Free Republic

There has been a storyline kicking around of late that Donald Trump is losing sway within the Republican Party, noting that his Senate picks in places like Alaska and North Carolina appear to be underperforming. While that may be true in specific circumstances, Trump's death grip on the GOP more broadly doesn't appear to be relaxing much. The latest evidence of that reality came Tuesday morning when Michigan Rep. Fred Upton announced he would not run for a 19th term against fellow Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga this year. "Even the best stories have a last chapter," Upton said on the...

(CNN)In the immediate aftermath of the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, CNN conducted a poll. Among the questions it asked was this one: "In general, how confident are you that elections in America today reflect the will of the people?"

For all of Donald Trump's talk about the "fake news" media and supposedly socialist Democrats, his real focus since leaving office has been to cleanse the GOP of those establishment types who didn't fall into lockstep with him during his presidency. "If we didn't have RINOs, the Republican Party would totally dominate politics," Trump said in a statement via his Save America PAC earlier this month. "The good news is there are far less than there were four years ago—it is a dying breed—but nevertheless, and unfortunately, they still exist!" The latest example of Trump's attempted purge of the establishment...

Talk about bad timing. In his absurd eagerness to always be spinning in favor of a Democrat (never a Republican) involved in an election campaign, CNN's resident prognosticator Chris Cillizza with a history of often hilarious errors spun himself into a corner on Tuesday. All he had to do was wait a couple of hours and he could have spared himself the embarrassment of portraying the scandal of Democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate from North Carolina, Cal Cunningham, as just a silly sexting scandal when there was already every sign that it was much more than that.

...What Pelosi did was hand Trump, whose entire strategy, such as it is, in the 2020 campaign is to troll liberals and media, a massive gift-wrapped present with her salon trip. For Trump and his Republican allies, the whole episode affirms everything they have been saying these last few years about liberals. Whether Pelosi thought she was following the rules in place is lost entirely in the Trump campaign's rush to use the incident as a symbol of the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do culture that they argue pervades the Democratic Party -- on Covid-19 (and everything else.) This tweet, from Trump's campaign, which...

Everywhere Donald Trump looks, he sees political fires that threaten to engulf his presidency. he Supreme Court has handed him two stunning rebukes in the last week -- one on gay rights and the other blocking the President from ending the DACA program. Senate Republicans have shown increasing willingness to buck Trump. On Wednesday every GOP senator wore a mask at a press conference. Sen. Lamar Alexander insisted that there will be a second surge of the coronavirus and Sen. Chuck Grassley announced he would introduce legislation to protect inspectors general as he seeks answers on two firings from last...

Chris Cillizza of CNN sent one of the most unintentionally hilarious posts into the Twittersphere when he proudly displayed his new (and ugly) sweater that read “America Needs Journalists.” Apart from the obvious tone-deafness of the message being sent at a time when most American would gladly trade the entire CNN staff for a single grocery store worker, trucker, medic, or just about anything else, this intrepid CNN American hero stumbled upon a sentiment that conservatives can fully get behind. America does need journalists. Too bad we have so few of them. Irony is never quite as thick as when...

Here's an indisputable fact: President Donald Trump is as popular today as he has been since his first day in office. In a new Gallup poll, 49% approve of the job Trump is doing as president while 45% disapprove, matching the highest his approval rating has ever been in Gallup surveys. A Monmouth University poll released on Monday showed Trump at 46% approval, again the best he has done in that poll in more than three years. What accounts for Trump's rise? Simple: His response to the coronavirus crisis. In the Gallup poll, 60% of Americans approve of the job...

Donald Trump is not someone who accepts losing. Whether in his decades in the business world or his second career as a politician -- and President -- his career is marked with a refusal to acknowledge when he has come up short. He appeared triumphant after declaring bankruptcy. He touted his victory after a Republican Congress failed to fully repeal the Affordable Care Act. He said, without evidence, he would have won the 2016 popular vote if 3 to 5 million illegal votes had not been cast. And on and on it goes. Which brings us to Wednesday morning --...

(CNN) — Attorney General William Barr did two strange things between the time he received special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and when he released it to Congress and the public. The first came on March 24 when, two days after receiving the Mueller report, Barr released a four-page summary letter in which he made clear his conclusion that the report found no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians and that Mueller hadn't made any recommendation as to whether President Donald Trump should be charged with obstructing justice. The second came on...

The biggest misconception surrounding the special counsel probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election is that it will likely end in some sort of legal proceeding involving President Donald Trump. It won't -- for a bunch of reasons, the most important of which is that Robert Mueller, who is running the investigation, doesn't seem to believe a sitting President can be indicted. The much more likely outcome is that Mueller releases the findings from his investigation sometime this fall — and lets the chips, as they relate to Trump, fall where they may. Which means — and this is...

If you blinked, you might have missed it. At a speech in Kansas City to the VFW annual convention on Tuesday, President Donald Trump -- amid one of his trademark anti-media rants -- said this (emphasis mine): "Stick with us. Don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. ... What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."I know I keep saying this, BUT: That is an absolutely remarkable thing for any elected leader to say -- especially when that leader is the most powerful person in the country. And I know I keep...

On Tuesday, James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, went on "The View" -- weird, right? -- to talk about President Donald Trump and the intelligence community. During that interview, this exchange happened between Clapper and co-host Joy Behar: BEHAR: "So I ask you, was the FBI spying on Trump's campaign?" CLAPPER: "No, they were not. They were spying on, a term I don't particularly like, but on what the Russians were doing. Trying to understand were the Russians infiltrating, trying to gain access, trying to gain leverage or influence which is what they do." BEHAR: "Well, why doesn't...

Chris Cillizza, a political analyst for CNN, deleted a tweet he sent out Tuesday that included an image appearing to show President Trump in crosshairs. In a separate tweet, Cillizza said the graphic was unintended and the result of a computer program he and his team used. "I’ve deleted a GIF about President Trump," he wrote. "We use @GifGrabber to make our GIFs and it defaults to the image below as a first frame. To clear up any unintended confusion, I’ve removed the tweet." A GIF is a type of digital graphic that sometimes show motion in the image. Cillizza...

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders isn't a big fan of the media. Which is, of course, her right. The relationship between any White House and any press corps tasked with covering that White House is almost always fraught and fractious. But, on Monday, Sanders made an accusation that went way, way beyond the pale of the usual give and take between White House and press corps. Here's what she said: "There's a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people. Something that happens regularly. You can't say -- I'm not done. You can't say...

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump clashed in often personal terms in the second presidential debate on Sunday night in St. Louis. I watched, tweeted and picked some winners and losers. My picks are below. WINNERS: * Hillary Clinton * Martha Raddatz * The late, great Abraham Lincoln LOSERS: * Donald Trump * The townhall format * The Trump walk * Mike Pence * Bill Clinton * No debate-opening handshake

The latest piece of bad news for Hillary Rodham Clinton came in the form of a Quinnipiac poll out of Iowa on Thursday morning: Bernie Sanders, 41 percent. Clinton, 40 percent. Clinton has dropped 11 points in two months in the state and now one in three self-identified Democrats say she is not honest or trustworthy. The poll numbers come just days after NBC and Marist College released twin surveys in Iowa and New Hampshire that also spelled trouble for Clinton. She led Sanders in Iowa 38-27 — less than half her lead in a July NBC/Marist poll. In New...

My favorite line, though, is this one: "There will be new efforts to bring spontaneity to a candidacy that sometimes seems wooden and overly cautious." Planned spontaneity! Here's the thing: This reboot/reinvention/reincarnation/renaissance/reset almost certainly won't work. Because they never do. Hillary Clinton has been running for or serving in office for the past 15 years. She spent the two decades before that by her husband's side as he rose from Arkansas governor to the presidency. This is not someone who is just getting her sea legs as to what sort of public persona she wants to give off. This is...

Via her Facebook page, Twitter account and regular appearances on Fox News Channel, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is everywhere these days -- and regularly takes the sort of potshots at other politicians and the media that most of her colleagues shy away from. To wit: * In an appearance last night on Greta Van Susteren's show, Palin took direct aim at two Politico reporters -- by name no less! -- for a piece they wrote detailing the behind-the-scenes effort of the GOP political establishment to kill her presidential ambitions before they grow. She called the reporters "jokes" for using...