Free Republic

Republicans are surging after President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address and might be in position to defy history in the midterm elections, polling shows. The Harvard Harris poll found Republicans are in a much better position heading into midterm elections than previously assessed. The poll asked respondents if the congressional election were held today would they be more likely to vote for a Democrat or a Republican for Congress, finding likely midterm voters split down the middle. The results mark an eight-point swing towards Republicans in the Harvard Harris poll since January when 54 percent of respondents replied...

Israel’s determination to attack Iran and the certainty that US troops would be targeted in response forced the Trump administration to take pre-emptive strikes, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said, in a new explanation for Washington’s surprise entry into the conflict. The rationale drew divided reviews from top members of Congress who on Monday evening received the first briefing by the Trump administration since it ordered the air campaign to begin over the weekend. Rubio; the CIA director, John Ratcliffe; and joint chiefs of staff, chair Dan Caine; spoke to the lawmakers behind closed doors in the Capitol ahead...

California Governor Gavin Newsom shared the strange origin story behind the infamous “Newscum” nickname, a moniker coined by President Donald Trump. In a late-night phone call, Newsom claims the president called him to test out the nickname, which he later adopted in his public tirades against. In a candid interview on “The Rest Is Politics” podcast, Newsom recounted the unusual exchange, which took place late one night in 2025.

~I was out of it for most of last week, due to a car accident and another heart attack within seconds of each other, both pretty serious. So I was hoping to emerge to a reasonably relaxed environment with plenty of time to get myself up to speed on what I've missed. Alas, the news cycle had other plans. One worries in such circumstances that one is projecting outward one's own intimations of mortality. As I have maintained for God knows how many sodding decades, in a certain sense the Iranian revolution is where our present era began, and not...

The official story is real — but incomplete. Operation Epic Fury’s stated goals — eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, destroying its missile arsenal, degrading its proxy networks, and annihilating its navy — are all legitimate grievances rooted in 47 years of Iranian hostility toward the United States. But they are the surface layer of a much deeper strategic play.

WASHINGTON, March 1 (Reuters) - Only one in four Americans approves of the U.S. strikes that killed Iran’s leader, while about half — including one in four Republicans — believe President Donald Trump is too willing to use military force, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that concluded on Sunday. Some 27% of respondents said they approved of the strikes, while 43% disapproved and 29% were not sure. About nine in 10 respondents said they had heard at least a little about the strikes, which began early on Saturday. The poll was conducted during the strikes on Iran by the U.S....

While Beijing publicly advocates restraint, sustained tensions between the U.S. and Iran serve its strategic interests.Recent heightened tensions between the United States and Iran over Tehran’s repression of nationwide protests and its advancing nuclear program have raised concerns about maintaining peace and stability in the Middle East. U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered key military assets to move into the region, and he may decide on whether to use force within the next few days. At the same time, Washington and Tehran have met indirectly in Oman and agreed that diplomacy on the nuclear issue should continue. Diplomacy is the...

‘Fifteen years ago if somebody was up here and said that, they’d say ‘What’s wrong with him?’ ” President Trump said Tuesday in his State of the Union address. Said what? “Surely we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will.” When Democratic lawmakers declined to stand in assent to that statement, the president declared: “These people are crazy.” Mr. Trump had introduced Sage Blair, 19, and her adopted mother (and biological paternal grandmother), Michele. Their story is unbelievable—and part of a...

Conservative podcasting titan Tucker Carlson torched Donald Trump for his 'evil' attack on Iran as the president's MAGA base fractures over the Middle East war. Carlson has levied a rare criticism against the president following the US military's joint attack with Israel on the Iranian regime on Saturday morning. 'Absolutely disgusting and evil,' Carlson said to journalist Jon Karl.

~I'm just emerging from a rather grisly week and was hoping to catch up leisurely with relatively inconsequential things such as the State of the Union, only to wake and find that we have a brand new war: OPERATION EPIC FURY 🇺🇸 — Department of War 🇺🇸 (@DeptofWar) February 28, 2026 I'm not sure, after the last quarter-century, that the over-butch monikers impress anyone anymore. I'd be pleasantly surprised if the next one were designated "Operation Somewhat Irked" or "Operation Mildly Peeved". Be that as it may, Lindsey Graham is already at the if-erection-lasts-for-over-six-hours-consult-your-doctor phase: God bless @POTUS for planning...

Donald Trump's immigration crackdown is fracturing his own party, with Republican governors openly defying the White House over detention expansion as political fallout from the carnage in Minneapolis threatens to cost him at the midterms. Kristi Noem was rebuffed this week when she tried to build a new illegal migrant camp in New Hampshire by the state's Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte. Merrimack residents were outraged when it emerged that the Homeland Security Secretary planned to use their town to expand Trump's mass deportation effort. Ayotte, a moderate Republican governing a blue state, informed Noem that she would not assist in...

My dad is Ken Paxton, and as you may know, he’s running for the United States Senate. I’m not a political strategist or a pundit. I’m his daughter, and I know him better than almost anyone. So when his opponent, unable to compete on record, on results, or on values, resorts to attacking my father’s character and personal life, I feel compelled to speak up. Not as a campaign surrogate. As his daughter. Let me start with what everyone already knows: my dad’s record as Texas Attorney General is extraordinary. He sued the Biden administration over 100 times, fighting back...

Last June when the United States targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities in a series of coordinated airstrikes with Israel, President Trump boasted that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” He said that on the day of the operation, which hit the enrichment facility at Fordow, buried under a mountain, as well as sites at Natanz and Isfahan.In the ensuing days and months, Trump repeated this claim, saying that Iran’s nuclear facilities and capabilities had been “obliterated.” In August he said, “We obliterated … the future nuclear capability of Iran.” In October he said, “Well, they don’t...

Advocating for diverse viewpoints on campuses is now apparently akin to saying “All Lives Matter,” or pushing a supposedly sinister Make America Great Again plot. That’s according to two recent op-eds, penned by professors at Stanford and Johns Hopkins, opposing efforts to get professors and students with different opinions onto campus. Academia has lost public trust precisely because anyone not of the far-left is admonished on campuses. Accusing proponents of viewpoint diversity of being Trumpy conspiracists certainly doesn’t help. Any professor who truly cares about academia should want more views on campus, regardless of their own politics. “It’s profoundly anti-intellectual,...

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday that it will take up a major climate change lawsuit targeting the energy industry — a case that could determine the future of similar lawsuits filed by left-wing states and municipalities across the country. The Court agreed to review Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. They granted the hearing after the Colorado Supreme Court allowed Boulder County’s state-law claims to proceed, rejecting arguments from energy producers that the lawsuit is preempted by federal law. The decision comes amid a wave of nearly three dozen lawsuits brought by leftist jurisdictions seeking to...

In 2023, Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old female who identified as male, shot and killed three children and three adults at the Covenant School in Nashville before being killed by police. A 2019 shooting at a Denver STEM school involved a transgender-identifying individual. The would-be assassin of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh identifies as transgender. On February 10, Jesse Van Rootselaar, 19, killed a parent and half-brother before going to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, Canada, killing eight more people, injuring 27 others, and committing suicide. On February 16, Robert Dorgan, 56, who underwent gender-reassignment surgery in 2020,...

On Tuesday night, President Trump made his case for attacking Iran. #Perhaps we ought to ask ourselves if an attack on Iran is prudent or desirable.#In his address, Trump argued that Iran was in the process of developing intercontinental ballistic missiles to hit the United States. This assertion is farcical and risible. Iran simply has no ability to hit the United States, and even if it did, the doctrine of classical deterrence would come into play. The United States and the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear-armed ICBMs targeted at each other for decades yet never engaged in direct conflict....

The Democrats showed their true colors at Tuesday evening’s State of the Union when they failed the president’s test of allegiance to this country. They are so devoted to illegal migration that they walked straight into his trap. President Trump asked every lawmaker in the chamber to stand if they believe their primary duty is to protect American citizens rather than illegal migrants. That should have be a no-brainer. It is the essence of putting America first. But the Democrats refused to stand. “One of the great things about the State of the Union is how it gives Americans the...

Iran killed hundreds of Americans across the Middle East, with its Hezbollah proxy being the most effective terrorist group against the U.S. prior to Al-Qaeda's terror attacks on 9/11. The revolutionary Iranian regime — which may possibly find itself in a war with the United States in the coming days — has positioned itself as an adversary of the U.S. ever since it came into power decades ago in 1979. President Donald Trump appears to be moving toward striking Iran, with the U.S. military moving significant military assets into the region, insisting he would prefer to strike a deal with...

Trump’s strategy prizes preemptive deterrence over drift or isolation, exploiting leverage to sap rivals, steady allies, and avert the cascading conflicts that metastasized under Obama and Biden. Critics of Trump’s second-term foreign policy—the usual Left and some on the neo-isolationist Right—claim it is recklessly herky jerky and guided by no consistent grand strategy. Yet, in both the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy paper and its second-term update, he clearly disdained ground wars abroad, nation-building, and isolationism. A better description of U.S. strategy across Trump’s two terms in office might be called Jacksonian or preemptive deterrence. That is, Trump’s foreign...