Free Republic

A new White House policy document formalizes President Trump’s long-held contempt for Europe’s leaders. It made clear that the continent now stands at a strategic crossroads.The Trump administration has not exactly kept its low regard for Europe secret. President Trump has long portrayed European allies as freeloaders that fail to pay enough for their own security and argued that the European Union was “formed to screw the United States.”Now, that hostility is official White House policy.The Trump administration issued a national security strategy paper this week that called for European nations to take “primary responsibility” for their own defense, indicating...

The new Pentagon press corps entered the imposing building on the Potomac for the first time this week as those disgruntled members of the former press corps took to their pages to complain about it. The New York Times went a step further and is suing the Pentagon over what they say is a violation of the First Amendment. The Times claimed that the outlets that are currently covering the Pentagon were selected "based on viewpoint." They state that in "In describing the '[n]ew media outlets' willing to accede to the Department's 'media access policy,' [Sean] Parnell wrote that they...

The shooting of two National Guard members the day before in Washington hung over President Trump’s Thanksgiving events at Mar-a-Lago, where he held a call with members of the military to thank them for their service on the holiday. At the beginning of the call, he revealed that one of the Guard members, Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, had died. “It’s just happened,” Mr. Trump said. “She was savagely attacked. She’s dead. Not with us.” The other victim, he said, was “fighting for his life.” Later, a White House official said that the president had spoken with the family of the...

Judge Mark L. Wolf, writing in The Atlantic, said he was stepping down to defend against the “assault on the rule of law” by President Trump, who he accused of “targeting his adversaries.”A federal judge warned of an “existential threat to democracy” in a searing first-person essay published on Sunday, saying he had stepped down from the bench to speak out against President Trump. He accused Mr. Trump of “using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment.”The judge, Mark L. Wolf, wrote in The Atlantic magazine that...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired or sidelined at least two dozen generals and admirals over the past nine months in a series of ousters that could reshape the U.S. military for years to come. His actions, which are without precedent in recent decades, have come with little explanation. In many cases, they have run counter to the advice of top military leaders who fought alongside the officers in combat, senior military officials said. The utter unpredictability of Mr. Hegseth’s moves, as described in interviews with 20 current and former military officials, has created an atmosphere of anxiety and mistrust...

Nations were poised to approve the first fee on pollution from ships. That’s when the Trump administration began the threats.More than 100 nations were poised last month to approve a historic deal to slash pollution from cargo ships. That’s when the United States launched a pressure campaign that officials around the world have called extraordinary, even by the standards of the Trump administration’s combativeness, according to nine diplomats on its receiving end. An ambassador from Asia was told that, if he voted in favor of the plan, his country’s sailors would no longer be allowed to disembark at American ports....

The federal indictment of New York’s attorney general centers on a home she purchased for a relative. It is an act that rings deeply familiar to many.To some Black families, it was an intimately familiar arrangement.A woman whose parents fled a life of sharecropping in the South was among the first in her family to achieve a prestigious career. She extended her help to relatives who had less, even buying a home for a grandniece in need of stability.The house sits at the center of the indictment of Letitia James, the New York attorney general, by the Justice Department. She...

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...