Free Republic

BRADENTON — GOP candidate for governor Adam Putnam portrayed his primary opponent as President Donald Trump’s puppet during a campaign stop in Bradenton on Tuesday, saying Ron DeSantis doesn’t have his own plan to lead the state. “You can’t afford to have a governor who calls the White House every morning and says ‘What are we going to do today, boss?’” Putnam said during a breakfast event at Theresa’s Restaurant. “No, if you want to help our president make America great, the third-largest state has to be hitting on all cylinders.” “I know Florida best,” Putnam added. “I have a...

Waking up 18 months ago to discover Donald Trump had been elected US president filled me with despair. What on earth had happened to politics? How could a reality TV star with no experience of government – and multiple character flaws to boot – have been chosen by American voters to be their leader? My 13-year-old daughter was also deeply troubled. “How could America vote for a man who said these things about women?” I didn’t know what to say. She went off to school. And I went off to a dance studio to practise a Gangnam Style salsa for...

Opposition research being sent around about President Trump’s second nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, accuses him of calling Hillary Clinton a bitch 21 years ago–in a private setting among friends where he was allegedly seen to mouth the b-word but not actually say it. The fate of Kavanaugh’s nomination to the high court apparently depends on whether this is seen as a resume enhancer or a nomination killer. The Washington Post’s Robert Costa tweeted several days ago about a snippet from a book by former conservative journalist turned Democratic Party activist David Brock about a gathering he attended...

A copy of the little-publicized second dossier in the Trump-Russia affair, acquired by RealClearInvestigations, raises new questions about the origins of the Trump investigation, particularly about the role of Clinton partisans and the extent to which the two dossiers may have been coordinated or complementary operations. The second dossier -- two reports compiled by Cody Shearer, an ex-journalist and longtime Clinton operative -- echoes many of the lurid and still unsubstantiated claims made in the Steele dossier, and is receiving new scrutiny. On Sunday, Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a TV interview that his...

Trump 'drinks TWELVE cans of Diet Coke daily, watches up to eight hours of news and tunes in to Morning Joe to get himself 'riled up'', insiders reveal More than 60 insiders have opened up about how Donald Trump lives his life He watches CNN for news; Fox & Friends for comfort; Morning Joe to get angry He voraciously drinks Diet Coke, imbibing far more caffeine than is healthy And he views every day as a fight against the 'liberal media' Trump last month told Air Force One reporters that he was too busy 'reading documents' to watch TV and...

Washington Post reporter Stephanie McCrummen, who co-wrote today’s hit piece on Judge Roy Moore, has a history of writing fake checks, according to a 2011 report reviewed by GotNews. According to left-leaning New York Magazine, McCrummen has an extensive criminal record, committing four infractions in three different states.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump downplayed his business ties with Russia. And since taking office as president, he has been even more emphatic. “I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia,” President Trump said at a news conference last month. “I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia." But in the United States, members of the Russian elite have invested in Trump buildings.

On Friday, President Trump and his entourage will jet for the third straight weekend to a working getaway at his oceanfront Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla. On Saturday, Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr., with their Secret Service details in tow, will be nearly 8,000 miles away in the United Arab Emirates, attending the grand opening of a Trump-brand golf resort in the “Beverly Hills of Dubai.”

Donald Trump once enjoyed a fairly friendly relationship with the mainstream media. Then he ran for president. As a Republican. On an "America First" platform. The relationship soured quickly. As bad as Candidate Trump’s relationship with media was, President-elect Trump’s relationship with media is worse. It appears that some media organizations are willing to risk everything in an effort to bring him down.While organizations such as the New York Times and the Washington Post maintained at least a semblance of credibility by staying away from the story about the less-than-credible "dossier" on Trump, others — CNN and BuzzFeed in particular...

The Trump campaign built a large policy shop in Washington that has now largely melted away because of neglect, mismanagement and promises of pay that were never honored. Many of the team’s former members say the campaign leadership never took the Washington office seriously and let it wither away after squeezing it dry. Donald Trump often brags about having experts and senior former officials advising him. Wednesday night in a forum on national security, he said, “We have admirals, we have generals, we have colonels. We have a lot of people that I respect.” It’s true that Trump is getting...

Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) haven't agreed on much during this presidential campaign. In fact, Ryan has disagreed with the Republican nominee about once a week since he reluctantly endorsed Trump in June. But perhaps nowhere do the two men diverge more clearly than on Russia. Trump thinks having a relationship with Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, could be a "wonderful thing." In a military-focused forum hosted by NBC on Wednesday, Trump even defended Putin from reports that his country is trying to influence or disrupt the U.S. election.

Did Donald Trump violate IRS rules, by using a charity's money to buy himself a signed football helmet? Four years ago, at a charity fundraiser in Palm Beach, Donald Trump got into a bidding war at the evening's live auction. The items up for sale: A Denver Broncos helmet, autographed by then-star quarterback Tim Tebow, and a Tebow jersey. Trump won, eventually, with a bid of $12,000. Afterward, he posed with the helmet. His purchase made gossip-column news: a flourish of generosity, by a mogul with money to burn. "The Donald giveth, and The Donald payeth," wrote the Palm Beach...

s the left turning on its darling, Bernie Sanders? On Friday, Netroots titan Markos Moulitsas, namesake of the liberal Daily Kos, dropped a rhetorical bomb on the Bern, blaming the candidate for doing too little to denounce death threats received by the Nevada Democratic Party after Sanders’ state convention delegates complained they had received unfair treatment. “The problem isn't Bernie Sanders' supporters,” Moulitsas wrote. “It's Bernie Sanders himself … [He] refuses to forcefully and unambiguously reject that violence, instead rationalizing and explaining it away with a mix of grievances and outright conspiracy theory.” Actually, Sanders hasn’t lost much support among...

When Phyllis Schlafly endorsed Donald Trump, the wheels started to come off her right-wing empire and allies blame the trouble on Ted Cruz. One of the right-wing’s most prominent empires is reeling — and its president says it’s Ted Cruz’s fault. Eagle Forum, a conglomerate of conservative groups which anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly started in 1972, has been rocked by inner turmoil over the last week that has pit family members against each other. And the group’s head, Ed Martin, says Cruz’s campaign is using its much-discussed “dirty tricks” to sow conflict in the organization as revenge for Schlafly’s endorsement...

Here’s what is most unusual about this week in news coverage of the GOP nomination drama: what’s not the top story of the week. On April 13, ABC’s World News Tonight correspondent Tom Llamas devoted most of that night’s report to chilling death threats against the Colorado state Republican party chairman, angered at how Donald Trump failed to win any delegates at the weekend party convention. Besides that one report, and two minor mentions (one on ABC’s Good Morning America and on Thursday’s CBS Evening News, that’s all the broadcast news attention given to reports of actual death threats in...

The next time you hear Mark Levin on the radio, or watch Glenn Beck on TV, or read Erick Erickson, RedState.com on the Internet, you might just ask yourself who is paying for the message? And why is it so stridently anti-Trump? Don’t fool yourself. They’re doing it for the money. ... Follow the Money The Conservative Tree House blog exposed the financial nexus supporting prominent “conservative” pundits to promote in their media outlets Ted Cruz as the last, best hope to block Trump in Wisconsin, a state considered by the Washington-based GOP establishment as perhaps the last establishment firewall...

An exchange on the BBC after the Nevada caucuses had given Donald Trump 46 percent of the vote said it all. A perfectly pleasant BBC interviewer asked a political consultant (as best I recall): "But how are the Republicans going to deal with Donald Trump?" "Well, at present they're voting for him," he said. Good heavens, so they are. Not fellows wearing three-piece suits in Washington, the consultant added, but people who think of themselves as Republicans or as conservatives in towns and cities across America. Now, that might not continue. It's always an error to suppose that the future...

Two months later, we ran a cover story on Ms. Palin with the tag line "She's One of the Folks." The editor in charge of covers, Bruce Ramsay, said he wanted a more intimate portrait, so we used a closely cropped version of the earlier image. A female staffer noticed that the crop revealed some untended lip and eyebrow hair, but Mr. Ramsay decided to go ahead with the image unaltered, for several reasons. The magazine had a policy of not retouching photos, and Mr. Ramsay wanted the strong eye contact in the image; in any case, the facial hair...

GOP front-runner Donald Trump refused to pick sides in the conflict between Israel and Palestine in last night’s town hall on MSNBC. “I don’t want to get into it,” he told moderators Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. “If I win, I don’t want to be in a position where I’m saying to you [my choice] and the other side now says, ‘We don’t want Trump involved…let me be sort of a neutral guy,” said the billionaire businessman. Trump described the Middle Eastern struggle as the “toughest deal in the world right now to make.” “A lot of people say an...

Even by the extraordinary standards of Donald Trump, it was a creepy chat-up line. We were at 30,000ft on Trump’s private jet flying to Florida, when he showed me his white leather double bed. ‘I like beautiful things,’ he purred seductively. ‘That’s why I like you so much.’ This was just one of many revealing and excruciating moments during the two weeks I spent with Trump in 1995 while making a 60-minute profile of him for ITV – a fortnight which started with a charm offensive, but ended in bitterness, recrimination and intimidating letters that only stopped when I threatened...