Ben Carson's fundraising operation has proved rewarding not only for his campaign but for the consultants running it. The story behind the creation of Carson’s fundraising network, as explained by The Times' Joseph Tanfani and Maloy Moore, is another example of the way that super PACs, which are supposed to be independent of campaigns, have become more entangled with candidates than ever before. It also illustrates how effective the checks of tens of thousands of small donors, many of them of modest means, can be at enriching campaign consultants.

After years of plunging crime rates, hugely expensive incarceration budgets and troubling racial disparities in criminal punishment, it has become fashionable on the presidential campaign trail to declare the United States' uncommonly high rate of imprisonment unacceptable.

Just don’t press candidates to explain how to significantly change it.

Hillary Clinton began demanding an end to the “era of mass incarceration” almost from the day she launched her campaign. Sen. Bernie Sanders recently made a pledge that would include cutting the prison population by more than one-quarter within four years.

On the Republican side, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky calls mass incarceration the Jim Crow of our time. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey says the country’s distinction of having more people locked up than any other nation is not what he has in mind when trumpeting American exceptionalism.

But ask what it would take to accomplish their goals, and all their campaigns struggle. The politically palatable prescriptions packed into bullet points in the candidates’ criminal justice plans don’t get the country even close.

Marco Rubio, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina all try their hands the presidential tradition of pardoning a turkey, at the invitation of Independent Journal. Less Butterball, more oddball.

Former Bush advisor Karl Rove thinks Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie can win the GOP nomination — but not Donald Trump. Rove, the former deputy chief of staff for George W. Bush, strategized what it will take for a Republican to win the next election during an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday.

“In order to win the next election, Republicans are going to have confidence in their conservative ideas and say we can take them to the Latino community, the African American community, young people,” Rove told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Rove said Trump may hold the power to win the nomination, but his vision isn’t strong enough.

For opponents, “it’s not about stopping Donald Trump,” Rove said. “He’s got a hot floor and a low ceiling.”

Right now, Trump attracts Republicans who are frustrated with government. Rove said that won’t last in a presidency, though.

In an interview with USA Today on Monday, Rove said the Republican party will need to deal with the aftermath of Trump’s inflammatory comments on the Latino population and wanting to “throw them out of the country.”

“He’s a showman,” Rove told the newspaper. “When he tweets something, that’s what he believes, but he thinks when he comes together with you, he can just schmooze you and you’ll just melt at his feet.”

Rove said he believes six or seven of the current GOP candidates have a chance at winning. It’s just a matter of strategy.

“In the history of the Republican party, we never came close to having 17 candidates; we now have 14,” he said. “In this election, lightning is going to strike for somebody.”

While Donald Trump travels on the 2016 campaign trail, daughter Ivanka Trump and her brothers watch over his business empire. Ivanka Trump, 34, sat down with ABC in an interview that aired Wednesday to talk about her own entrepreneurial success and her belief in her father’s ability to run for president.

“It’s incredible what my father has accomplished, and how strongly his message is resonating with so many people,” she said of her father’s poll ratings in the interview on “Good Morning America.”

She said she and her father do talk about his media image, shaped by his controversial comments advocating for a database tracking Muslims and his proposal for a wall along the southern border with Mexico.

Ivanka Trump, an executive vice president at the Trump Organization, said she views her father as a mentor and one of her closest friends but still sets her own goals and has her own opinions.

“Well you know, I’m a daughter, not a clone,” she told “Good Morning America.” “There are times when I’ve disagreed with him.”

Donald Trump is still on top of the polls — defiantly, loudly, implausibly on top, even after saying things that would doom any candidate in a normal year.

A month ago, Trump's standing among Republican presidential candidates appeared to be eroding, especially in Iowa, where Ben Carson was gaining support. But since the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, Trump has seized the center of the GOP's stage and bolstered his lead in both national and state polls. The horrors inflicted by Islamic State have given his campaign a lift.

The would-be president said he would register Muslims in a national database and probably close some mosques. He charged that Muslims in Jersey City, N.J., cheered the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001, even though there's no evidence of such a thing. He warned that President Obama plans to admit 250,000 Syrian refugees next year; the real number is 10,000. He sent out bogus statistics claiming that 81% of white murder victims are killed by black people; after Bill O'Reilly of Fox News told him that wasn't true, Trump shrugged and said he didn't have time to check the facts. And that's only in the last week.

How can a figure this gratuitously divisive hold on to his place atop the Republican presidential standings? Anger and fear.