Free Republic

If former President Donald Trump is trying to make it look like he isn't bothered by Ron DeSantis, his Truth Social feed this weekend told a very different story. Over the weekend, Trump's Truth Social profile was filled with post after post about DeSantis, the governor of Florida and Trump's main rival in the GOP. On Saturday, Trump kicked off his DeSantis-posting spree of at least 10 posts, by Insider's count. The first was to insult DeSantis by writing that he thought it was "totally inappropriate to use the word 'meatball' as a moniker for Ron" — in the process...

Donald Trump was a great if imperfect president. By the third year of his presidency, the country was flourishing. The economy was roaring, jobs were up, incomes were up, gas prices were down, and America & Americans were doing fairly well. But then a funny thing happened on the way to the election. The swamp struck back via Covid and the George Floyd protests. Neither of those was of Trump’s making, but both were utilized by Democrats to steal the election. The Democrats didn’t create Covid or put Floyd in the morgue, but they used the lockdowns and the riots...

The Trump administration has finalized a roll back of Obama-era regulations for oil trains. The rules, which date back to 2015, required railroads carrying crude oil or other flammable liquids to outfit their trains with more responsive electronic braking systems. The rules came in response to concerns about explosions and spills from mile-long trains of crude and ethanol. In the Northwest, those trains move along the Columbia River and through cities to coastal refineries. The U.S. Department of Transportation, which has been working on rescinding the rules since last December, said in statement this week that its analysis showed the...

Politics aside, if you study the data trends, the 13 “Keys to the White House, ” created by analyst and historian Allan J. Lichtman, have demonstrated an uncanny knack for calling U.S. presidential elections. There have been a few hiccups, where it called Al Gore over George W. Bush in 2000, with Gore winning the popular vote and Bush winning the Electoral College. When a reverse phenomenon occurred in 2016, it correctly called Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016, with Trump winning the Electoral College and Clinton winning the popular vote. The key’s predictions now focus solely on the...

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida prizes preparation and the way it allows him to control his political narrative. But suddenly, he was on the verge of going off message. He had traveled to a Central Florida warehouse this past week to promote a $2 billion tax cut proposal when he was confronted with the inevitable: an especially ugly attack from former President Donald J. Trump that seemed to warrant a strong response. Mr. Trump had insinuated on social media that Mr. DeSantis behaved inappropriately with high school girls while he was a teacher in his early 20s. As a reporter...

<p>Former President Trump’s 2020 election campaign hired an outside research firm to try to prove allegations of voter fraud, but never released the results because the company disputed many of its theories and, according to Four, could not provide any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election was people who are familiar with the matter.</p>

... For too long Washington has refused to think strategically about some of the major foreign policy issues of our time. In the rare instance where Washington’s policymakers do think strategically, the strategies they concoct seem less like realistic attempts at applying state power and more like they were conceived over a game of Risk while under the heavy influence of alcohol. Such is the case with the current American preoccupation in Ukraine. The Russians have invaded Ukraine. They’ve committed their entire society to the war. In the words of popular geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan, this is “Russia’s last war.”...

State of the Union: A Trump ’24 focus on foreign policy restraint is very good news. And we shouldn’t be surprised.Over at Politico, there’s a noteworthy report on some early jockeying in the 2024 GOP primary:Those close to Trump’s campaign operation say he plans to try and paint himself as an anti-war dove amongst the hawks. They believe doing so will resonate with GOP voters who are divided on, but growing wary of, continued support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.This is a smart political move from 45. “Growing wary” of Ukraine support could prove to be an understatement,...

Trump gave an interview on Thursday to Hugh Hewitt, who repeatedly asked him to spill on what disparaging nicknames he plans to use against those who compete with him in the 2024 Republican primary. When Hewitt floated Glenn Youngkin (R) as a possible bid, Trump referred to the Virginia Governor as a “disappointment,” complaining that he didn’t get enough gratitude from Youngkin or his team even though “I did a lot for him. And he got elected because of me, just like Ron DeSantis. Even more so.” DeSantis is often considered Trump’s biggest potential primary threat, and the former president...

I once asked a senior American official about why he accepted honoraria from the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or the MKO, given the group’s cultlike nature and its lack of popularity inside Iran. His response: Even if the group lied about its support, they said the right things about democracy and regime change, and so he saw no harm in collecting the cash. The regime’s fall, he said, would be a moment of truth: Either the MKO would prove itself right, or its political Ponzi scheme would collapse. The problem with engaging in the MKO’s endorsement-for-cash scheme is the impact it has on...

A four-star US Air Force general has warned of a conflict with China as early as 2025--most likely over Taiwan--and urged his commanders to push their units to achieve maximum operational battle readiness this year. In an internal memorandum that first emerged on social media on Friday, and was later confirmed as genuine by the Pentagon, the head of the Air Force Mobility Command, General Mike Minihan, said the main goal should be to deter "and if required, defeat" China. "I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we will fight in 2025," Minihan said. Laying out his reasoning,...

A federal judge on Thursday imposed nearly $1 million in sanctions on former President Donald Trump and his lawyer for filing a since-dismissed ‘frivolous’ lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and many others, which had claimed they tried to rig the 2016 presidential election in her favor by smearing Trump.“We are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” wrote Judge John Middlebrooks in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in his order sanctioning Trump.The judge in his...

President Biden would easily beat former President Donald Trump in a hypothetical 2024 election matchup — but would lose if he faced off against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to a recent poll. In a rematch of the 2020 presidential contest, the 80-year-old Biden would prevail over his 76-year-old predecessor by eight percentage points in the popular vote — 49% to 41% — but would fall to the Sunshine State’s Republican governor by 45% to 42% in a head-to-head contest, the WPA Intelligence survey released Jan. 13 found.

Former President Donald Trump has dismissed claims that COVID-19 vaccines are broadly unsafe while asserting that his own role in the development of the vaccines may have saved 100 million lives. Trump touted the effectiveness of Operation Warp Speed, his administration's program to accelerate the development of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics, during a Monday interview on the conservative podcast The Water Cooler. Host David Brody asked the former president if he would "acknowledge" that the vaccines "were not as safe or effective as we were told.... "I was able to get something approved that, you know, that has proven to...

Observers say DeSantis is not as clueless as the ex-president, but can be just as ruthless. And he’s building momentum to be the GOP’s candidate in 2024 By some measures, Ron DeSantis is Donald Trump’s carbon copy. The Florida Governor achieved a national profile by rejecting social distancing, masking and vaccination mandates during the pandemic. He launched a culture war in his state, cracking down on discussions of racism and LGBTQ issues in schools. And he has shown a penchant for using the power of his office to punish those who defy him, from corporations to sports teams to government...

On Dec. 10, 1991, a conservative pundit who had worked for three presidents and become a celebrity by hosting a cable television debate show declared he would run for elected office for the first time – and not just any office. Pat Buchanan, a veteran of the Nixon, Ford and Reagan White Houses, announced his campaign for the presidency in front of a small yet raucous gathering of his supporters in New Hampshire. He would challenge in the upcoming primaries incumbent Republican President George H. W. Bush who, in Mr. Buchanan’s view, was a globalist who had lost touch with...

On Nov. 30, 2020, Sean Hannity hosted Sidney Powell on his prime-time Fox News program. As she had in many other interviews around that time — on Fox and elsewhere in right-wing media — Ms. Powell, a former federal prosecutor, spun wild conspiracy theories about what she said was “corruption all across the country, in countless districts,” in a plot to steal re-election from the president, Donald J. Trump. At the center of this imagined plot were machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which Ms. Powell claimed ran an algorithm that switched votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R....

You’ll notice a striking difference between election news coverage now and the leadup to the 2016 presidential primaries: The mainstream media have hardly breathed a word about Donald Trump (except to say that he’s not doing well in their “polls” and so obviously voters must want him out of the race). Back when Trump was making his run for the nomination in 2015, the newspapers couldn’t keep him off their front pages. He got hours of coverage on every news network every day.But that was back when most Republicans (myself included) didn’t consider Trump a serious candidate. The media decided...

The nation's largest annual conference for Millennial and Gen-Z conservatives, AmericaFest, drew tens of thousands of attendees who seem divided on who should win the 2024 nomination—a troubling sign for the former president. As Trump acolytes, like his eldest son Donald Trump Jr. and unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, sang praises for Trump's 2024 campaign, many event speakers avoided endorsing the former president and interviews with attendees revealed that many aren't prepared to commit to another Trump term just yet. The four-day event in Phoenix, Arizona, is a glaring red flag for Trump's campaign. It signals there may not be...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is endorsing the Electoral Count Reform Act as necessary to save the Electoral College, saying on Monday the system needs to be reformed so it will not be abolished. Paul said in an op-ed in The Louisville Courier-Journal that recent elections have shown flaws in Congress’s role with the Electoral College, leaving the vice president’s role in counting the votes ambiguous and allowing one member of the House and Senate to object to counting a state’s votes. He said both political parties have exploited these issues to cause “political theater.” “In 2021, the theater act went...