Free Republic

In a reversal, President Trump appears to have backed off joining a European push for new sanctions on Russia, seemingly eager to move on to doing business deals with it.For months, President Trump has been threatening to simply walk away from the frustrating negotiations for a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine.After a phone call on Monday between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, that appears to be exactly what the American president is doing. The deeper question now is whether he is also abandoning America’s three-year-long project to support Ukraine, a nascent democracy that he has frequently...

SummaryTrump's Middle East focus shifts to Gulf business deals PM Netanyahu's right-wing govt at odds with some U.S. policy shifts U.S.-Israel relations strong but diverging priorities evident, say observers JERUSALEM, May 14 (Reuters) - Israel's right-wing government has maintained a diplomatic silence this week as U.S. President Donald Trump fired off a blizzard of announcements that have shaken Israeli assumptions about their country's standing with its most important ally.Trump's decision to bypass Israel during his current visit to the Middle East had already been seen as a marker of the his administration's increased focus on lucrative business deals with wealthy...

Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday called on Ukraine to accept an American peace proposal that closely aligns with longstanding Russian goals, including a “freeze” of territorial lines in the three-year war, acceptance of the annexation of Crimea by Russia and a prohibition on Ukraine becoming part of the NATO alliance.It was the first time a U.S. official had publicly laid out a plan to end the war that favors Russia in such stark terms.A peace plan that leaves Russian forces deep inside eastern Ukraine would be welcome news in Moscow. President Vladimir V. Putin has said for almost year...

This time around, the ACLU shows no signs of backing off, particularly since Trump has once again made big promises to overhaul the border and immigration protocols.ACLU leadership warned two days after the Nov. 5 election that the organization stood ready to take on Trump again.“As Trump returns to the White House, we’re ready to return to the courts and Congress to fight for our civil liberties,” the group said in a statement last month.“Starting on day one, we’re ready to fight for our civil liberties and civil rights in the courts, in Congress, and in our communities,” it continued....

NEW YORK — The immigration officers sat in their vehicles before dawn near a two-story building. A New York subway line rumbled overhead. After about two hours, an officer’s voice crackled over the radio. “I think that’s Tango,” he said, using a term for a target. “Gray hoodie. Backpack. Walking quickly.” The officers surrounded and handcuffed a 23-year-old man from Ecuador who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a minor. Kenneth Genalo, head of Enforcement and Removal Operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York, said a popular misconception is that officers can sweep into a community and pick...

WASHINGTON — The fate of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet is still unclear after Republican senators spent much of December carefully dodging questions about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ’s views on vaccines, accusations of sexual misconduct against Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard’s 2017 meeting with then-President Bashar Assad of Syria. While some GOP senators have indicated they are all-in on Trump’s picks, others have for now withheld support, especially on some of his more controversial nominees. The dynamic is injecting uncertainty into the process as Republicans prepare to take the Senate majority in January with a four-seat margin and as Trump...

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition operation announced on Tuesday that it had belatedly signed an agreement with the Justice Department that will allow the F.B.I. to conduct background checks on people Mr. Trump intends to appoint as senior officials in his new administration.F.B.I. background checks have long been a routine part of transitions. Law-enforcement vetting of a president-elect’s senior team is normally part of decisions about whether they can be entrusted with access to national security secrets, and senators traditionally want to see such dossiers during the confirmation process.But Mr. Trump, who is hostile to the F.B.I. because of its...

Plenty of presidents have been called dictators by their political opponents, but none until now has been publicly accused of being a “fascist” by his own handpicked advisers.When former President Donald J. Trump’s longest serving chief of staff said the other day that his old boss “falls into the general definition of fascist,” Mr. Trump let loose with the insults, assailing his onetime right hand as a “total degenerate,” a “LOWLIFE” and a “bad General.”What Mr. Trump did not do, at least at first, was actually deny that he was or aspired to be a fascist.Any other politician might consider...

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...

Donald Trump has largely avoided interviews where he will be fact-checked in real time. But on Sunday, he sat for an interview on Fox News, where he was challenged directly on some of his most glaring falsehoods of the campaign. The exchanges that resulted provided a case study in the tactics the former president uses when confronted with facts that contradict his statements. Mr. Trump repeatedly denied knowledge of information that has long been publicly available, questioned the sources and then pivoted away to an unrelated topic. On one point, though, he stuck by his words with no deflection or...

The young CIA analyst waited anxiously for Fiona Hill to pick up her phone. He had dialed her, he recalled, because he wanted to hear a familiar voice and make sure he wasn’t doing something “colossally stupid.” Five years later Hill’s memories of the call are still vivid: the CIA analyst’s voice, which sounded uncharacteristically emotional; the annoying clatter of the Frappuccino machine inside the Starbucks where she was waiting for her morning coffee. Hill stepped into the parking lot. She was on vacation in Hawaii, having just resigned a week earlier from her job in Donald Trump’s White House...

As the presidential campaign begins its final sprint, Donald Trump has made crystal clear how he will respond if he loses. He will refuse to accept the results; he will make baseless claims of voter fraud; and he will turn, with even more ferocity than he did in 2020, to the courts to save him.Mr. Trump has made clear that he views any election he loses — no matter how close or fair — as by definition illegitimate. The question then is whether there will be lawyers willing to cloak this insistence in the language of legal reasoning and therefore...

In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are staking their chances on two radically different theories of how to win: one tried-and-true, the other untested in modern presidential campaigns. Ms. Harris’s team is running an expansive version of the type of field operation that has dominated politics for decades, deploying flotillas of paid staff members to organize and turn out every vote they can find. Mr. Trump’s campaign is going after a smaller universe of less frequent voters while relying on well-funded but inexperienced outside groups to reach a...

Trump has made 41 distinct promises for his first day in office, including mass deportations and banning transgender women from sports.Donald Trump has a long list of executive actions he says he wants to carry out on his potential first day back in the White House. Among them: Begin mass deportations, eliminate perks for electric vehicles and ban transgender women from women’s sports. Since launching his bid for a second term, Trump has made 41 distinct promises about what he says he wants to do “on day one” as president, and he has mentioned those promises more than 200 times...

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee, narrowed down his appearances on the Sunday political talk shows this weekend to just one: Fox News. Perhaps this was because his multiple appearances a week ago had him trying to defend his running mate Donald Trump’s past engagement with a notorious antisemite; perhaps it was because he is viewed broadly negatively, including faring relatively poorly among Fox News’s central audience, Republicans. Whatever the reason, the friendly environment allowed Vance to lean into claims that would have met more resistance elsewhere, like Trump’s long-standing insistence that every bad poll is (somehow)...

Well, there you have it. Jack Smith has joined the “Gag Academy” and requested yet another gag order against President Trump for merely speaking the truth. This post President Trump made on Truth Social was the final straw for little Jack Smith. The gag order is dripping with irony. Smith claims that President Trump is posing a “danger” to law enforcement agents, yet the directive from Biden’s regime that they use “deadly force” is supposedly a nothing burger.The gag order is dripping with irony. Smith claims that President Trump is posing a “danger” to law enforcement agents, yet the directive...