Free Republic

“I’m not going that far,” President Joe Biden told a room full of his former opponent’s supporters as they urged him to don a Trump hat last month.But he did go that far. Grinning ear to ear, Biden popped the “Trump 2024” cap on his head, sparking a viral photo and endless memes on social media.Some observers wondered if the president’s cheeky move — a bad look for the party as Biden’s own vice president campaigned against former President Donald Trump — was more than a light-hearted moment. It’s seeming more and more like they may have been onto something.In...

Donald Trump is leaning into a nativist, anti-immigrant message in the final stage of his third presidential campaign, advancing a closing argument centered on fearmongering, falsehoods and stereotypes about migrants as polls show his edge on economic issues fading. In recent days, the former president has suggested that “bad genes” are to blame for people in the country illegally who have committed murders, reprised his warnings about a migrant “invasion” and suggested Vice President Kamala Harris’s handling of border issues shows she is “mentally impaired.” He will campaign in Aurora, Colo., on Friday, after promoting false claims about Venezuelan gangs...

When former President Barack Obama admonished some Black men who he said were not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president,” some Democrats saw it as an urgent, necessary call to action to voters who are desperately needed to push Vice President Kamala Harris to victory.For others, Mr. Obama’s tone threatened to scapegoat some of the Democratic Party’s most reliable supporters, alienating voters who may have grown disillusioned but are still persuadable.For Mr. Obama, it was a remarkable, if calculated, risk.As he spoke on Thursday to a room of overwhelmingly Black supporters in a campaign field office in...

Heading into the final three weeks of the 2024 election, Senator JD Vance of Ohio will still not say whether his running mate won or lost the last race for the White House.In an interview with The New York Times that will be published on Saturday, Mr. Vance repeatedly refused to acknowledge former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat and went to even greater lengths to avoid doing so than he did during the vice-presidential debate earlier this month.When asked about the previous election during an hourlong interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a host of “The Interview,” a Times podcast published each...

In 1978, I visited my first war zone, Beirut. There were, in fact, several wars going on. The Israelis had made an incursion in the south, but there was chaos everywhere, with various local militias squaring off in the streets. Two of them had battled each other for control of the Holiday Inn. Imagine that. Beirut, clearly, had been a civilized and sophisticated city; parts of it still were — and yet it was descending into the unthinkable. The lesson was stark: My American soul, my life experience, had assumed that civilization was a rock-solid given, especially in historic cultural...

I just watched Mr. Jones last night. I knew about Walter Duranty lying in the New York Times about Stalin's mass starvation of the Kulaks in Ukraine (Holodomor) and the Pulitzer prize the NYT received for his false reporting, but no real details. Mr. Jones is an excellent but disturbing movie. Nothing has changed in the intervening eighty years. The NYT is just as sleazy as it ever was, and the elite (represented by Mr. Duranty) every bit as debauched and evil as they ever were. And, frighteningly enough for me, I see parallels in what was done to the...

When clients tell Mercury Public Affairs, a consulting and lobbying shop with 18 offices worldwide, that they’re concerned about Donald Trump’s possible return to office, the firm has just the person to ease their nerves: Bryan Lanza. “He gives them assurances that there will be life after Nov. 5,” said one of the colleagues, referring to Election Day.Lanza declined to comment through a Mercury spokesman. A Trump spokesman did not respond to questions.Eight years after Trump entered politics promising to reduce the influence of Washington lobbyists — to “drain the swamp,” as he put it — advocates for corporate interests,...

Former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, regularly blame America’s housing affordability crisis on a recent surge in immigration. They point to their plans for mass deportations of undocumented workers as part of the solution.But most economists do not believe that immigrants have been a major driver of the recent run-up in housing prices. Rents and home costs started to surge in 2020 and 2021, before the flow of newcomers began to pick up in 2022 and 2023.And while immigrants could have kept housing demand elevated in some markets, past studies suggests that they are...

The former president is holding a rally in a Colorado city he falsely claims was overtaken by violent immigrants from Venezuela. The city’s leaders, Republicans and Democrats alike, tried to pre-emptively fact-check him. Mike Coffman, the conservative Republican mayor of Aurora, Colo., had a message for former President Donald J. Trump before the Republican nominee for the White House came on Friday to a city he has repeatedly painted as having been taken over by vicious migrant street thugs.The visit, Mr. Coffman said in a statement to The Times, “is an opportunity to show him and the nation that Aurora...

Regular readers of Revolver will know that no elected official has done more than Congressman Thomas Massie to amplify and advance our groundbreaking coverage on the January 6 Fedsurrection. It was only because Thomas Massie was willing to pursue Revolver’s pipe bomb coverage that we learned, among other things, that the former head of the FBI’s pipe bomb investigation claimed the geofencing data that would have identified the bomber was “lost.” And of course it was entirely thanks to Massie’s persistent and judicious efforts that the single most important and damning piece of J6-related footage was released. The footage in...

One evening in February 1989, my Watergate reporting partner Carl Bernstein bumped into Donald Trump at a dinner party in New York. “Why don’t you come on up?” Carl urged me on the phone from the party, hosted by Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish American socialite and record executive, in his Upper East Side townhouse. “Everybody’s having a good time,” he said. “Trump is here. It’s really interesting. I’ve been talking to him.” Carl was fascinated with Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal.” Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to join him, in large part, as Carl often reminds me, because I...

It’s not your imagination: The ground beneath Southern California has been particularly unsteady as of late, with the region experiencing more moderate-sized earthquakes this year than it has in decades. What precisely is fueling the sequence of shakers is not entirely clear, and officials warn that prior seismic activity does not necessarily mean more powerful temblors are imminent. But the series of modest shakers have many wondering what is going on.“Earthquakes pop off around the state, and it’s a little bit like popcorn that they hit — sometimes they bunch up for reasons that we don’t understand,” said Susan Hough,...

Wildly improbable conspiracy theories about Hurricanes Helene and Milton have spread largely unchecked on social media. The storms were engineered to clear the way for lithium mining. They were sent to help the Democrats in next month’s election. They were formed by weather-controlling lasers. The claims persist despite attempts by scientists and government officials to debunk them with evidence. They survive all calls to reason. The falsehoods, which have been circulating on X, TikTok, YouTube and other platforms, can resemble the conspiracy theories that plague modern American politics. Prominent figures are pushing them, citing unrelated, misleading or outdated evidence. But...

Control of the Senate appears likely to flip from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party this fall, as one of the nation’s most endangered Democrats, Senator Jon Tester of Montana, trails his Republican challenger in his bid for re-election, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College. Mr. Tester, who first won election to the Senate in 2006, is winning over moderate and independent voters and running far ahead of the Democrat at the top of the ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris. But as of now, that does not appear to be enough to...

A ballot measure that would establish a right to abortion in the Florida Constitution is not on track to pass in November, according to a poll by The New York Times and Siena College.A plurality of voters expressed support for the measure — significantly more than those who said they would vote “no” — and a large percentage of voters were undecided. But Florida requires 60 percent of voters to approve any ballot amendment, an unusually high threshold, and the poll found support for the measure falling well short of that.Conducted between Sept. 29 and Oct. 6, the poll found...

Chances are you’ve never heard of Tina Peters. It’s worth taking a moment to get to know her.Peters used to be the elections chief in Mesa County, Colo., a slice of rugged beauty perched on the state’s Western Slope. After the 2020 election, Peters fell in with the tinfoil-hat crowd promoting the phony claim the presidential race was stolen from Donald Trump. In furtherance of that fallacy, Peters allowed an unauthorized person to access voting equipment as part of a crackpot scheme to gather “proof” that Mesa County’s voting machines were rigged.They weren’t.But Peters’ conniving made her a celebrity in...

Donald Trump has had as many as seven private phone calls with Vladimir Putin since leaving office and secretly sent the Russian president COVID-19 test machines during the height of the pandemic, Bob Woodward reported in his new book “War.”In the famed Watergate reporter’s latest book, Woodward reports that Trump asked an aide to leave his office at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, so that the former president could have a private call with Putin in early 2024. The aide, whom Woodward doesn’t name, said there have been multiple calls between Trump and Putin since Trump left office, perhaps as many...

As Pennsylvania voters begin casting perhaps two million-plus mail ballots, Democrats and Republicans are in furious legal combat over a once-overlooked aspect of voting remotely: which ballots are counted, which are rejected as defective and which ones voters are allowed to correct.Simple math explains why. In the 2020 presidential contest, Pennsylvania election officials rejected more than 34,000 mail ballots. In a tight 2024 election in the most coveted swing state, even a fraction of that many rejections could spell the difference between victory and defeat — not just in the presidential race, but also in any number of others.What’s true...