Free Republic

The notion that Biden is less mentally fit for the presidency than Trump is extremely dubious. The president has been involved in public policy for more than half a century and Biden has almost certainly forgotten more about geopolitics and the federal bureaucracy than Trump has ever learned. Age notwithstanding, Biden remains far more cognitively qualified for the presidency than his 77-year-old rival... The president’s mental competence is similarly well established. Last year, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told allies that he “found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations,” as Politico put it. This comports with the assessment of...

Tim Scott and Nikki Haley don’t seem like they’re one electoral defeat from hawking snake-oil supplements on a podcast monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Both would have been at home in the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, or Mitt Romney. Neither harbors any obvious affection for Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. They are both stalwart supporters of Ukraine’s defense and the Republican foreign policy establishment’s ambitions more broadly. For these reasons, both have been coded as relative “moderates” in GOP’s 2024 presidential primary. The tendency to ideologically categorize Republicans on the basis of their affinity...

A couple of very long years ago, 62.9 million Americans voted to make a racist reality star — who, by his own account, had no experience at governing, but plenty at groping random married women — their president. By the time these votes were cast, Donald Trump had called for banning all Muslims from the United States, led a movement contesting the first black president’s legitimacy, insinuated that the bulk of Mexican-Americans were drug dealers or rapists, praised his supporters for assaulting (nonwhite) protesters, and vowed to subject each and every one of America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, including those...

Democratic primary voters are looking for a wide range of disparate things in their party’s 2020 standard-bearer. For some, the top priority is to nominate a progressive who boasts a long record of supporting single-payer health care, standing up to the financial industry, and championing organized labor. And many just want a nominee who will definitely beat Trump. Unfortunately, there is no Democratic 2020 hopeful who checks all of these boxes at once. But there could be. What if there were a Democratic politician who had been championing single-payer health care for two decades, and calling for a ban on...

The Democratic Party has never been more reliant on the support of upper-middle-class voters than it is today. And the economic fortunes of affluent Americans - and those of the typical working-class household - have rarely been more disparate. These twin developments have inspired much commentary about the class tensions beneath Team Blue’s “big tent”. There is little doubt that it would be easier to advance radical economic reform in an America where politics was sharply polarized along class lines, and working people of all races were concentrated in a single partisan coalition. It is absolutely true that a liberal...