Free Republic

I have no idea how 2024 will ultimately play out for Republicans, but I believe if anyone is going to eclipse or defeat Trump, it will be someone like DeSantis who has learned from Trump and could critique him from the right. I wrote about this for Politico today. Ron DeSantis Knows the Formula to Defeat Donald Trump

It was only a matter of time before Ron DeSantis’ rising star ran into the unmovable object of Donald Trump’s will to continue to dominate the GOP. A spate of recent news stories has focused on the proto-feud between the past president with future ambitions, and the protégé who rode his endorsement to victory in a Florida GOP gubernatorial primary and has big ambitions of his own. The scale of the clash shouldn’t be exaggerated — so far it mostly consists of muttering from Mar-a-Lago, and speculation that both men could end up throwing their hats in the 2024 ring....

Biden is stumbling, out of touch and weak. Two of his major initiatives, at the border and in Afghanistan, created completely avoidable catastrophes. He has given no sense of being in control of events or even his own party. He is an accidental president who is running smack into his own inadequacies and absurd pretensions. No one in Washington over the last four decades ever said that Joe Biden was the just the man with the foresight, wisdom and deft political touch to lead the free world. No, he was an average senatorial bloviator whose three presidential campaigns flamed out...

oe Biden and Kamala Harris have no clue how to deal with the many crises their administration has created, exacerbated, or failed to get under control, but as of last Friday they now have a 42-page gender strategy. Gender strategy? Yes, the “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality,” the first-ever such declaration because in the near-quarter millennium of this country’s existence no one ever thought we needed one, lays out a list of goals and aspirations and solutions to alleged problems whose existence keeps being asserted without evidence. “Health care,” for instance, is a strange action item to list...

there are reasons to believe Trump’s dominance is exaggerated and that it is slowly degrading, such that by the time the 2024 Republican primaries roll around, he’ll be challengeable and beatable if he runs. [cut] Trump’s media footprint is much reduced. Data from SocialFlow shows engagement with Trump stories plummeting in March of this year and it took another jag down in August and September. As for Trump’s polling numbers, Republicans might tell pollsters they want him to run again as a way to stick a finger in the eye of the media or as a general statement of warm...

TUCKER CARLSON: Why did you leave National Review? VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Because there were certain issues that would pop up occasionally, and I could predict what the answer was going to be. The Covington kids. I just sensed that before we knew anything, people would come and condemn them. TUCKER CARLSON: People at NR condemned the Covington kids? VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think there were certain people in the Republican movement, or establishment, who felt it is their duty to internally police their own, and that's kind of a virtue signal to the left. We are just part of your...

Remember Never Trump? For four years, an influential clique of think tankers, Republican operatives and talking heads claimed that any conservative who supported ­Donald Trump was complicit with a uniquely malevolent presidency. But if Trumpian conservatives are ­responsible for everything the 45th president was faulted for, then Never Trump should likewise own the evils of the new Biden administration. Never Trumpers spoke of the Trump GOP almost as if it were Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, a dictator’s discredited political organ, badly in need of a purge. “President Donald Trump leaves office with a crimson-stained legacy,” thundered Peter Wehner, vice president...

The American media — long stalwart defenders of the First Amendment — are now having second thoughts. For decades, it was a commonplace sentiment among journalists that freedom of the press was one of the glories of our system. It helped to make the government accountable and to air diverse points of view — even unpopular ones — to be tested in the marketplace of ideas

Lin Wood has seen and raised his fellow conspiracy-theorist Sidney Powell in a series of tweets that would make Q blush:My information from reliable source is that Roberts arranged an illegal adoption of two young children from Wales through Jeffrey Epstein. I think we can all agree that Epstein knows pedophilia.If only Jeffrey Epstein was still alive . . . Wouldn’t that be something? https://t.co/DwhgKO3gMp— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 31, 2020A couple of more questions for Chief Justice John Roberts:(1) You are recorded discussing Justice Scalia’s successor before date of his sudden death. How did you know Scalia was going...

Each day, with the coverage of the Biden as president-elect, Trump’s insistence that he’s the true winner will seem more wan and detached from reality— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) November 8, 2020 Relax, Rich. Gore had 37 days. There’s canvassing, recounts, and lawsuits. Isn’t it time for an NR cruise? https://t.co/I7Hn8f8VUs— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) November 8, 2020

The polling aggregator on the website RealClearPolitic shows the margin in polls led by Joe Biden in a blue font and the ones led by Donald Trump in red. For a while, the battleground states have tended to be uniformly blue, except for polls conducted by the Trafalgar Group. If you are a firm believer only in polling averages, this isn’t particularly meaningful, but if you are familiar with Trafalgar’s successes in 2016, when (unlike other pollsters) it had Trump leading in Michigan and Pennsylvania and, in 2018, Ron DeSantis winning his gubernatorial race, it is notable. Regardless, it’s worth...

Amy Coney Barrett has been the subject of all sorts of misleading attacks, and progressives have invented ridiculous process reasons to deny her a confirmation vote. When there is so much nonsense to knock down, we go into overdrive to do it. We are now in the same mode that we were in during the Kavanaugh fight — on high alert, rebutting all the shoddy journalism and tendentious arguments. Which is why I’d like to ask you to contribute to our flash fundraiser.

President Trump pulled an inside straight to win in 2016, and now he needs another one. The good news for Trump is that his approval rating has stopped falling recently. The bad news is that it has stabilized in the low 40s. Election-watcher Harry Enten points out that no president since Harry Truman has won with anything like Trump’s negative net approval rating. Truman won at –6, while incumbents who lost (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush) averaged out at about –13, roughly where Trump’s number is. The presidents who won reelection averaged an approval rating of...

For years, #NeverTrump activists were pushing the challenge to Trump supporters on social media: “Is there anything that Trump could do that would cause you to stop supporting him?” It was one of the primary “Orange Man Bad” themes. The morality test is that Trump supporters are abandoning all principle by worshipping Donald Trump as our Messiah and engaging in a cult. Leftists in both parties have lied about Donald Trump, hurling smears and invective, accusinng Trump of saying things that Trump never said and doing things Trump never did. And yet it just isn’t working. Why don’t any of...

National Review (NR) and the National Review Institute (NRI) are looking to get into the fight to defend free market capitalism from the Keynesian and socialist hordes attempting to destroy it.

If only mobs were allowed to destroy federal property without consequence. Then, there wouldn’t have to be any dispute over federal agents defending a federal courthouse in Portland, Ore.; it could simply be over-run and burned to the ground with no unwelcome resistance from the government. As it is, Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, who presides over a city that has become a watchword over the years for left-wing thuggery unchecked by municipal authorities, has roused himself to a state of high dudgeon — over federal officers trying to counter ongoing assaults on a federal building. He calls the feds “a...

President Trump has commuted the sentence of Roger Stone. The timing, late on Friday, suggests internal embarrassment over the move, and we wish there were more. The commutation is a move fully within the president’s powers and in keeping with the long-established pattern of presidents’ pardoning or commuting the sentences of associates caught up in special-counsel probes, although usually the associates aren’t as sleazy as Stone. We’re a long way from George H. W. Bush’s pardoning Cap Weinberger, the great Reagan-era defense official, who had been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice in the Lawrence Walsh investigation. [cut] It...

In the wave of cancellations sweeping America, Confederate statues have been particularly hard hit. They have been graffitied, assaulted, and torn down, while authorities rush to remove them. For his part, President Donald Trump has been a steadfast defender of the statues and other forms of recognition of the Confederacy. He has come out in favor of preserving the names of military bases named after Confederate generals and pointedly said that we should build on our heritage rather than tear it down. Conservatives tend to think the same way. They reflexively oppose politically correct campaigns to destroy anything giving offense....

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Russia investigation launched and conducted by James Comey’s Federal Bureau of Investigation deserves to rank as one of the agency’s great blunders — at best. President Trump famously calls the probe a hoax, a label he uses liberally, but in this instance, it may literally be true. We’ve spent years obsessing about Russian meddling in our politics, and now it turns out that the original FBI investigation into the Trump campaign that morphed into the Mueller probe may have been instigated, in part, by Russian disinformation.

In an editorial published Wednesday at National Review, the editors argue that an “unspoken consensus” has emerged among Republican senators that what President Trump did was wrong but it doesn’t warrant his removal from office. The editors think this a “reasonable” position and that Republicans should make the case for it publicly, but they can’t because of the president’s “obstinacy” in defending his actions vis-à-vis Ukraine.Instead of insisting that Trump “cannot be impeached for any abuse of power unless that abuse took the form of a criminal violation of a statute,” they write, “Republicans would be better off arguing...