Free Republic

Top Republicans on Monday seized on House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ endorsement of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York, casting the self-described democratic socialist as the new face of the Democratic Party ahead of next year’s midterm elections. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., called Jeffries’ endorsement a “seismic shift in politics.” “We saw our clearest sign yet that this radical insurgent movement in the Democrat Party is succeeding, and they are ending what has always been known as the Democrat Party in America,” Johnson told reporters in the Capitol. “After a monthslong pressure campaign from the far left, House...

State Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Monday that he anticipates the Trump administration, which last week announced plans to use federal election monitors in California, will use false reports of voting irregularities to challenge the results of the Nov. 4 special election.Bonta, California's top law enforcement officer, said on a call with reporters that he is “100%” concerned about false accusations of wrongdoing at the polling places. Bonta said it would be "naive" to assume Trump would accept the results of the Nov. 4 election given his history of lying about election outcomes, including his loss to President Biden in...

The Senate passed a resolution Tuesday aimed at ending President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Brazil, with five Republicans joining Democrats in a rare bipartisan rebuke of the president over trade policy. Sens. Rand Paul, Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and former Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell sided with Democrats in the 52 to 48 vote. McConnell has long been critical of Trump’s trade policy, and said in a statement ahead of the vote, “Tariffs make both building and buying in America more expensive. The economic harms of trade wars are not the exception to history, but the rule.” The...

When I found Darshan Smaaladen earlier this month, she had joined several hundred of her neighbors at a “No Kings” demonstration in Orange County, California. Not that she was there to protest. “Rallies are great,” Smaaladen told me, “but they don’t get people out to vote.”A year ago, Smaaladen had helped lead a successful campaign to recall two ultraconservative members of Orange County’s school board. Now the 52-year-old mother of three was using the “No Kings” protest as a campaigning ground for Proposition 50, the ballot measure orchestrated by Governor Gavin Newsom that would redraw California’s district map to add...

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson argued that the phrase “illegal alien” strips away the humanity of the person in question. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson issued a scathing rebuke of dehumanizing language at a news conference Friday after a question he was asked about the city’s spending on “illegal aliens.” Though Johnson was less than sincere when he suggested that “illegal aliens” are something you’d expect to find in a work of science fiction, he was correct to argue that such phrasing erases the humanity of the people in question.“We don’t have illegal aliens,” he said, before making the science-fiction remark. “The...

A plan at Utah Valley University (UVU) to create a memorial to Charlie Kirk has been met by protests and a petition signed by thousands to block the effort. One protester declared, “We don’t want his likeness on campus.” That is hardly a new sentiment since Kirk was assassinated on the campus on Sept. 10, 2025. However, the protest shows the sense of license that many have in opposing anyone with conflicting views, including those represented in memorials. I have a long history with UVU and was pleased to receive the Madison award from the university, and was declared an...

Acrowd of thousands gathered in downtown Washington, D.C., Saturday as part of the nationwide anti-Trump 'No Kings' rallies with a long list of White House actions they were protesting against: mass deportations of undocumented immigrants; National Guard deployments in Democratic-controlled cities ostensibly to combat crime; the looming expiration of Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies, which is the main cause of the ongoing government shutdown. But Saturday’s event also was an opportunity for dozens of participating federal employees, many of whom have lost their jobs and seen their years of experience be discarded, to come together. “Connecting in person with...

A president steeped in constitutional lore might have been offended by claims he’s acting as a king. But Donald Trump and his entourage responded with mockery to weekend “No Kings” protests by millions of Americans — embracing the narrative in a way that explains his growing hubris and belief that he has unchecked power. The president and Vice President JD Vance this weekend both posted AI memes to social media depicting Trump in a crown. The one Trump shared was a mocked-up vision of the president flying a fighter jet emblazoned with “KING TRUMP” appearing to dump raw sewage on...

Unicorns are supposed to be rare and mythical. But at Saturday’s No Kings protests I saw the largest outbreak in America outside a Lisa Frank store. They were everywhere, but I was surprised to see almost a dozen of them down in New Braunfels, Texas. As at many of the No Kings protests across the country, attendees embraced the example set by the taunting frog outside Portland’s ICE facility and came in outfits that you could find threatening in only the most silly and specific of contexts: Cookie Monster was there.But you don’t pass up a chance to meet a...

More than 2,700 “No Kings Day” demonstrations are scheduled nationwide Saturday, four months after the first protests drew five million people. Organizers say Trump’s actions have escalated since June, including expanded immigration raids, prosecutions of political opponents and pressure on universities. Trump allies brand them “anti-American” When millions of demonstrators took to the streets in June for “No Kings Day” — depicting President Trump as a wannabe monarch intent on violating American democratic norms — it was still fairly early in his administration. The immigration raids in Los Angeles were just getting under way and Trump had deployed military troops...

If their plan is just to rely on Trump’s overreach, then they’ll be repeating Biden’s mistakes.Voters certainly seem to be going south on President Donald Trump’s war on non-White immigrants. In a New York Times poll conducted in late September, a slim majority of registered voters said the president had gone too far in aggressively trying to ferret out and deport non-Americans — and that was before federal agents started using tear gas and pepper spray on the streets of Chicago.It’s a rare glimpse of bluer skies for Democrats since last year’s presidential election. But if their plan on immigration...

Each case will be judged on its own merits, but this is part of a pattern of selective prosecution.President Donald Trump has embarked on a campaign of prosecuting political foes, from ex-FBI director James Comey to New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). On Thursday night, his former national security adviser, John Bolton, became the third high-profile antagonist to face charges in as many weeks. What’s different now is that the Justice Department’s charges, and the evidence underlying them, appear stronger than in previous cases.A grand jury in Maryland indicted Bolton on 18 counts of transmitting and retaining national defense...

Since immigration-enforcement agents began their descent on Chicago, acting with seemingly unprecedented speed and ferocity, Evelyn Vargas and her colleagues at Organized Communities Against Deportation have been in a frenzy. They help run an emergency hotline that refers people who have been detained to immigration lawyers and directs their families to support services such as food pantries, emergency housing, and mental-health care. (On a single day last week, it took 800 calls.) And they oversee a team of 35 “rapid responders” who have been sprinting across the city to film arrests, aiming for at least two to arrive on the...

Top brass at the Department of Homeland Security approached the Federal Emergency Management Agency this spring with a proposal: What if the agency blocked millions of dollars in security grants awarded to Muslim organizations around the country? The suggestion of a blanket ban left the FEMA leaders bewildered and deeply concerned, and they immediately pointed out such a proposal could be considered discriminatory and even illegal, according to three sources with knowledge of the episode who asked not to be named out of fear of reprisal. While the DHS officials didn’t give a reason for disqualifying Muslim groups when they...

President Trump has unleashed new weaponry in his war against Democrats, liberals and the left. Over the past four weeks, he has initiated what amounts to a unique form of partisan civil war designed to amass power in a nominal democracy and defang, decimate and defund the opposition. Trump’s assault on the left combines the use of the available tools of violent conflict — the military, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE in particular — with the prosecution of critics (and people he just doesn’t like), cuts of essential funds for liberal institutions, the use of regulation to threaten...

Government shutdowns are a familiar autumn rite of dysfunctional government. But this one is different from any that have come before. That makes it a harder test of both sides’ resolve and discipline. President Donald Trump is reveling in a legally shaky plan to employ the shutdown to punish his enemies — or more accurately, their constituents. The administration has put a halt on tens of billions of federal dollars that are going to blue states, including roughly $18 billion for New York’s subway and Hudson Tunnel projects. Not coincidentally, those are in the hometown of the Democratic leaders of...

After months of emergency rulings, the justices will be asked to render final verdicts on economic and immigration policies at the core of Trump’s presidency. The Supreme Court and President Donald Trump are headed for a reckoning. After months of terse emergency rulings that largely avoided major confrontations with the new administration, the justices will open their new term on Monday faced with the need to render full, final verdicts on policies at the core of Trump’s presidency. “It really is going to be a showdown,” said Jennifer Nou, a law professor at the University of Chicago. “So many of...

Next year, the United States will observe the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence. To begin a year of celebration, Donald Trump appeared at the Iowa State Fairground in early July. “We’ve saved our country,” he proclaimed to the crowd of supporters. Trump then announced a “giant patriotic festival” on the National Mall for next summer, and suggested an Ultimate Fighting Championship event could take place on White House grounds. UFC is one of the corporate sponsors of ­America250, the nonprofit organization that will be overseeing the country’s semiquincentennial celebration. Other sponsors represent different parts of Trump’s corporate coalition:...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is asking nine major universities to commit to President Donald Trump’s political priorities in exchange for more favorable access to federal money.Universities were asked to sign a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” committing them to adopt the White House’s vision for America’s campuses. It asks the schools to accept the government’s priorities on admissions, women’s sports, free speech, student discipline and college affordability, among other topics.Signing on would give universities priority access to some federal grants, but government money would not be limited solely to those schools, according to a White House...

An immigration judge on Wednesday denied a motion filed by Kilmar Abrego Garcia's attorneys to reopen his immigration case, according to a copy of the decision obtained by ABC News. In the emergency motion filed in August to reopen the case, attorneys for the wrongly deported Abrego Garcia argued that because he was deported to El Salvador and then brought back to the United States, he is now eligible to apply for asylum within one year of his last entry into the U.S. But in the order filed on Wednesday, Regional Deputy Chief Immigration Judge Philip Taylor said that Abrego...