Ron DeSantis

Former top Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway has teamed up with the hard-core conservative anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA) to urge Republican candidates to take a strong anti-abortion stance. On Thursday in a Washington Post op-ed, Conway and SBA's president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, attacked GOP candidates for not pushing harder against abortion, writing: "If they want to win, Republicans need to go on offense on abortion."

The move comes just over a year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, allowing states to ban abortion – which many GOP-led states have done, and others have tried but failed. An anti-abortion stance proved fatal for many Republicans in the November 2022 midterms, and polls, including recent ones from Gallup show "broader support" for abortion after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision removing it as constitutional right.

Former President Donald Trump has converted the whole Republican Party into doomsayers who believe America is heading for an "apocalypse" in what can only be described as a "recipe for carnage," wrote Eugene Robinson for The Washington Post on Friday.

All of this was put clearly on display Wednesday, wrote Robinson, as Republicans gathered for their first primary debate — and as Trump, who skipped the debate, tried to counterprogram it with a lengthy interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

If debates were won based on interruptions and bombastic declarations, Vivek Ramaswamy would be Wednesday night's victor, the Daily Beast said on Friday. Adopting favorite tactics used by Donald Trump, coupled with open expressions of admiration, earned him praise from the leading Republican presidential candidate, who was himself absent during the Wednesday event.

“President Trump, I believe, was the best president of the 21st century,” Ramaswamy said during the debate.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-GA) went into Wednesday night's GOP debate knowing he had to stop the bleeding from a rough few weeks on the campaign trail. The effort was not successful, according to some of the party's biggest donors.

Rolling Stone spoke to one wealthy supporter on Wednesday night who said of DeSantis: "He was there."

Former President Donald Trump didn't bother to show up for the first GOP debate in Wisconsin, and it seems likely he may end up skipping all of them. But he didn't have to show up, argued Amanda Marcotte for Salon.

The reason: for all the talk by Republican pundits about wanting to move on from Trump and discuss the issues, none of the candidates onstage were capable of doing that.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?

"Poor Ron DeSantis melted down when they asked him, did Mike Pence do the right thing?" the laughing Scarborough told his panel.

"It wasn't a hard question, Ron!" he exclaimed. "It's a real simple 'Yeah, I like the Constitution.'"

Asked for his take, Politico's Jonathan Martin contributed, "I thought, Joe, you touched on a really key point. Ron DeSantis on that answer, but also really more broadly, his entire candidacy, he wants to avoid making a choice. He wants to be the candidate who doesn't make the choice."

If Wednesday's US Republican debate was judged on applause alone, Vivek Ramaswamy won hands down, with Nikki Haley emerging as a pleasant "surprise" -- at least at one Atlanta bar, where a group of young voters was trying to pick a candidate to back.

Gathered at a bar in the city's trendy Buckhead district, more than a hundred people, including young Republicans, watched eight of the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination with interest.