Free Republic

History has its eye on us. President Biden’s decision to end his campaign was as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime. It should also be a call to action to the rest of us to continue his fight for the soul of our nation. The next 15 weeks will be like nothing this country has ever experienced politically, but have no doubt: This is a race Democrats can and must win.Mr. Biden has done a hard and rare thing. Serving as president was a lifelong dream. And when he finally got there, he was...

Democrats’ abrupt and desperate move to ditch incumbent President Joe Biden as their 2024 presidential candidate and instead coronate Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket is already showing signs of backfiring on their party and playing right into GOP presidential nominee former President Donald Trump’s hands.First and foremost, the mad dash by Democrats over the past several weeks since the late June debate between Trump and Biden to force the reluctant-to-drop-out Biden out of the race severely weakened Biden’s standing to the point where he basically had no choice politically but to drop. Then, when Biden...

Those of us who have studied modern assassinations, including those of President John F. Kennedy and the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., hoped the government had learned a lesson from its dismal public responses.The government’s repeated failure to address what it knew quickly fed suspicions that the silence itself was evidence of a conspiracy. The federal government sealed files for decades and refused to disclose information — often to protect the reputation of agencies and their officials — which only added fuel to conspiracy theories.In the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, we are seeing that...

Kamala Harris is a highly memeable presidential candidate. She dances in a loose and enthusiastic manner. She has an idiosyncratic speaking style. She laughs easily, including at herself. This has not always worked in her favor.When Harris said, in a May 2023 speech, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?,” a Republican YouTube channel snipped the clip from its context and tossed it to commentators, who used it to compare Harris to a daffy talk show host or to joke that she sounded high. Videos of Harris dancing at campaign events were labeled “cringe.” The stickiest anti-Kamala...

Before last week’s Republican convention, Donald Trump seemed to be moving away from the populism that characterized his 2016 campaign. “This time around, the former president isn’t even pretending to stand up to corporate power,” Rogé Karma observed in The Atlantic. “He’s defending big business, cozying up to billionaires, and wooing C.E.O.s.”When Mr. Trump named Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate, though, pundits quickly concluded that he was doubling down on populism. Mr. Vance has been a leading critic of Reagan-Bush policy orthodoxy in the G.O.P., has expressed skepticism of further corporate tax cuts and has even...

In the days since Judge Aileen Cannon issued her inexplicable 93-page dismissal of the classified-documents case against Donald Trump, I’ve been coming back to something JD Vance said on a podcast in 2021.Mr. Vance, the Ohio senator and now Mr. Trump’s running mate, predicted on the podcast that the former president, who had been recently disgraced by his insurrectionary attempt to overturn the 2020 election, would nevertheless run again in 2024. Should Mr. Trump win, Mr. Vance said, he had some advice: “Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” And...

The would-be assassin who opened fire at Donald J. Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13 was able to get a clear shot at the former president, as countersniper teams nearby failed to see him in time to thwart the shooting.The New York Times used drone photography to build a 3-D model and recreate the lines of sight for both the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, and three teams of countersnipers — two federal and one local. The analysis shows that Mr. Crooks, 20, who appears to have flown a drone to survey the site the morning of the...

President Biden plans to address the nation from the Oval Office on Wednesday night to explain his decision to bow out of the presidential campaign and outline how he wants to use his final six months in office. Mr. Biden is scheduled to return to Washington on Tuesday afternoon for the first time since announcing his withdrawal on social media on Sunday. He spent six days at his vacation house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., recovering from Covid and recalibrating his political future. In a post on social media announcing that his address would be at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Mr. Biden...

Donald J. Trump and his political team spent nearly two years tailoring a campaign to defeat an old white male president who is conspicuously frail and who most Americans had told pollsters they doubted could handle another four-year term.Suddenly, Mr. Trump faces a starkly different opponent: a vice president who is a Black woman, nearly 20 years younger, and who brings her own strengths and weaknesses but who adds new uncertainty into what had been a remarkably static race.Allies of Ms. Harris have already telegraphed that she will run a campaign framed around a “prosecutor versus felon” theme, highlighting her...

Representative Mike Waltz (R-FL) questions Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle in a House Oversight hearing Monday on the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.Representative Waltz points out “the dog that didn’t bark.” WATCH: ♦ Where are the official 10:00am press briefing updates every day on the investigation?♦ Where are the official press conferences from the Secret Service, FBI and law enforcement answering questions and providing information from the prior days investigative results?♦ Where are the organized and official updates to let the American people know what has been found out...

Never has an NCAA Sports Day been so widely and breathlessly covered as it was on Monday.And never has it been clearer that Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, did not just fall out of a coconut tree.With President Biden recovering from COVID-19, the task of honoring top college athletes from across the country fell to Harris, who performed the same duty last year with much less fanfare.This year, of course, the event occurred the day after Biden announced he was ending his reelection campaign and endorsed Harris as the party’s replacement candidate for president....

After weeks of intense focus on President Biden’s health and age that ended with his withdrawal from the campaign on Sunday, the script has flipped: Former president Donald Trump is now the oldest presidential candidate in history — and one who has been less transparent about his medical condition than his former opponent. Trump, a 78-year-old with a history of heart disease and obesity, according to experts, has not shared any updated bloodwork results or other specific information during this campaign to help experts assess his ongoing medical risks. Instead, he has released a vague, three-paragraph letter from his primary...

Who visited Thomas Crooks’ home before he attempted to assassinate President Trump?Mobile ad data analysis reveals someone who regularly visited Crooks’ Pennsylvania home also visited a building in DC near an FBI office.The Oversight Project identified nine devices linked to AD-IDs that were located at Crooks’ home and work within the last year. Per the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project: “We found the assassin’s connections through our in-depth analysis of mobile ad data to track movements of Crooks and his associates”Someone who regularly visited Crooks home and work also visited a building in Washington, DC located in Gallery Place.“This is in...

We just bought a new used car for my wife off of craigslist. Now I am selling her old car on craigslist. Within minutes of posting the ad I got a response. The people were "very interested" but wanted a report on the car from some website. I paid $22.95 for the report and sent it to them. Never heard from them again. Today I got another guy who was "very interested" in the car, but wanted me to get a report from some website for $27. Fool me once, your fault. Fool me twice, my fault.

Sen. Joe Manchin is considering challenging Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic presidential ticket, according to a report Sunday. Manchin — a longtime moderate West Virginia Democrat who turned independent this year — is weighing whether to return to the Democratic Party and make a run for the White House, sources close to his office told CNN.The 76-year-old called for Biden to drop out of the race Sunday morning just hours before Biden, 81, announced his withdrawal.What to know about President Biden's decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race:President Biden announced Sunday he is dropping out of...

Vice President Kamala Harris got off to a rocky start in office. She is now at the heart of a political drama that could make her the first woman of color to become a major party presidential nominee. Vice President Kamala Harris, who has struggled for nearly four years in President Biden’s shadow, was thrust on Sunday into the center of a remarkable political drama that could culminate with her becoming the first woman of color at the top of a major-party presidential ticket. Mr. Biden’s decision to abandon his re-election bid and endorse Ms. Harris to succeed him puts...

The Paley Center for Media just opened an exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of “The West Wing,” the NBC series I wrote from 1999 to 2003. Some of the show’s story points have become outdated in the last quarter-century (the first five minutes of the first episode depended entirely on the audience being unfamiliar with the acronym POTUS), while others turned out to be — well, not prescient, but sadly coincidental. Gunmen tried to shoot a character after an event with President Bartlet at the end of Season 1. And at the end of the second season, in an episode...

The Republican convention that concluded early Friday was a four-day celebration of the cult of Donald Trump. Night after night, disciples and flatterers portrayed America as a nation in decline and Trump as its savior. But the real focus wasn’t on making America great again. It was on making Trump president again. To prevent that outcome, Democrats must stage a different kind of convention. They need to focus on the needs of the American people. They have to present a plan for getting to a better place. And most important, they cannot spend four days in Chicago celebrating President Biden....

At his first campaign rally since he survived an assassination attempt last week, former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday launched a litany of attacks that suggested his call for national unity in the wake of the shooting had faded entirely into the background.Over the course of an almost two-hour speech in Grand Rapids, Mich., Mr. Trump insulted President Biden’s intelligence repeatedly, calling him “stupid” more than once. He said Vice President Kamala Harris was “crazy” and gleefully jeered the Democratic Party’s infighting over Mr. Biden’s political future.Even as Mr. Trump made numerous false claims accusing his political opponents of...

Can Trumpism outlast Donald Trump? The selection of Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate suggests that the answer is yes.Even the most successful political parties are coalitions of odd bedfellows and competing interests. But parties risk decline if they cannot attract new voters or if they suppress internal debates. The Republican Party Mr. Trump inherited in 2016 had been defined by free market ideology and neoconservative foreign policy for a generation: From Ronald Reagan through both Bushes to Mitt Romney, mainstream conservatism pursued a narrow agenda of tax and entitlement cuts at home and wars of regime...