Free Republic

As President-elect Donald Trump fills out his Cabinet and chooses his closet advisers ahead of Inauguration Day, many African American leaders are asking why more Black people haven't been appointed to key positions. ABC News spoke to more than a half dozen longtime and new African American conservatives and Republicans within Trumpworld, in and outside of Washington. Last month, the president-elect appointed Scott Turner, who was executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council during Trump's first term, to serve as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. ...

President-elect Donald J. Trump has promised to unravel President Biden’s major legislation when he takes office next month, but Mr. Biden is hoping to salvage his most prized policies with help from an unlikely source: Republicans.With just weeks left in office, Mr. Biden and his aides have emphasized that his signature economic legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, overwhelmingly benefits Republican districts, in the hopes that Mr. Trump would face blowback from his own party if he repealed it.The administration is also racing to award hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and finalize environmental regulations to lock in Mr. Biden’s...

By Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker and Perry Stein November 22, 2024 at 5:43 p.m. EST The plans show how president-elect Donald Trump wants to use the Justice Department to address his own personal grievances President-elect Donald Trump plans to fire the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution, according to two individuals close to Trump’s transition. Trump is also planning to assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the...

A thousand miles from the austere buildings where Washington runs, Donald Trump’s transition team in his Mar-a-Lago resort has begun what a close ally calls a hostile takeover of the federal government.Since his victory, Trump has ignored many of the rules and practices intended to guide a seamless transfer of power and handover of the oversight of 2.2 million federal employees. Instead, the president-elect, who has pledged to fire thousands of civil servants and slash billions of dollars in spending, has so far almost fully cut out the government agencies his predecessors have relied on to take charge of the...

WASHINGTON—In naming a set of unconventional nominees to run federal departments, Donald Trump this week also took steps to push for a broader goal: realigning the balance of power among Washington’s major institutions so that more authority flows from the White House. Trump has threatened to take steps that would undermine the Senate’s confirmation powers and Congress’s role in budgeting—the most essential powers of the two chambers. He has insisted that senators allow him to place some nominees directly in their jobs, bypassing the Senate’s public hearings and confirmation process. He has said he would move to impound—or decline to...

SENATE PROBE ON ELON BASED ON WSJ’S UNFOUNDED CLAIMS? A WSJ article alleging Elon held “regular conversations” with Putin is now driving a Senate investigation—but where’s the accountability for WSJ’s reporting? Despite relying solely on unnamed “current and former officials,” the piece quickly sparked backlash, with both Elon and the Kremlin slamming it as “absolutely false.” Now, Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Jack Reed are calling for a probe based on these unverified claims—so why isn’t WSJ facing scrutiny for publishing such an explosive story on shaky grounds? https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1857608109012783348?t=ns0BAkwpB0os0TDMCX-LeQ&s=19 Sources: Sky News, PBS

According to CNN reports, Pentagon brass met recently to discuss and plan how to override President Trump’s 47 orders. This smells like treason. The military-industrial complex is infuriated that the first president in 40 years who did not start a war while in office has returned to power. This latest report that the failed Pentagon brass who surrendered to the illiterate Taliban barbarians, donated billions of dollars in US weapons, and abandoned Bagram Air Force Base, are plotting against Trump 47 is not a complete surprise. Retired General Mark Milley, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, openly...

Democrats are readying a rapid-fire response to flood social media and the airwaves with calls for calm and patience with vote-counting should Donald Trump try to prematurely claim election victory, as he did in 2020, Harris campaign and party officials told Reuters. The Republican candidate told reporters this week that he hoped to be able to declare victory on Election Day, although election experts have cautioned that it could take several days for the final result to be known, especially if there are demands for vote recounts in some key areas. Trump is locked in a razor-thin race with Democratic...

As the presidential contest enters the final sprint, campaign aides and allies close to Vice President Kamala Harris are growing cautiously optimistic about her chances of victory, saying the race is shifting in her favor. Top Democratic strategists are increasingly hopeful that the campaign’s attempts to cast former President Donald J. Trump as a fascist — paired with an expansive battleground-state operation and strength among female voters still energized by the end of federal abortion rights — will carry Ms. Harris to a narrow triumph. Even some close to Mr. Trump worry that the push to label him a budding...

As Election Day approaches, former President Donald Trump has increasingly been warning that if he loses, it will be because of cheating. “They’re going to cheat. They cheat. That’s all they want to do is cheat,” Trump said of Democrats during a rally this month in Juneau, Wisconsin. “It’s the only way they’re going to win. And we can’t let that happen, and we can’t let it happen again. We’re going to have no country.” Trump has long inaccurately claimed that he is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, and false claims of Democratic meddling have been a centerpiece...

A memo circulating among at least half a dozen advisers to former President Donald J. Trump recommends that if he is elected, he bypass traditional background checks by law enforcement officials and immediately grant security clearances to a large number of his appointees after being sworn in, according to three people briefed on the matter.The proposal is being promoted by a small group including Boris Epshteyn, a top legal adviser to Mr. Trump who was influential in its development, according to the three people.It is not clear whether Mr. Trump has seen the proposal or whether he is inclined to...

A campaign marked by Donald J. Trump’s apocalyptic extremes has turned even darker in its final days.With voting already underway in battleground states, the former president on Friday escalated his threats to prosecute and imprison a wide range of people involved in elections and politics. Hours later, on the hugely popular “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, he said that the “enemy within,” a phrase he has used to describe political opponents, poses a bigger threat to the nation than North Korea.For eight years, Democrats have warned that Mr. Trump’s political ambitions have fueled some of the nation’s deepest divides. But...

Late this summer, a prominent right-wing think tank invited conservatives from around the country to learn how to work in a second Donald J. Trump administration. In a series of training sessions in Washington, former Trump officials shared strategies with attendees for combating leftist civil servants in the federal government and dealing with the mainstream media. Participants were sent home with a thick binder of materials for further study. One section’s title: “Tales From the Swamp: How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump.” The classes could easily have been the work of Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint and personnel project...

Half the country sees former President Donald Trump as a fascist, amplifying concerns raised in recent days by Vice President Kamala Harris and past members of Trump's own administration. Far fewer in a new ABC News/Ipsos poll level the same charge against Harris. Nearly two-thirds also say Trump often departs from the truth, again more than say so about Harris. But Harris gets more criticism than Trump for pandering for votes by promoting policies she doesn't intend to carry out -- underscoring challenges for both candidates as the fur flies in their increasingly heated presidential race. Responding to one of...

With three weeks left before Election Day, former President Donald J. Trump is pushing to the forefront of his campaign a menacing political threat: that he would use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him. In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Trump framed Democrats as a pernicious “enemy from within” that would cause chaos on Election Day that he speculated the National Guard might need to handle. A day later, he closed his remarks to a crowd at what was billed as a town hall in Pennsylvania with a stark message about his political opponents....

Former President Donald J. Trump escalated the nativist, anti-immigration rhetoric that has animated his political career with a speech Friday in Aurora, Colo., where he repeated false and grossly exaggerated claims about undocumented immigrants that local Republican officials have refuted.For weeks, Aurora has been fending off false rumors about the city. And its conservative Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, said in a statement on Friday that he hoped to show Mr. Trump that Aurora was “a considerably safe city.”But Mr. Trump has made debunked claims about Aurora, a Denver suburb, such a central part of his stump speech that he took...

Trump showed disregard for Pence’s safetyIt was previously known that Trump showed little regard for the safety of Vice President Mike Pence as a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, but two new details revealed in Smith’s filing underlined that fact. On Jan. 6, 2021, as rioters breached the Capitol in an apparent attempt to stop Congress’s certification of the Electoral College results, Trump took to Twitter — now known as X. He condemned Pence for lacking “courage” because he refused to disrupt the certification by rejecting the official electoral votes for Biden in favor of certifying false slates...

In Valdosta, Ga., Donald Trump made a false claim about President Biden’s responsiveness and demonstrated his long-held instinct to view disaster response through the prism of his personal politics

Justice Department prosecutors would launch criminal investigations of those Trump views as enemies. IRS workers would likely be ordered to audit prominent Democrats’ tax returns. WASHINGTON — If former President Trump wins the November election, he says one of his actions on “Day One,” right after he begins deporting millions of undocumented migrants, will be enacting a radical plan to force the federal bureaucracy to bow to his demands.Like any president, Trump would undoubtedly stock the top levels of the government with loyal appointees. But he also intends to enforce his will by making it possible to fire lower-ranking federal...

False rumors of Haitian residents eating dogs and cats have thrown the Ohio city into turmoil.Daily life, says one resident, has been “turned upside down by such vitriol and ignorance.”Some Haitians have already decided to leave Springfield and Ohio altogether. A disturbing scenario has played out at public schools across Springfield, Ohio, in recent days, with children turned away as they arrive or, worse, rushed out of classrooms, all because of bomb threats.Parents have struggled to explain to 6- and 7-year-olds what is happening. Some aren’t quite sure about sending their kids back.“You don’t want to give in to the...