Free Republic

Politics: During the primaries and the presidential campaign, Donald Trump rarely described himself as a conservative. But his appointments and his initial actions as president have turned out to be as about as right wing as it gets. Trump over the years has earned a healthy amount of skepticism from conservatives, including from this page. National Review, in its editorial denouncing Trump early in the primary season, called him "a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself." We asked...

Since World War II, the two men who have most terrified this city by winning the presidency are Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.And they have much in common.Both came out of the popular culture, Reagan out of Hollywood, Trump out of a successful reality TV show. Both possessed the gifts of showmen — extraordinarily valuable political assets in a television age that deals cruelly with the uncharismatic.Both became instruments of insurgencies out to overthrow the establishment of the party whose nomination they were seeking.Reagan emerged as the champion of the postwar conservatism that had captured the Republican Party with Barry...

When he is sworn in, his hand will be on a Bible that hasn't been used in 32 years—the Reagan family Bible used by President Ronald Reagan for all of his swearing-in ceremonies as president and governor. Not only that, but the Bible will be turned to an important piece of scripture, 2 Chronicles 7:14: "If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray, and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and will heal their land."

Video. Clinton spoke for 7 minutes, 25 seconds; Reagan spoke for 20 minutes, 42 seconds; and George W. Bush spoke for 13 minutes, 7 seconds. Obama spoke for 51 minutes, 10 seconds, nearly 10 minutes longer than the other three put together. Obama also broke from the tradition of delivering his final speech from the White House. Clinton and Reagan both spoke from the Oval Office, and George W. Bush spoke in front of a small audience in the White House East Room; the Obama administration distributed public tickets for his speech at the McCormick Place convention center in Chicago....

When James McHugh typed up a batch of letters the other day, his boss sent them back. ''They were red-penciled,'' said Mr. McHugh unhappily. ''I had to do them over again.'' As a secretary, McHugh, who once directed a staff of 10 people and administered $27 million in Federal grants, does not know his carbon paper from his Ko-Rec-Type. Yet the Federal Government is paying him $46,000 a year to type. ... In a bizarre twist, the Federal use of the "reduction in force," or RIF, has turned thousands of highly paid specialists like Mr. McHugh into secretaries, file clerks...

Dubbed “Project Moonblower,” during the height of the F-117 Nighthawk’s secrecy in the mid 1980s, the Reagan administration, and even the Gipper himself, offered an invite to the UK Ministry of Defense to join the highly classified program. In newly unsealed UK National Archives files obtained by The Guardian, Reagan’s offer to his good friend and Prime Minister of the UK Margaret Thatcher was casual as can be, with Reagan penning a diplomatic cable that stated in part: “Dear Margaret, I am delighted to hear that you will be able to see Cap (Caspar Weinberger, the US defence secretary at...

Remember the old conservative charge that many of the Democrats here in America were playing footsie with the Soviets? Some Republicans even said the Russians viewed the Democrats as their favorite party. Now bombshell revelations prove these accusations beyond a shadow of a doubt. Peter Schweizer, a Hoover Institution research fellow, has just written a new book, "Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism." This book may well force historians to revise the history of the Cold War. Schweizer, after scouring once-classified KGB, East German Stasi and Soviet Communist Party files, discovered incontrovertible...

RONALD REAGAN was intensely interested in the fate of individuals in trouble. He wanted to do everything in his power to help them. His harsh judgment of the Soviet leaders was based, more than any other single factor, not on the ideology he talked about so much, but on his perception of the way they treated their own people. When I first met him in November I981, I had just come from several months in Moscow in charge of our embassy and was on my way to Prague as U.S. ambassador. My family and I were invited to join the...

Police in North Carolina say someone broke into a local Republican Party office and defaced a wall mural of former President Ronald Reagan. A Goldsboro police report says the break-in was discovered Thursday. Police say a door was kicked in at the building housing the Wayne County GOP. The report says nothing appears to have been stolen, but the vandalism caused hundreds of dollars in damage. …

Works every time it's tried Liberal heads can start exploding in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . If you were alive and aware in the 1980s, here are some of the things you remember: Reagan wants a war. Reagan’s going to push all the buttons. Reagan has built enough nukes to destroy the world many times over, and he’s going to do it!

DONALD Trump and Theresa May have vowed to make the special relationship between Britain and the US “stronger than ever”, Britain’s ambassador to Washington has revealed. The President-elect and second British female Prime Minister have agreed over a series of phone calls to build on the legacy that President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher forged. Sir Kim Darroch, praised the billionaire’s “historic and impressive” victory that was “like no other in history” and called leaders to embrace the future that lies ahead.

Ed Reinecke, the California lieutenant governor who resigned after being convicted of perjury in a Watergate-era scandal, died Saturday in Laguna Hills. He was 92 and died of natural causes, said his son, Mark Reinecke... Reinecke was a protege of then-Gov. Ronald Reagan... The conviction was eventually overturned because of a technicality: the Senate Judiciary Committee had not officially published a rule permitting a one-man quorum, and the special Watergate prosecutor had not established that more than one senator attended the hearing... After Reinecke’s downfall, Reagan remained loyal to his former lieutenant, soliciting funds to help him pay his legal...

Set to appear in the January/February 2017 print issue, the responses published ranged from liberal authors to TV hosts to average readers of the monthly magazine and the people cited spanned nearly the duration of human history. . . . Ronald Reagan. Tens of thousands of gay men were wiped off the map simply because he refused to speak, much less act. What’s worse than ignoring a national health crisis while you stuff your face full of jelly beans and your wife reads her horoscope in the next room?

Readers' Forum,, Letters To The Editor Trump will be good for U.S. and world President-elect Donald Trump is putting together an impressive team. His picks for Secretary of Defense, National Security Adviser, CIA chief, and Secretary for Homeland Security have put ISIS and Orthodox Islam on notice. History shows that the U.S. has saved the world from Nazism and communism. Under Donald Trump, the U.S. will save the world from ISIS and Orthodox Islam. The American Thinker recently published an article suggesting how Donald Trump may bring about an Islamic Reformation, thus saving the world from disaster. Freedom and tolerance...

10-19-87 MANAMA, Bahrain — “The United States destroyed two Iranian offshore oil platforms in the central Persian Gulf today in retaliation for a missile attack on a U.S.-flagged tanker, U.S. officials announced”

By COURTESY MISSILE DEFENSE AGENCY The Missile Defense Agency and sailors aboard the Pearl Harbor destroyer USS John Paul Jones successfully fired a salvo of two SM-6 Dual I missiles against a complex medium-range ballistic missile target. COURTESY MISSILE DEFENSE AGENCY The Missile Defense Agency and sailors aboard the Pearl Harbor destroyer USS John Paul Jones successfully fired a salvo of two SM-6 Dual I missiles against a complex medium-range ballistic missile target. The Missile Defense Agency and Navy continued testing the versatility of the SM-6 missile with a salvo of two missiles fired at a ballistic missile target in...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I want to remind people, we were the first, this program was the first to actually make big news out of this. When the Soviet Union imploded, when the Berlin Wall came down and Soviet communism came to a screeching halt -- communism did not. Soviet communism did. But communism didn't lose anything. Communism just kept right on going. They found a new home in the environmental movement and they've been off to the races. Many people are laboring under a misconception that with the fall of Soviet communism, we also saw the defeat of communism in...

Looking for Mythological ReaganRonald Reagan’s legacy looms large over American conservatives. Everyone wants to be the new Ronald Reagan and Republican candidates can’t stop declaring his name with bated breath. Regrettably for conservatives, the visage of Reagan they broadcast has little to do with the actual president but epitomizes a caricature forged in Republican media circles and punditry for the last 20 years. This Mythological Reagan is evoked as the tough, principled, provocative conservative who spoke truth in an uncompromising fashion. A man hated by liberals and leftists while he celebrated America’s greatness at home and abroad; a leader who...

In trying to depict what an 80s redux will be like to my young'uns, less the crackbabies, AIDS, smog, etc., the most profound human recovery will be Freedom, which most kids under 30 don't seem to have an acquaintance with. Since 9/11, American culture has taken a permanent nosedive: music, film, art, education, everything, and here we are with a clean re-boot handed to us by DJT. What do you want to bring back? What should we diligently avoid as consequences of freedom and prosperity that half the nation doesn't have the experience or wisdom to handle competently this time...

Has Ronald Reagan passed the Republican Party baton to Donald Trump? I suggested as much a few days ago, critics objected that I was blaspheming the Gipper. They said his ideas of limited government, individual freedom, lower taxes and peace through strength will live on forever. Amen to that. Yes, Reagan's ideals should always be the guiding light of the GOP. Radio talk show host Mark Levin, reminded his listeners that Reagan won two landslide elections, while Trump so far has won one narrow victory. Levin says that Reagan was a real conservative, and Trump isnÂ’t, "Shame on you, Stephen...