Free Republic

The Illinois governor, a potential presidential candidate, is fighting the presence of National Guard troops and the activities of ICE agents in Chicago.When President Trump ordered the National Guard to Chicago last week, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois became the latest Democrat to bear the brunt of managing an aggressive federal government. He has concluded it must be combated with a national campaign. Aside from instructing his attorney general to file a lawsuit to block troops from other states coming to Illinois, Mr. Pritzker has few formal options to resist what he described this week as an “unconstitutional invasion of...

President Trump has unleashed new weaponry in his war against Democrats, liberals and the left. Over the past four weeks, he has initiated what amounts to a unique form of partisan civil war designed to amass power in a nominal democracy and defang, decimate and defund the opposition. Trump’s assault on the left combines the use of the available tools of violent conflict — the military, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE in particular — with the prosecution of critics (and people he just doesn’t like), cuts of essential funds for liberal institutions, the use of regulation to threaten...

The White House has cut or paused billions in funding to Democratic-run cities and states since the federal government came to a halt.President Trump has embarked on a legally dubious campaign to weaponize the federal budget during a contentious government shutdown, halting more than $27 billion in approved funding in a bid to punish Democratic-led cities and states. Rather than broker a legislative truce or seek to ameliorate the fallout of a costly fiscal stalemate, the president has leveraged the crisis to exact revenge on rivals, slash federal spending and pressure Democrats into accepting his political demands. Since the shutdown...

Ms. Jong-Fast is the host of the “Fast Politics” podcast and the author of “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.”Nobody thinks the N.F.L. is run by a bunch of woke libs. Or for that matter, that most N.F.L. fans fit that description. In fact, the team owners, many of whom trend MAGA oligarch, donated $23 million to Republicans in the 2024 election, versus $2.5 million to Democrats. And of course there’s a reason Colin Kaepernick’s career was so resolutely benched. Many woke libs won’t even let their kids play football, not wanting to risk that their meritocratic brains...

A notice calls the people the U.S. military recently killed on suspicion of drug smuggling in the Caribbean Sea “unlawful combatants.”President Trump has decided that the United States is engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels his team has labeled terrorist organizations and that suspected smugglers for such groups are “unlawful combatants,” the administration said in a confidential notice to Congress this week. The notice was sent to several congressional committees and obtained by The New York Times. It adds new detail to the administration’s thinly articulated legal rationale for why three U.S. military strikes the president ordered...

During a panel discussion featuring world leaders and philanthropists in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon, Alex Soros said the $23 billion philanthropic organization he leads would not cave to pressure from President Trump. Mr. Soros, the son of the billionaire investor and Democratic megadonor George Soros, defiantly told attendees that it had done nothing wrong and would back away from its human rights work “over my dead body,” according to two people who attended the panel who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was an invitation-only event. The remarks came in response to a question about a report in...

Residents of Palmetto Bay, Fla., have demanded the resignation of Councilman Stephen Cody, who wrote a post mocking Charlie Kirk’s support for gun rights.One by one, the angry residents who had packed the council chambers on Monday night in Palmetto Bay, Fla., stepped to the podium to express their disgust over online comments that a councilman, Stephen Cody, had made about Charlie Kirk.One man called Mr. Cody’s comments “vile.” Another called them “abnormal and dangerous.” A third man said that the councilman’s Facebook post, which went up a few hours after Mr. Kirk was fatally shot in Utah, “smells like...

President Trump has begun a major escalation in his long-running efforts to stifle political opposition in the United States, using the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to make the baseless argument that Democratic organizations and protesters are part of a violent conspiracy against conservative values and the American way of life.

Gregory Washington, George Mason’s first Black president, runs a university that prizes diversity. That has made him a target of the Trump administration.Gregory N. Washington, the first Black president of George Mason University, remembers the tumult on campus as he began his new job in 2020.It was the era of Black Lives Matter, and students were protesting over the man the school is named after, a complicated Virginia historical figure and slaveholder. Demonstrators were demanding that a statue of Mason on campus be torn down, Dr. Washington said.Five years later, George Mason’s statue remains intact, and politics are once again...

When Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, dispatched his National Guard troops to Washington to support President Trump’s crackdown on crime, Democrats and other critics wondered why he didn’t keep them within state lines. Memphis, after all, has long been one of the most dangerous cities in the country, with a murder rate about twice as high as the nation’s capital, according to F.B.I. statistics. Nashville has a higher rate of violent crime than Washington as well. The same questions could be asked of other Republican governors like Greg Abbott in Texas, Mike DeWine in Ohio and Mike Kehoe in Missouri,...

... Mr. Moran, 44, is the pasha of a new power tribe in the capital: the gay men of the Trump administration. These are the A-Gays. They’re (mostly) out, they’re proud (to work for President Trump) and they have big jobs inside (or alongside) this administration. They wield influence all over town, from the Pentagon to the State Department to the White House to the Kennedy Center. “We’re like Visa,” Mr. Moran said. “Everywhere you want to be.” He sipped a dirty vodka martini and surveyed the room. Two Republican men waved at him from across the club. “Both gay,”...

President Trump has embraced an array of far-right views and talking points in ways that have delighted many right-wing activists who have long supported those ideas.During President Trump’s first turn in the White House, right-wing extremists like the Proud Boys were on the streets, weekend after weekend, raising their voices — and oftentimes their fists — about issues such as immigration, the squelching of conservative speech and the removal of Confederate-era statues. But in the first seven months of Mr. Trump’s second term, there has been a conspicuous absence of far-right demonstrations. And that, some leaders of the movement say,...

Democratic friends, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you woke up one morning and all your media sources were produced by Christian nationalists. You sent your kids off to school and the teachers were espousing some version of Christian nationalism. You turned on your sports network and your late-night comedy, and everyone was preaching Christian nationalism.That’s a bit how it feels to be more conservative in the West today — to feel drenched by a constant downpour of progressive sermonizing. What would you do in such circumstances? Well, at least at first, you’d probably grit your teeth and take it...

For quite some time, the leftist political establishment has been accusing President Donald Trump of abandoning the US Constitution. Now they have me wondering why that’s supposed to be a criticism. Just last week The New York Times, the establishment’s chief house organ, boosted the arguments of writer Osita Nwanevu in a column headlined: “Abolish the Senate. End the Electoral College. Pack the Court.” Why? Because “The left can’t win without a new Constitution.” He’s hardly the first Democrat to say so. I’ve noticed that whenever the Constitution stands in the way of something the left wants at the moment,...

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican authorities are accusing sportswear company Adidas of plagiarizing artisans in southern Mexico, alleging that a new sandal design is strikingly similar to the traditional Indigenous footwear known as huaraches.The controversy has fueled accusations of cultural appropriation by the footwear brand, with authorities saying this is not the first time traditional Mexican handicrafts have been copied. Citing these concerns, local authorities have asked Adidas to withdraw the shoe model.Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Friday that Adidas was already in talks with authorities in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca to provide “compensation for the people...

President Trump plans to build a $200 million ballroom off the East Wing “long before” the end of his term in 2029.Experts on historic preservation are raising concerns over the feasibility of President Trump’s plans to complete large-scale renovations to the White House by the end of his term, and whether the project can be done while respecting the historic nature of the building.Mr. Trump unveiled plans on Thursday to construct a $200 million, 90,000-square-foot state ballroom off the East Wing to be completed “long before” the end of his term in 2029. The project would be one of the...

The administration’s claims are overblown, but newly declassified information provides some messy details about a January 2017 intelligence assessment of Moscow’s election interference.The Trump administration in recent weeks has released a series of reports intended to undermine the conclusion reached by intelligence agencies before President Trump’s first term that Russia had favored his candidacy in 2016 and sought to improve his chances of winning.That assessment, an unclassified version of which was made public in January 2017, has long infuriated Mr. Trump. In disclosing the reports, he and his team are proclaiming that President Barack Obama and his team torqued the...

Attorney General Pam Bondi informed President Trump in the spring that his name appeared in the Jeffrey Epstein files, according to three people with knowledge of the exchange. The disclosure came as part of a broader briefing on the re-examination of the case against Mr. Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, by F.B.I. agents and prosecutors. It was made by Ms. Bondi during a meeting that also included the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, and covered a variety of topics. Ms. Bondi frequently meets with Mr. Trump to brief him on various matters, officials...

This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Trump gave Mr. Epstein a note for his 50th birthday in 2003 that included a sketch of a naked woman and a cryptic reference to a “secret” the two men shared.In the swirl of money and sun-tanned women that was their Palm Beach-and-Manhattan set, Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein spent nearly 15 years mingling side-by-side as public friends. There were lavish dinners with boldface names at Mr. Epstein’s mansion on the Upper East Side and raucous parties with cheerleaders and models at Mr. Trump’s private club and residence at Mar-a-Lago....

Donald Trump has been vindicated after The New York Times accused him of pushing a false conspiracy theory about a migrant gang taking over a Colorado apartment building... only for the paper to now admit those same claims were true. One article published last September scolded Trump for his 'false' claims that Aurora was overrun with Tren de Aragua goons. But a recent investigation published by the esteemed paper now concedes the Denver suburb is indeed a hotspot for the Venezuelan gangsters. The controversy took on national prominence during the presidential election as Donald Trump often cited it during rallies...