.”

In recent days, Trump has hit back against both of his top challengers, calling Rubio a “little senator” and calling Cruz a liar. He has also dismissed Romney, blaming him for the GOP’s 2012 loss to President Obama.

In Thursday’s debate, Trump will also face Kelly, one of the three moderators. In the first GOP debate in August, Kelly asked Trump a question about unpleasant comments he had made about women: “How will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?”

Trump answered: “What I say is what I say. And honestly, Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.”

Afterward, Trump complained that the question was too harsh, and he seemed to blame it on Kelly’s menstrual cycle. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” he said. The next time Fox News hosted a debate, in Iowa, Kelly was again a moderator — but Trump boycotted the event, holding a fundraiser for veterans’ charities instead.

In the lead-up to this debate, Kelly told the Associated Press that she thinks Trump — now a veteran candidate — is better prepared for the hard questions of a presidential debate.

“I think at this point in the game he understands better how these things go. He knows he can handle me. He can handle any interviewer,” she said.

Also in the debate will be Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a relative moderate whose best showings in this primary season have been second-place finishes in New England states: Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire.

In the last debate, Kasich did not participate in the attacks on Trump.

Instead, he seemed to be holding his own private event at the side of the stage, ignoring the fighting next to him and trying to speak directly to voters. “Shoot for the stars. America’s great, and you can do it,” he said in his opening statement.

Now, however, Kasich is under increasing pressure to fight or flee the race.

His best hope for the nomination was that he could win Midwestern states such as Ohio and Michigan, and begin a last-minute comeback. But now, polls show him trailing badly in Michigan, where Trump is leading with the Republican primary looming March 8. One recent poll showed Kasich losing to Trump even in his own home state, which will hold its vital, winner-take-all primary March 15.

If Kasich wants to win those states, he may have to enter the fray against Trump.

If he doesn’t want to enter the fray, he may come under increasing pressure from other Republicans to drop out so that his voters might flow to another Trump challenger.

This will be the first GOP debate without retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who said Wednesday that he did not see a “path forward” for his campaign. Carson — a Christian conservative who last year briefly challenged Trump for the lead in national GOP polls — has not yet formally suspended his campaign.

Instead, he said he would not attend Thursday’s debate. Then, on Friday, Carson will make a speech about his future at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major gathering of conservatives at a hotel in the Maryland suburbs of Washington.

Carson’s departure may not change the dynamics of the GOP race much: He has won a total of eight delegates, far behind Trump’s 319.

But it will change the Republican debates, where Carson had been the anti-Trump: a low-key, cheerful presence on a stage full of big, loud egos. He didn’t fit, and was often proud to point that out.

“I’m .?.?. the only one to operate on babies while they were still in a mother’s womb, the only one to take out half of a brain,” he said in the first GOP debate, in one of the most memorable lines of the primary season. “Although you would think, if you go to Washington, that someone had beat me to it.”

For those who remain in the race, there is no time for mistakes: This is the most vital two weeks of their campaign so far.

The next states to vote will be Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and Maine, all on Saturday. After that, the next primaries will be March 8, when Republicans vote in Hawaii, Michigan, Mississippi and Idaho.

Military 'Censors' Book Exposing Poisoning of Troops

By Ken Klippenstein, Reader Supported News

03 March 16

kyhorse Publishing’s new imprint Hot Books, created to publish investigative books on controversial issues, has indeed touched off controversy with a new book that the Department of Defense refuses to carry in its stores relied upon most heavily by service members.

The book, titled “The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers,” reveals a link between military service in Iraq and Afghanistan and serious illnesses ranging from respiratory complications to brain cancers. The illnesses affect at least 59,000 soldiers including, according to the book, Joe Biden’s son Beau, who died of brain cancer after serving in Iraq.

Though one would think a book on this topic would be helpful to service members, Chris Ward, public affairs official for the Defense Department’s Army & Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES), confirmed to me via telephone that they had decided not to carry “The Burn Pits.” Ward would not provide a clear reason for not carrying the book, despite its prominence – it is an Amazon bestseller with favorable reviews in major news media like The Guardian.

When I told the publisher, David Talbot, about the DOD’s response, he called it an “outrageous and blatant example of government censorship.” He argued that the DOD has a responsibility to “do everything within their power to inform returning veterans about these potential health hazards instead of covering it up.”

Talbot thinks the DOD’s refusal to carry the book represents “the military’s ongoing efforts to cover up a problem that is developing into the Agent Orange scandal of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The AAFES (known colloquially by service members as the PX) is the primary location where soldiers shop for all of their goods. AAFES is a government-owned company and is the oldest and largest of the DOD’s exchange services, offering service members tax-free goods conveniently located on all Army and Air Force bases in the United States and around the world. AAFES’s refusal to carry the book keeps it out of the hands of military personnel who most need to read it. This may even violate the law.

As Joseph Hickman, the book’s author, told me, in 2013 the Senate passed legislation and the president signed into law The Burn Pit Open Registry Act, mandating that any new information or studies about burn pits must be shared with military personnel and veterans. Hickman is preparing a lawsuit against the DOD over their refusal to carry his book, alleging that this violates the law. For Hickman, the matter is personal: he himself is a former US marine and Army sergeant. In fact, Hickman dedicated his book to “all the military service members and veterans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Hickman is donating a portion of the proceeds from his book to a burn pits advocacy group, Burn Pits 360.

I asked the publisher about his thoughts on Hickman’s forthcoming lawsuit against the DOD for not carrying his book. Talbot said, “I think the lawsuit has solid basis. It’s obviously not just censorship, it’s infringement of trade. They are trying to snuff out the book’s sales potential. This is obviously the key audience for this book: the people who have the most interest in this book are the members of America’s military services and their families.”

In Iraq and Afghanistan, massive open-air burn pits were used to dispose of waste, often including toxic materials like asbestos insulation, lithium batteries, pesticides, electronics, and medical waste. Jet fuel was frequently used to stoke the fires. The burn pits were located on military bases in close proximity to where soldiers were housed and worked.  

The burn pits were largely operated by KBR, Inc., formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton, a private military contractor for which former vice president Dick Cheney served as CEO. In the past, the DOD had managed waste disposal, but in the case of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they decided to farm the work out to KBR. KBR’s use of open-air burn pits went against the EPA and DOD waste management guidance, the latter of which says that open-air burning of solid waste should be forgone in favor of incinerators.

Perhaps the greatest lapse in the DOD and KBR’s judgment was the fact that they constructed some burn pits on documented chemical weapons sites, where such weapons remained from Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime and could have been released when the burn pits were set on fire. In fact, Hickman’s book reveals a statistical correlation between troops who served near these chemical sites and troops presenting with the most severe symptoms associated with the burn pits. One of those service members was Beau Biden.

I asked Hickman why he thinks KBR and the DOD were so careless. He didn’t mince words: “For KBR, it was corporate profits. For the DOD, it was penny pinching. Neither of them ever took into consideration environmental ramifications, or U.S. military members’ health and wellbeing.” Hickman believes that everything from the close proximity of the burn pits to military bases to the use of open-air pits instead of incinerators can be explained by KBR’s quest for quarterly profits and DOD stinginess.

Asked what the Bush and Obama administrations have done to help burn pit victims, Hickman’s answer was no less candid: “Nothing.”

Susan Burke, an attorney, has filed a class action lawsuit against KBR on behalf of hundreds of ill veterans. Burke told me that she expects the class action to ultimately cover 3,000 veterans.

Asked about why she took up the lawsuit, Burke said she’s “seeking justice for all of those folks … who are injured. We have people who have suffered serious pulmonary injuries as well as cancer.”

KBR has insisted that everything it did was in keeping with laws and guidance governing waste disposal.

When I asked Burke if she thinks KBR’s policies were legal, she replied, “That’s not accurate. We have evidence that KBR failed to comply with the [DOD’s] contract.”

Asked how strong she thinks the link is between the respiratory illnesses, cancers, and the burn pits, Burke put it bluntly: “Very strong.” Burke reiterated that this link has been borne out by medical professionals and other experts.

Ken Klippenstein is an American journalist who can be reached on twitter @kenklippenstein or via email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.