Free Republic

Donald Trump took credit for “being right on radical Islamic terrorism” in the wake of the worst mass shooting in American history Sunday. The suspect in the attack, reportedly a U.S. citizen of Afghan descent named Omar Saddiqui Mateen, killed 50 people and injured another 53 during a rampage through a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. He died in a gunfight with SWAT officers after initially firing shots into the club and later taking hostages. “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!” the presumptive...

If you've noticed Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has been a less-than-enthusiastic supporter of Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting Donald Trump, you're not alone. And according to a new report Friday, one GOP insider is now explaining why. The unnamed "longtime Republican financial backer"—who attended a New York fundraiser held by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for Trump Thursday—told TheDailyCaller that most Republican donors are on board with Trump, yet Ryan is hoping Trump loses so he can run himself in four years. The source tells TheDC that the reason Ryan has not been coming out strongly for Trump is...

House Speaker Paul Ryan’s primary opponent Paul Nehlen said the Puerto Rico debt crisis should not be a top priority for the representative of Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation. “I don’t care about Puerto Rico,” Nehlen told TheDCNF. “I care about people in this country dying from heroin.” The businessman said the island, which faces a $70 billion debt burden and recently defaulted on a major loan payment, should be responsible for fixing its fiscal predicament, and slammed Ryan for supporting a bill Nehlen sees as a massive taxpayer bailout. “The...

Donald Trump earlier this week promised to make Republicans "proud of our party and our movement." Days later, he's punching up his message to skeptical party members: Get your act together. "We have a war to win against a very crooked politician," he said at a rally in Tampa on Saturday, referring to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. "I don't want to waste a lot of time trying to defend ourselves against these phony (politicians)." "The Republican Party has to come together, they have to get their act together," he added, citing the potential for the next president to nominate multiple...

WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham will travel to Dresden, Germany, this weekend to participate in the 2016 Bilderberg meeting — a private gathering of public officials, lawmakers, journalists and thinkers. The South Carolina Republican is the only member of Congress scheduled to attend the meeting, according to an official list of participants. Among those included in the 125-person roster are former Army Gen. David Petraeus, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde. Also taking part are the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg, a history professor from Harvard University, the head of Google and the...

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, would not rule out the possibility of rescinding his endorsement of Donald J. Trump’s presidential bid down the road, and he described the candidate as lacking knowledge in a number of areas in an interview released on Friday. The comments from Mr. McConnell, in an interview with the “Masters in Politics” podcast on Bloomberg Politics, came as Republicans down the ballot continue to face questions about Mr. Trump’s criticism of the Indiana-born federal judge overseeing a case against Trump University as “Mexican.” Mr. McConnell has been pointed in his criticism of those remarks. It...

Reports are circulating that Meg Whitman, a high-profile Republican donor, is considering supporting Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump. Whitman reportedly attended an exclusive Republican summit hosted by Mitt Romney on Friday. A source told ABC that Whitman asked, "'Is it not reasonable to support Hillary Clinton?' given all the awful things Trump has said." Whitman, the CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, has a long history with the Republican Party. She was the finance co-chair for Romney's and Chris Christie's presidential campaigns,and she launched an unsuccessful bid for California governor in 2010.

Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, two ex-Silicon Valley executives who pledged to use their business acumen to fix California's many economic woes, today fell short in their bids to overcome their Democratic rivals. Despite widespread anti-incumbent sentiment and a California unemployment rate hovering around 12 percent to 13 percent, Whitman and Fiorina failed to overcome their Democratic adversaries: onetime Gov. Jerry Brown, who sought to reclaim his old job, and incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer, who has been in the U.S. Congress for approximately 28 years.

A battle is escalating over the potential release of videos of Donald Trump dodging and weaving during depositions in the Trump University case, footage that could make its way into attack ads aimed at the Republican White House hopeful. The plaintiffs’ attorneys in two class-action lawsuits are pressuring U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel — the target of Trump’s racially charged attacks — to take steps that could make public four dozen video clips of Trump being pressed on whether his real estate seminar business was a sprawling scam, as well as his thoughts on the 2016 political race. It’s...

Extra, Extra! Republican Paul Ryan is an advocate for political correctness! That’s right. In commenting about Trump’s remarks concerning Judge Curiel, Ryan told George Stephanopoulos: “That comment is beyond the pale. That’s not political correctness. Suggesting that a person can’t do their job because of their race or ethnicity… that’s not a politically incorrect thing to do; that’s just a wrong thing to say.” For decades, conservatives and other decent, law-abiding Americans, have labored under the yoke of political correctness. They have been publicly shunned, lost jobs, had careers ruined, and been kicked out of universities. Why? Simply for exercising...

MADISON — The state elections agency on Friday unanimously allowed a Republican challenger to House Speaker Paul Ryan to stay on the ballot for the August primary election. The Government Accountability Board met Friday to consider the challenge to Paul Nehlen along with challenges targeting nine other candidates across the state. Nehlen’s nomination papers were challenged by a conservative activist who said Nehlen should not be allowed on the Aug. 9 primary ballot for the 1st Congressional District race because he listed an incorrect address on his filing papers. The 1st District includes Racine County. Orville Seymer argued the longshot...

Top figures in the Democratic Party pummeled Donald Trump Thursday as they publicly coalesced around Hillary Clinton for the first time in her push for the White House. The three-pronged attack from President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren came on the same day the former and latter formally endorsed Clinton. The fiercest attack came from Warren, who excoriated Trump as "a loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud who has never risked anything for anyone and who serves no one but himself" and warned of a "full-scale assault on the integrity of the federal judiciary and its judges."...

Speaker Paul Ryan’s handling of Donald Trump is coming under criticism from Senate Republicans, many of whom prefer the way their leader, Mitch McConnell, deals with the unconventional candidate. McConnell, the Senate majority leader from Kentucky, has steadfastly declined to call Trump's criticism of a federal judge “racist,” a term that Ryan (R-Wis.) pointedly deployed. “It sets up journalists to ask, ‘Do you agree with Paul Ryan that it was racist?” said an aide to a vulnerable GOP senator Trump set off a firestorm last week by claiming that a Mexican-American federal judge handling a lawsuit against Trump University was...

Donald Trump, former reality television star, finally has at least one celebrity in his corner. Comedian Roseanne Barr, who has run for the presidency herself, told the Hollywood Reporter that, 'we would be so lucky if Trump won. Because then it wouldn't be Hillary.'

Whether Americans will continue to have a Second Amendment right to own guns now depends on whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton wins the White House. The Supreme Court will soon have an opportunity to review a federal appeals court’s decision Thursday that the government can ban all concealed firearms outside the home.

John A. Boehner's replacement in Ohio's 8th District is joining the group of right-wing conservatives that helped push the former speaker into an early retirement. Newly elected Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, who was sworn in Thursday, will become a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a spokesman confirmed. The caucus has about 40 members; there are 247 Republicans in the House.

There is evidence of large-scale fraud involved in last Thursday's democrat primary in California. The present voting system in America involves a voter walking into a room, pulling a lever on a machine, and thereafter having nothing resembling control over how the record of his vote is maintained nor any sort of confidence that his vote is being counted as he might wish. That is clearly untenable, hugely subject to abuse and fraud, and it is remarkable that the American people have ever tolerated it. If we do not have some sort of a rational and decent voting system in...

Asked during a taping of "The Tonight Show" whether he thought Republicans were happy with their presidential nominee, President Obama had a quick answer. "We are," he said to immediate laughter. "I don't know how they're feeling." "I am worried about the Republican Party," he told host Jimmy Fallon in the interview, which will air in full Thursday.

Seven swing states? Seven battleground counties as bellwethers for the presidential election? Why does this sound so … familiar? Axiom Strategies and Remington Research have teamed up to provide a look at polling in key counties as an indicator for November, and two of the seven — and five of the seven states — match up with my book Going Red. At the moment, the Axiom Battleground Counties (ABC) survey shows some good news for Donald Trump: The first two counties in the ABC series match up exactly with Going Red. ABC also picks up Ohio, North Carolina, and Virginia...

The establishment is now looking to finish off Donald Trump. The presumptive Republican nominee is under intense criticism for his comments about the federal judge presiding over the Trump University class-action lawsuit. Our political and media elites are trying to turn this into Trump’s version of Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” comment — a watershed moment that cripples the GOP candidate’s electoral viability.