Free Republic

Over a year ago, when the media were already obsessed about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, I wrote that the Trump empire’s entanglement with troubled financial giant Deutsche Bank presented the only real existential threat to Donald Trump’s presidency. The media have largely ignored this story in favor of the more sensational (and much more spurious) story about Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russian government during the 2016 election. They are still doing it today, even in the face of mounting evidence that special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe isn’t really about collusion with Russian election tampering at all....

As Donald Trump emerged victorious in the race for the Republican presidential nomination this week, the loudest cries of anguish heard in Washington may well have come from one section of his own party—from those in its conservative movement. “Conservatives had their party hijacked from them in the 2016 primaries,” wrote Jonathan S. Tobin in Commentary, a leading platform for conservatives. He added: “The consequences for individual liberty and restraint of government power, not to mention America’s foreign-policy interests, will be incalculable.” Meanwhile, Leon H. Wolf, writing on the conservative site Redstate.com, proposed what many conservatives would consider a radical...

Probably no one has earned more leeway from conservative voters and pundits than Rush Limbaugh. Rush has been a tireless force for the conservative movement for decades, and he probably is responsible for a whole lot of conservative Republicans who are currently in office. But thankfulness for past service only goes so far, and Rush’s program yesterday officially crossed the line. When I think about Rush’s last year or so on air, I’m reminded of Marshall Phillipe Petain, one of the most intriguing figures of the twentieth century. Without Petain, the French might not have prevailed over the Germans at...

Who is Corey Lewandowski? Leon H. Wolf. March 12, 2016 . Thanks to the Michelle Fields incident, the world has now been exposed to Donald Trump's pint-sized campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. But many people still don't really know who Corey Lewandowski is or where he came from. There's a reason for that: Lewandowski has a long history of working for convicted political crooks and greasing the skids in Washington. Lewandowski first came to political prominence during the Jack Abramoff scandal, when he was an aide to Bob Ney, the Ohio congressman who got sent away for 30 years on corruption...

By all accounts, Ted Cruz had a great day on Saturday, scoring surprise wins over Trump in Kansas and Maine (by fairly comfortable margins), tying him in Louisiana, and narrowly losing Kentucky. Cruz narrowly closed the delegate gap with Trump and just as importantly increased the space between himself and the other non-Trump candidates. Today, Ted Cruz needs to do three things in order to keep his momentum going, in no particular order. 1. Beat Marco Rubio (and John Kasich) in Michigan. Donald Trump is probably going to win Michigan. Cruz's strategy in Michigan is to beat two guys who...

This is one of the most difficult posts I have ever had to write. I had naively hoped that this election cycle, I would be treated to a substantive contest between a spate of highly accomplished two-term conservative governors, and Senators of great rhetorical skill acting as the ideological conscience of the bunch. As the primary wore on through the summer of 2015, it became clear that the GOP electorate was not interested in governors of accomplishment, but I still had hope for a final contest between two of my favorite Senators: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. I hoped to...

Ben Carson finished dead last in South Carolina last night, as the polls predicted that he would. He did not finish last due to lack of effort, or because he was focusing on some other state where he had a better chance. By Carson's own admission, South Carolina was a state where he should have done well, and where the large evangelical population should have given him a decent chance to post a good showing. Instead, he finished behind John Kasich, a guy who spent significant portions of the last week campaigning in far flung places like Michigan. He finished...

Right after calling the South Carolina primary for Trump, the CNN political panel was borderline orgasmic and already calling the entire race for Trump. They claimed, incredibly, that it would take an unexpected and unforeseeable event for someone other than Trump to win. CNN is as slow to adapt to the reality of Trump as the Republican establishment has been. If Donald Trump were a traditional Republican, I would agree that this race would already be over. But what CNN is ignoring is the mounting evidence that Donald Trump does not receive momentum from victories like other Republicans in the...

An exposé on Donald Trump where Dana Loesch reveals how Donald Trump has long time connections with organized crime in almost all of his partnerships, his always changing and never constant stance on the 2nd amendment, and how he is basically controlled by the banks who he depends on for his big business deal ventures.

There's a reason why Donald Trump is taking his loss in Iowa so hard - it's been devastating to his national standing. His standing in the polls might already be falling like a rock, and now it appears that the rolling concert tour that was his national campaign might be coming to an end. Now comes pretty convincing evidence that his crowds are shrinking, and he's trying to hide it (poorly). Trump was in Little Rock last night, and he tweeted a picture that seemed to show a typical Trump full house, and that specifically claimed that the crowd was...

How Will Trump Handle Losing Iowa? If you scratch any Republican pundit on the face of the earth, a comparison between Trump's 2016 campaign and Rudy Giuliani's 2008 campaign will fall out. If the point is to illustrate that being the frontrunner at this stage of the race won't necessarily translate to victory, then these pundits are on solid ground. If the point is to draw a meaningful parallel between the current Trump boom and the forces that drove Giuliani to the top, and then back down to the bottom, of the 2008 pile, then they are dead wrong. By...

I had the opportunity to sit down yesterday with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 100% at a campaign event in Nashville and ask him several questions. One of the questions I asked was whether Senator Cruz still supported expanding the H-1B visa program, as he has in the past. Senator Cruz indicated that he no longer does, and you can see his explanation here: Transcript: RedState: Senator, I think the path to legalization issue has been beaten to death and I won't go over it again. One of the things you have supported in the past is raising the ceiling on...

Denver to Host 2016 RedState Gathering...click here for more information and to Register Today « BACK | PRINT RS FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR Ted Cruz Has a Problem By: Leon H. Wolf (Diary) | December 16th, 2015 at 08:59 AM | 195 RESIZE: AAA Share on Facebook 55 55 SHARES Up until last night, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 100%‘s refusal to attack Donald Trump was defensible. Without question, it was smart politics, as his rise in the polls would attest. But it was also defensible on the merits as a guy who is a solid conservative in good standing, who was...

...Mocking a disabled person for their disability has been universally passe since at least the 1950s, and so some of his supporters have been out on twitter over the last couple of days offering various defenses for Trump's behavior on this video. It is important to note that Trump himself has (as far as I know) offered only this by way of "explanation" for his actions: Defense 1. Trump didn't know Koveleski was disabled... So, to believe that Trump had no idea what Koveleski looked like or the particulars of his disability, you would have to believe a) that the...

Last week, National Review’s Jim Geraghty published what may be the most insightful essay yet [1] on the difference between the conservative movement and Donald Trump and his followers. Geraghty has noticed a telling reticence on Trump’s part to utter such words as “freedom” or “liberty.” By contrast, Geraghty notes that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker used the word “freedom” six times in the 179-word announcement of his plan to replace ObamaCare, and Ted Cruz used “freedom” twice and “liberty” eleven times in his announcement speech at Liberty University, not counting references to the university itself.The reason for this lack of...