Free Republic

“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...

For the second straight year, about one in five Americans say they would like to leave the U.S. and move permanently to another country if they could. This heightened desire to migrate is driven primarily by younger women. In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups. The percentage of younger women wanting to move to another country first rose decisively...

Top Trump administration officials met Wednesday with a key GOP lawmaker about an effort in the US House to force a vote on releasing Justice Department case files related to Jeffrey Epstein... White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged the meeting later Wednesday when asked about reporting that administration officials were huddling with GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert. “Doesn’t that show the level of transparency when we are willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns?” she told reporters at the press briefing. Leavitt added: “I’m not going to detail conversations that took place in the Situation...

President Trump is being misled into a regime-change war close to home. Few Americans nowadays find much to celebrate in the Iraq War or the intervention that overthrew Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Regimes were successfully changed both times, but what came after the dictators’ downfall was civil war, regional instability and mass-migration flows that exported many of those nations’ troubles to their neighbors. Now the Trump administration wants to do to Venezuela’s despot, Nicolás Maduro, what George W. Bush did to Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama did to Gaddafi. That will predictably do to the Americas – including the US –...

Jeffrey Epstein told author Michael Wolff that his ex-friend President Donald Trump "knew about the girls" in a 2019 email released by House Democrats...Epstein told Maxwell that a victim of his "spent hours at my house with" Trump, the email says.

Pundits are criticizing the Trump administration for committing large-scale military resources to advance U.S. interests in Venezuela. Some are going so far as to sensationalize the issue, claiming it could be “another Vietnam.They are wrong.Critics are wrong because they are not thinking through U.S. national strategic logic. That region is not only a transit area for the illegal drug trade, flooding the U.S.: It represents a contentious powerhouse combination of massive oil resources (it is ranked number 1 in proven world oil reserves), combined with a rich land/water staging area that could become a permanent foreign “fortress.”In other words, it...

During the interview, Ingraham pressed the president on H-1B foreign visas, arguing the president could not fulfill his promise of revitalizing the manufacturing economy in the United States by bringing in foreign workers.“I mean, the H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration, because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers,” Ingraham told the president.“Well, I agree, but you also do have to bring in talent when a country,” Trump pushed back.“Well, we have plenty of talented people...

Shortly before New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, delivered his rousing victory speech to a packed hall in Brooklyn on Tuesday night, one person was singled out for praise: Elle Bisgaard-Church, his 34-year-old chief adviser… It was a fleeting moment in the spotlight for Bisgaard-Church…She rarely speaks in public or gives interviews and, unusually for a New York politico, does not post on X. Yet she has masterminded one of the most improbable, closely-watched and successful campaigns in recent political history, propelling an obscure socialist candidate to the highest office of the most important city in the US. Patrick Gaspard,...