Free Republic

Today’s Republican Party is big on manliness and masculine virtues. The MAGA right in particular is forever obsessing over who is the biggest, the strongest, the most fearless among them.This is why, watching President Trump’s fight to keep a lid on the Epstein files, I have been struck, delighted even, that among the vanishingly few Republican lawmakers with the courage to defy him have been three fire-breathing congresswomen: Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.Love ’em or hate ’em, these House troublemakers bucked their party leadership, stared down their president and made...

Fresh off their staggering electoral losses this month, Republicans are urging President Donald Trump to start hitting the campaign trail for them next year with control of Congress on the line. And in a sign of their rising anxiety over Democrats’ renewed enthusiasm, the requests for rallies have started rolling in. Wisconsin GOP Chair Brian Schimming said Trump’s team is “certainly aware” he wants to see the president visit the purple state next year, where he won by his thinnest margin in 2024 and his party is defending two competitive House seats and trying to win statewide races. Schimming plans...

Zohran Mamdani will become the 111th mayor of New York City. While the electoral outcome is not what I hoped for, I wish Mayor-elect Mamdani and his administration every success in leading this city we love. As the prophet Jeremiah instructed the Jews of his time, “Seek the peace of the city … for in its peace you will find your peace.” Our community will, as it would with any mayor, work with the Mamdani administration on matters of shared concern and common cause. We will also, as we would with any mayor, hold the Mamdani administration accountable for ensuring...

An old report has brought back a question Donald Trump’s team hoped would disappear: did the FBI work through the night to remove his name from the Jeffrey Epstein files before saying there was nothing left to release? The timing is important as Trump has suddenly reversed his stance on making the documents public. Sources familiar with the process told Bloomberg, “We know from news reports that Trump’s name was in the Epstein files. But what hasn’t been reported is that an FBI FOIA team redacted Trump’s name and the names of other prominent public figures from the documents.” The...

What’s clear is that the 2024 election was not the final boss. It didn’t destroy wokeism. You have to picture the spider in The Lord of the Rings, Shelob, crawling back into her cave after being stabbed by Samwise. Is she injured? Yes. Dead? No. She will probably be back to kill you. Republicans and pundits and podcasters will come up with all sorts of reasons for the latest losses (including blaming the Jews), but it comes down to fundamentals. Ground game. Optics. And of course, “It’s the economy, stupid!” The GOP has no ground game in part because it...

Republican U.S. Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky said he is a "little bit suspicious" of President Donald Trump after his reversal in stance on releasing files connected to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. ... "Well, he got tired of us winning," Massie responded. "He decided to join us. Look, they could have done this four months ago, and instead they fought us every bit of the way. Now they want to be on our side, we'll accept their support, but we're, you know, a little bit suspicious of this sudden turn of events." Massie continued, "So, we'll keep an eye on...

So on a whim I just asked AI "What has Trump done today?"This was AI's response: On November 18, 2025, President Donald Trump hosted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia at the White House for a bilateral meeting and an arrival ceremony with full honors. Key events from the day include: Meeting with Saudi Crown Prince: President Trump welcomed the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) for his first visit to the U.S. since 2018. Discussions focused on economic and defense partnerships, including the potential sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia and the kingdom's commitment...

“We’re gonna be issuing dividends later on, somewhere prior to — the middle of next year, a little bit later than that,” he said, noting it would include “Thousands of dollars, for individuals of moderate income.” [Scott] Bessent also floated a rough income limit of $100,000 that would disqualify higher income families from receiving the dividend.

MASSIE on the Epstein files: "The Speaker, the Attorney General, the FBI Director, the President, and the Vice President could have saved us all this time and embarrassment, frankly, for our own party if they'd just done the right thing four months ago."

President Donald Trump’s call for House Republicans to support releasing Jeffrey Epstein-related documents was a stunning capitulation after a months-long campaign to block the vote. It was also a specific defeat for Trump at the hands of a despised GOP opponent: Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. “He got tired of me winning,” Massie said of Trump’s U-turn in an interview Monday morning. Insisting “I DON’T CARE!” in a late-night Truth Social post, Trump was bowing to the inevitable — a broad House Republican mutiny on a vote that was only scheduled because Massie forced it. It was the result of...

PRESIDENT TRUMP DEFENDS @TuckerCarlson : “I think he’s good!”“He’s said good things about me over the years…”“Look, you can’t tell him who to interview!”47 then DESTROYED a Bloomberg “reporter” who interrupted 🤣“Will you let me finish my statement? You are the WORST! I don’t know why they even have you.”

Time is short for the Trump administration. Last week's elections were a setback, but not a devastating one: New Jersey is still a blue state, and while Virginia went red four years ago, it's been trending Democratic for more than a decade. Republicans also fared poorly in Pennsylvania, however, an all-important presidential battleground. Democrats even made inroads deep into the South, taking two state senate seats in Mississippi -- ending a GOP supermajority -- and picking up city council spots in South Carolina and Florida. With results like these, the Republicans' razor-thin majority in Congress won't survive the midterm elections...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers seeking to force the release of files related to the sex trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein are predicting a big win in the House this week with a “deluge of Republicans” voting for their bill and bucking the GOP leadership and President Donald Trump, who for months have disparaged their effort. The bill would force the Justice Department to release all files and communications related to Epstein, as well as any information about the investigation into his death in federal prison. Information about Epstein’s victims or ongoing federal investigations would be allowed to be redacted. “There...

President Trump said he is withdrawing his support for GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a longtime backer who has recently criticized the Trump administration and called for the release of Justice Department investigative files into disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. The president, in a Friday night social-media post, said he would consider supporting a primary challenge to Greene. “I understand that wonderful, Conservative people are thinking about primarying Marjorie in her District of Georgia, that they too are fed up with her and her antics and, if the right person runs, they will have my Complete and Unyielding Support,”...

No one uses “Malthusian” as a compliment. Since 1798, when the economist and cleric Thomas Malthus first published “An Essay on the Principles of Population,” the “Malthusian” position – the idea that humans are subject to natural limits – has been vilified and scorned. Today, the term is lobbed at anyone who dares question the optimism of infinite progress. Unfortunately, almost everything most people think they know about Malthus is wrong. The story goes like this: Once upon a time, an English country parson came up with the idea that population increases at a “geometrical” rate, while food production increases...

The Trump Organization sought to bring in at least 184 foreign workers in 2025 for temporary positions at Mar-a-Lago, two golf clubs and a Virginia winery through H-2A and H-2B visas, according to data from the Department of Labor. The company’s visa requests have risen steadily in recent years, from 121 in 2021 to a record 184 in 2025. During Trump’s five years in office, the Trump Organization filed to bring in at least 566 foreign workers. The jobs—primarily servers, clerks, housekeepers, kitchen staff and farm workers—pay between $15.58 and $27.91 an hour, per Department of Labor listings. Spokespeople for...

One common explanation for last week’s “blue-bath”—the election night triumph by Democrats just one year after President Donald Trump retook the White House—is that the GOP’s “multiracial coalition” collapsed. There’s just one problem: That coalition never existed, at least not to the extent imagined by doomsaying Democrats and wish-casting Republicans. Grasping this basic reality is necessary to understand the macro trends in American politics. Even after decades of mass immigration from the Global South, the red team has remained overwhelmingly white. Trump’s voters in 2024 were 84 percent white, according to the comprehensive AP VoteCast survey of 120,000 voters. That’s...

This is a real head scratcher as why even bother? So much for America First I guess.

There’s a lot of ill-suppressed glee among Republicans right now, along with recriminations among Democrats, about the resolution of the longest government shutdown ever. Eight Democratic senators were able to undercut a few hundred of their colleagues by ending a filibuster against a bill to reopen government, exhibiting both weakness and disunity. (Though there’s no telling how many holdouts privately agreed with the “cave.”) Worse, Democrats failed to secure an extension of Obamacare premium subsidies they repeatedly demanded. So were Republicans the “winners” and Democrats the “losers” in the shutdown saga? Maybe now, but maybe not later. As the New...

The grandstanding over Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes is exhausting The American right has a problem: it can’t stop talking about itself. Commentators, academics and journalists of what used to be called a “conservative” persuasion all tend to think that their ideas are tremendously interesting. And, in the way a difficult child becomes argumentative when he or she isn’t getting attention, they fight. They fear irrelevance and so they fall out with each other and take sides in order to prove to themselves that they have something worth saying. Things become messy and nasty and everybody gets carried away...