Bobby Jindal drops out. Which 14 Republicans are left for 2016?

The GOP has a history of nominating people who have run before, which could give heart to some familiar faces. But there’s also a crop of first-timers who could steal the show.

12. Donald Trump

Charlie Neibergall/AP
Donald Trump waves as he walks off stage after speaking at the Iowa Republican Party's Lincoln Dinner, May 16, 2015, in Des Moines, Iowa.

[Updated June 16, 2015] Real estate magnate and reality television star Donald Trump has been toying with running for president since 2000, but never pulled the trigger. On June 16, in a bravura performance at Trump Tower in New York, he announced his campaign. 

Mr. Trump had been appearing at campaign-style events in early primary and caucus states. At the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference in late February, Trump positioned himself as an outsider with the right experience – business, not politics – to fix Washington.

"Washington is totally broken and it's not going to get fixed unless we put the right person in that top position. It's just not going to happen," Trump said. "I'm not a politician, thank goodness. Politicians are all talk, no action. I’ve dealt with them all my life."

Trump said at his campaign announcement that he is worth more than $8 billion. 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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