Free Republic

A number of Ron DeSantis supporters have taken to social media to announce they will vote for Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before they unify behind Donald Trump, despite the DeSantis camp pitching the Florida Governor as a facsimile of Trump with less “baggage” and more “effective” administration.“Since I have been reliably told for months by Trump supporters that they would write him in even if DeSantis or anyone else won the GOP primary, it’s good to have permission to support RFK in the general if DeSantis doesn’t win the GOP primary,” wrote DeSantis booster Scott Morefield, a...

Regardless of any delusions you, I, or anyone else may harbor on this issue, the odds that Donald Trump will be saddled with at least one FELONY conviction out of the dozens he is currently charged with are exceedingly high. It doesn’t even matter whether the charges are with or without merit. If a firing squad is pointing 91 rounds at someone, at least one of them is gonna hit the target. This means that this time next year, instead of campaigning or even accepting the GOP nomination in person, the former president could either be in prison or on...

The general Trumpworld consensus around last Wednesday night’s GOP primary debate, mainly as laid out by Florida Rep. Byron Donalds during Fox News post-debate analysis, seems to be that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had a solid enough performance but failed to dominate and thus didn’t move the needle in any meaningful way. It’s a ridiculously unfair cope, of course. In a field of eight, it’s tough to hit a home run, especially when the other candidates aren’t directly targeting you and giving you a chance to rebut anything. Which is interesting in and of itself. Of the people on that...

People call me 'Never Trump,' but I was as Trumpy as the Trumpiest Trumper in 2015-16. Wore the red hat. Donated. In 2015, I argued in op-eds for TheBlaze and other places that Trump could win where no other Republican could. And he did, thank God. So what happened? Why did I switch? Things were going swimmingly for a while, for three years to be exact. As any of my columns or tweets from the time will prove, I was among Trump's biggest cheerleaders. Then Covid hit, and though I was frustrated with various aspects of the way he handled...

With the dawn of a new year comes the traditional time for political pundits to prognosticate. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that’s never been as easy as it is right now. In sum, my crystal ball for pretty much everything spells out that things - and by ‘things’ I mean everything by every metric you can imagine culturally, economically, and politically - are going to be worse this time next year than they are right now. This isn’t rocket science and it doesn’t take any special skills other than the basic knowledge that, despite the slim House majority that will certainly herald...

The New York Times made an eye-popping admission on Sunday regarding data collected by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on Covid-19 vaccines.In an article titled, "The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects," reporter Apoorva Mandavilli writes: "For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public."Mandavilli, who covers science and global health for the Times, reported that the agency has published...

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), uttered a lot of words on Sunday when asked by Fox News' Trace Gallagher about Florida's low Covid-19 numbers despite a lack of lockdowns or mandates. However, unfortunately for him and fortunately for those of us who want to see more people see through these clowns, none of those words had anything to do with answering the actual question. Introducing the topic while filling in for Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday," Gallagher brought up a chart showing vaccination rates and new case percentages in New York, Maine, Michigan,...

As Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ profile as a viable GOP presidential front-runner continues to grow, former President Donald Trump is back in the public eye and on an early ‘campaign trail’ of sorts, making public appearances perhaps earlier than he would prefer in order to - I’m guessing - throw his weight around a bit and remind everyone in the party that he’s still the Alpha dog. Given recent events, it’s not a bad idea. After all, DeSantis is and has been out there virtually every day creating accomplishments in his state that conservatives can only dream of nationwide,...

There’s not a lot of mystery here. At this point, every indication is that former President Donald Trump will announce his third presidential bid as soon as it makes sense from a campaign finance perspective to do so. When this happens, like it or not, most political analysts think he will win the 2024 GOP nomination similarly to how he won in 2016, not by having a majority from the get-go, but by consistently maintaining a larger and more dedicated base than his opponents. Sure, some current polling indicates Trump’s support among the GOP dropping as increasingly more would like...

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is taking a small bit of flak from Team Reality for extending the state’s state of emergency order another 60 days on the same day last week that Tennessee’s Bill Lee lifted his and overtly required local mask mandates to end in the few remaining counties where they still existed, but those critics are missing the bigger picture. It’s not that Florida did everything perfectly according to what most of us would have done. They didn’t, not by a long shot. While a handful of states never shut down at all at the onset of...

At the independent, fundamentalist Baptist church I grew up attending in the 1980s, legalism was a staple, and the ‘rules’ were seemingly endless. Skirts (or something called ‘culottes’) for women and girls, long pants only for men and boys, and dresses and ties on Sunday morning. Good Christians didn’t dance or go to Hollywood movies. They didn’t smoke, cuss, or drink or hang around with those who did. Music wasn’t allowed unless it was Christian, and regardless of the lyrics, it wasn’t ‘Christian’ if it had drums, an upbeat tempo, or was written after 1895 (or thereabouts). And the “thou...

No doubt, Trump-haters will call it “punching down” and “unpresidential,” but I call it making Alinsky work for us. Yesterday, during a press conference at the UN, President Trump referred to CNN anchor Chris Cuomo as “Fredo,” a Godfather-referencing nickname that has in the past driven him to threaten violence.Scott Morefield of The Daily Caller picked-up on the jibe: Responding to a reporter’s question about Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s performance on the Ukraine issue, the president referred to Rudy’s wild “Cuomo Prime Time” interview last Thursday before slamming CNN as “fake news.” He then turned his attention to the CNN anchor...

One of Christine Blasey Ford’s attorneys on Friday said her client was upset by President Trump’s “very hurtful” mocking of her testimony at a rally in Mississippi last week. . . “I had one beer!” Trump told the Mississippi crowd Tuesday night, mocking Ford’s account. “How did you get home? I don’t remember. How did you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know! I don’t know! What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where is the house? I don’t...

“If there is a scintilla of evidence that the president colluded with the Russians and Brennan had that evidence, the entire world would already know,” Scott said during a Fox News appearance with host Neil Cavuto. In a Thursday op-ed published in the New York Times, Brennan based his claim that President Trump colluded with Russia on the fact that then-candidate Trump “publicly called upon Russia to find the missing emails of Mrs. Clinton” during the 2016 campaign. “By issuing such a statement, Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen,...