Free Republic

President Trump has always defied the laws of political gravity, seemingly impervious to setbacks that would sink any other figure and immune from the traditional ebb and flow of campaign cycles. But his capitulation in the fight over releasing the Epstein files, and other recent developments, suggest that, when it comes to Congress, the president is subject to at least some of the same currents as his predecessors, as the first signs of his lame duck status emerge. The willingness of congressional Republicans to defy Mr. Trump and back legislation requiring the disclosure of federal files on Jeffrey Epstein, the...

FRANKLIN PARK, Ill. (WLS) -- It's been about a week since Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino and his team left the Chicago area. But immigration operations still continue in the area as two people were detained by U.S. Department of Homeland Security federal agents in Franklin Park. A family in Franklin Park spent the afternoon fixing the front door which federal agents knocked down Thursday morning while executing an arrest warrant for a man in his 60s. The family says that man and his wife were both taken into DHS custody for allegedly living in the country illegally. The granddaughter...

Washington (AFP) – In a sharp change, the United States said Thursday that its signature human rights report would start tracking countries that support gender changes for children and diversity and equity programs. Specifically, the report will ask US embassies to report on countries that allow "chemical or surgical mutilation of children in operations that attempt to modify their sex." Rubio also asked embassies to track "enforcement of policies like affirmative action of diversity, equity and inclusion that 'provide preferential treatment' to workers on the basis of race, sex or caste." The issues reflect top priorities for Trump since he...

The Trump White House is working to fix the affordability crisis, making “significant progress” in this area after Americans suffered under Bidenflation for years, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pointed out during Thursday’s press briefing.Leavitt pointed to the blockbuster September jobs report, which showed the addition of 119,000 jobs – more than doubling the forecast of 50,000 jobs.“These gains came after the summer passage of President Trump’s historic tax cuts and multiple big trade deals with countries around the world,” Leavitt said. “In particular, construction jobs surged by 19,000 in September, the largest monthly gain in a year.”She also...

It’s been a week of Donald Trump outrages—he barked at a female reporter, “Quiet, quiet, piggy,” and during a meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, he denigrated Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was slain and dismembered by Saudi operatives, allegedly on bin Salman’s orders. But perhaps his most horrendous transgression, so far, is his amplification of a call to execute Democratic members of Congress. Trump in front of members of the military President Donald Trump aboard the USS George Washington near TokyoEugene Hoshiko/AP Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs....

The Pennsylvania Working Families Party says it will support a primary challenger against Democrat Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman in 2028. "We're primarying John Fetterman. Last week, Fetterman once again sold out working Pennsylvanians. He was the deciding vote for a Republican budget bill that will strip healthcare from over 400,000 Pennsylvanians. We deserve real working-class leadership in the U.S. Senate, not a Trump-enabling Democrat," the group said in a social media post. "We're training potential candidates, recruiting volunteers, and soliciting donations to help us defeat him," it added. The party has not yet fielded a candidate. Fetterman has, on occasion,...

Democratic senators clashed with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) on the Senate floor Thursday when the GOP leader proposed a resolution to clarify that any damages won by Republican senators from lawsuits against the Department of Justice (DOJ) would go to the U.S. Treasury and not to the senators’ bank accounts. Responding to complaints that empowering Republican senators to sue the Justice Department for millions of dollars is inappropriate or unseemly, Thune on Thursday proposed a compromise.He suggested that colleagues approve a resolution by unanimous consent to clarify that any financial compensation awarded to senators would go to the...

While the U.S. Department of Agriculture considers reform to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that helps feed 42 million people, one lawmaker is pushing legislation aimed at curbing the program’s use at fast-food restaurants nationwide. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-IA, cited new data from the USDA that exposes how blue states have abused the SNAP program to spend $250 million per year on fast food through the 1977 exception to the “hot food” restriction through the Restaurant Meals Program. While SNAP's original intent was to provide food-insecure families basic staples, like meat, fruits, and vegetables, loopholes created by Congress in 1977...

The make-believe future that exists only among those who mistook Trump for a typo. There’s a certain kind of conservative, often credentialed and overconfident, who clings to the belief that Trump’s departure from the ballot magically resets the board. They imagine the movement snapping back to a tidy, small-government ethos — as if the last decade were a loud, unruly detour rather than the story itself. Sarah Isgur’s recent conversation with David Leonhardt of the New York Times is a clear example of this instinct: a hope that the base doesn’t really want what it overwhelmingly chose, twice, and...

The nation’s foreign-born population is continuing to decline, newly released Bureau of Labor Statistics data reveals, as President Donald Trump’s administration carries out an aggressive immigration enforcement agenda.The preliminary data, analyzed by Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steven Camarota, suggests that in September, the 16-year-old and older foreign-born population declined by an additional 101,000.From January through September, the number of foreign-born residents in the United States aged 16 and older has decreased by 2 million. Camarota suggests that the total foreign-born population, including those younger than 16 years old, has declined by 2.3 million.Compare this to the rapid...

Trump grew the conservative coalition in 2024. Carlson and Fuentes would shrink it.Tucker Carlson’s effort to bring neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes into the mainstream of the conservative movement is not only morally reprehensible, it is a path to political suicide for the right. Those defending or excusing Carlson’s sane-washing of Fuentes need to ask themselves a simple question: Do they want to be a majoritarian movement or not?Conservatives cannot build a lasting majority without appealing to minority voters — and that won’t happen if they embrace White nationalists.It is true that Democrats have a problem with White men. In 2024, Democrats...

Political figures from across the aisle gathered Thursday in Washington, DC, for former Vice President Dick Cheney’s funeral — sending off a key figure of pre-MAGA Republican politics. The funeral, which was attended by two former presidents and all living former vice presidents, was a bipartisan who’s who of Washington dignitaries yet with the notable absence of two of the country’s current leaders. Neither President Donald Trump nor Vice President JD Vance attended the service, and they were not invited to the funeral, according to a source familiar with the matter. Vance said Thursday that the former vice president was...

The Epstein files were the latest Never Trump plot to take down Trump. It failed. When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene apologized to CNN, went on The View, blamed Trump for supposed death threats, was hailed by the Washington Post and welcomed to join the Democrats by Rep. Jamie Raskin, many in MAGA compared her to Rep. Liz Cheney. The original Never Trump is long since dead, its leading lights indistinguishable from Democrats, hammered home by Bill Kristol’s endorsement of Zohran Mamdani, but a new Never Trump 2.0 has formed, once again made up of Republicans like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene...

More mush from the wimps. Donald Trump is very bad, because mumble mumble mumble.Even by the pathetic standards of congressional Democrats, this is unusually idiotic. Note what they don’t say. They say that the American military is being “pitted against” their own countrymen, and they say to service members that “you can refuse illegal orders…” …but they don’t say, even once, even in a pretty clear hint, precisely what illegal orders Trump has issued. He’s being vaguely bad, so you don’t have to obey him. The serious version would look like this: On [date here], the president of the United...

The fact that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to fight one another is sometimes described as a sign of vitality, particularly as compared to the enforced unanimity of the Trump-era GOP (give or take an MTG or Thomas Massie). But sometimes, fairly personal disputes are blown up into factional battles that really don’t merit an ideological interpretation. That seems to be the case with the vote of disapproval in the House yesterday for veteran congressman Chuy Garcia of Illinois. Garcia recently chose to retire from the House due to distressing family and medical concerns, but he timed his announcement...

Speaker Mike Johnson defended Donald Trump’s declaration Thursday that some congressional Democrats engaged in “sedition” after the president suggested those Democrats should be executed Thursday. Johnson said it was the Democrats who were acting “wildly inappropriate” by suggesting that military members should disobey unlawful orders from Trump. By post “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” according to Johnson, Trump was simply “defining the crime of sedition.” “That is a factual statement,” Johnson said, adding attorneys would have to “parse” the language in the criminal act. Trump had previously reposted another Truth Social user, who wrote, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!” Johnson...

Politico's Playbook on Wednesday announced what could be the biggest world news story of the year. An end to the bloody Ukraine-Russia war via a peace deal negotiated by the Trump administration. So guess where the immediate focus of the story was? If you have been following the absurd obsessions of Politico recently you would know the answer despite not quite believing it: Jeffrey Epstein. In fact their obsession in the Playbook story by Jack Blanchard and Dasha Burns, "A peace deal ‘as soon as this week’," came immediately after their joyous announcement:

Gov. Kathy Hochul has spent $66 million of taxpayer money on grants to radical left-wing groups that conduct overt political operations to defund the police, close prisons, abolish ICE, decriminalize prostitution, promote open borders, target minors with transgender ideology, promote anti-Israel extremism, impose crippling climate mandates on new housing — and increase taxation to pay for it all. An examination of 13,000 grants since Hochul took office in 2021 shows a massive investment in far-left causes, with $66 million paid so far and almost $50 million promised for a total contract value of $113 million. “Our tax dollars should go...

On the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York’s mayoral race. We wonder if Zohran Mamdani, New York’s thirty-four-year-old socialist mayor-elect, is familiar with the wit and wisdom of Margaret Thatcher. We know that he has gone to the school of Frantz Fanon, the author of The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and an apologist for violence as a “liberating force,” since Mamdani wrote his senior thesis at Bowdoin College on Fanon and that progenitor of modern revolutionary sentiment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Thatcher, our readers will recall, was the prime minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990. She is widely...

The House vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files was, in the end, 427-1. That’s a margin typically reserved for proclamations and post office namings, not for what was perhaps the biggest defeat of President Donald Trump’s second term, a fight that GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene declared on Tuesday had “ripped MAGA apart.” A group of Epstein’s survivors, sitting together in one section of the House gallery, applauded. Democrats applauded. Some Republicans applauded. No one seemed to say much to Rep. Ro Khanna as he stood in the center of the floor, toward the front, chitchatting with colleagues. When...