Free Republic

They're really trying it, aren't they? President Joe Biden and his Inner Circle Delusionists are hoping to brazen it out and prop up this past-its-expiry-date presidency. In the process, they're proving themselves to be everything they've ever leveled at Donald Trump: out-of-touch, a sore loser, anti-democracy. Mad King Joe just won't quit. As he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in Friday's primetime interview, 'if the Lord Almighty comes down and tells me' only then will he consider stepping back from the ticket. Maybe. Snap polls following the CNN debate disaster in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both...

John Davidson asks at the Federalist, “Does DeSantis Know What Time It Is? Didn’t Sound Like It In That NBC Interview.” Responding to DeSantis’s assertion that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and was in large part responsible for allowing Covid-driven rules changes that helped Democrats collect a lot of mail-in votes, this is Davidson’s thesis: "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to have lost his way, unable to articulate a clear position on the most important issue of the primaries, which is what happened in 2020. . . . No issue is more important for DeSantis (and the entire GOP...

Donald Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign Tuesday night, heavy with the odor of a man fighting the last war. But politics is all about matching the man to the moment. Trump’s moment was six years ago. The nation’s voters have moved on, and if early signs are any indication, Republican primary voters are ready to consider doing so as well. The 2022 midterms were about as decisive a failure for Trump as it was possible for them to be. Consider, as one item of evidence, the exit polls. Exit polls are not perfect; even though they should have the...

If the Florida governor can get past Donald Trump in 2024, he will prove something important about himself. Ron DeSantis has a Donald Trump problem. How he solves it -- if he can -- will be the first test of an important aspect of presidential character. Let us assume -- as is widely assumed, but as yet unannounced -- that DeSantis would like to run for president in 2024. Many across the Republican spectrum would like to see him do so. The trick is that DeSantis needs to wrest the Republican nomination away from Trump, either by defeating him or,...

Dan McLaughlin Reminder: in most systems of government in world history, January 7 would have dawned with the heads of Donald Trump and the rioters mounted on pikes around the Capitol as a warning to others for all time. A purely legislative process of accountability is a pretty mild response. And you know, there are principled reasons not to want Georgia to bring a criminal investigation against Trump for the Raffensperger call. But that ground gets harder to defend if there is no legislative forum for accountability.

As Kevin Williamson observes, the 1950s still play something of an outsized role in the American imagination:Americans talk about the postwar years — the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy years — as though they were a kind of golden age. They weren’t, and damned few of us would be happy with the political settlement that existed then: The Left may cheer the high statutory tax rates of the time, but actual tax collections in those years were almost exactly what they are today, and as much as 80 percent of that Eisenhower-era tax revenue was spent on the military and national...

There’s a lot going around right now among disappointed Republicans about fraudulent or illegal behavior by Democrats in the 2020 election. Donald Trump and his most vocal supporters claim that the election was stolen. There is a disconnect here: Most of the theories of election misconduct, even if proven, would not change the vote totals enough to overturn the outcome. That does not mean that Republicans and conservatives should roll over and do nothing, but we should temper our expectations and not go chasing rumors and conspiracy theories without evidence. The goal should be to unearth genuine misconduct, expose it...

Should Amy Coney Barrett recuse herself from California v. Texas, the case challenging Obamacare? Chuck Schumer has called for it: video Schumer argues that Barrett has “clearly said she’d strike down the Affordable Care Act” and has “serious conflicts of interest” regarding the ACA. On the former point, as I have detailed at length, while Barrett in her academic writing has indicated her disagreement with the 2012 NFIB decision upholding the individual mandate as an exercise of the taxing power, she did not give a view on whether she agreed with Justice Antonin Scalia that the whole law should be...

If a Supreme Court vacancy opens up between now and the end of the year, Republicans should fill it. Given the vital importance of the Court to rank-and-file Republican voters and grassroots activists, particularly in the five-decade-long quest to overturn Roe v. Wade, it would be political suicide for Republicans to refrain from filling a vacancy unless some law or important traditional norm was against them. There is no such law and no such norm; those are all on their side. Choosing not to fill a vacancy would be a historically unprecedented act of unilateral disarmament. It has never happened...

May The Best Man Win, Not The Least WorstPolitics, as they say, ain’t beanbag. But party politics is still a team sport, in which a team that acts together is vastly more powerful than a bunch of people who have been forced together in mutual loathing and are looking to backstab each other at the first opportunity. The strongest political parties are those that give their voters a choice between their strongest candidates, who bid to persuade the voters to their side – as the Democrats did with Obama and Hillary in 2008 – and then close ranks once they...

The question intrigued me ... and the article does, too

No matter how much you dislike Donald Trump and his effect on the Republican presidential primary race, and there are many, many good reasons to do so, you have to spare a little grudging admiration for the sheer madcap genius of Trumps ability to disrupt, unsettle, and exploit the primary system. We can better understand what Trump has done successfully, as well as his ultimate limitations as a candidate and why he would be such a terrible president, using the ideas of military strategic theorist John Boyd. Trump has been, thus far, the true Boyd candidate in this race, yet...

Did we just see Erick Erickson’s Red State draw a red line in the sand in front of Rush Limbaugh? And if so, is it another aspect of the booming dynamic known as “the Trump effect?” That very case can be made – as Erickson used Red State’s daily email blast lead story from Dan McLaughlin on Wednesday to fire shots across the bow of all talk radio hosts and other pundits who are in any way supporting Donald Trump. And while Erickson does not have the by-line on this indictment, it is right in line with his recent dis-invitation...

Paul needled him last night on Hannity’s show for taking a “gimme, gimme, gimme” attitude towards federal spending on Sandy relief. Here’s Christie needling him back by accusing Paul and his home state of Kentucky of being a couple of deadbeats: “I find it interesting that Sen. Paul is accusing us of having a ‘gimme, gimme, gimme’ attitude towards federal spending when in fact New Jersey is a donor state and we get 61 cents back on every dollar we send to Washington,” Christie said. “And interestingly, Kentucky gets $1.51 on every dollar they send to Washington. So if Sen....