Free Republic

A federal court has determined that President Donald Trump does not have the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs, dealing a sweeping blow to the president's main weapon in his ongoing global trade war. A panel of judges on the U.S. Court of International Trade found the tariffs were unlawful and permanently vacated them.

In what can be called a victory speech over failed neoconservative foreign policy, President Donald Trump proclaimed the end of 30-some years of existing foreign policy in the Mideast. The ideology dragged the U.S. through pointless wars from Libya to Yemen is now dead. At an investment conference in Riyadh, in a speech little-commented on by the mainstream media, Trump said, “In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. And the interventionalists [sic] were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.” For the first time since the First Gulf War in...

The first four months of President Donald Trump’s second term has been a whirlwind of historic progress. From his executive actions to his reciprocal tariffs to his determination to bring peace to the world, President Trump has acted quickly to implement the Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda. In the mission to undo the damage done by the last presidential administration, no cabinet member has been more instrumental than Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Vice President JD Vance fired back at Joe Biden's new criticism of the infamous Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, dismissing the former commander-in-chief's foreign policy as a "total disaster." "I think it's rich for Joe Biden to comment on anything that we’re doing when it comes to Russia and Ukraine," Vance on Thursday told Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum on "The Story." "Under Biden’s administration, Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine… I wish Joe Biden the best. I don't really care what he has to say about American foreign policy because so much of what he...

A second member of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's inner circle has been placed on leave after an investigation into leaks of potentially sensitive information. Darin Selnick, the Defense Department's deputy chief of staff, was suspended from duty and escorted out of the building. This came on the heels of another Hegseth aide, Dan Caldwell, being escorted out of the Pentagon; see Hegseth Advisor Who Was Included in Leaked Signal Text Chain Escorted From Pentagon, Placed on Leave – RedState.Selnick is a retired Air Force officer and, like Caldwell, was part of a group Hegseth brought with him from Concerned...

Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson Pocahontas Elizabeth Warren says NO ONE is interested in making investments in the United States after President Trump's tariffs. Does she live under a rock? President Trump has already secured TRILLIONS in investments. 11:32 AM · Apr 9, 2025

The EU Parliament has lifted the immunity of AfD foreign policy spokesman Petr Bystron because he shared a photo of Angela Merkel on Twitter in 2022. The reason? Bizarre: since Merkel is seen raising her arm in the image, it’s being interpreted as a Nazi salute – but only because Bystron posted it. Prosecutor: Waving is not a Nazi salute This farce has a backstory: In 2022, during a protest against COVID-19 measures, Bystron waved to the crowd. The public prosecutor immediately launched an investigation: “Nazi salute!” In response, hundreds of AfD supporters filed complaints against Angela Merkel, who had...

Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Trump administration would “absolutely” continue to remove Venezuelan immigrants on deportation flights despite a ruling from a federal judge ordering them to pause their efforts. “These are foreign terrorists, that the president has identified them, and designated them as such, and we will continue to follow the Alien Enemies Act,” Bondi said Monday on Fox News’s “Jesse Watters Primetime.” U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Saturday temporarily blocked President Trump from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which would grant him the authority to detain and deport individuals of countries deemed foreign adversaries with little...

The former secretary of state’s 1972 opening to China badly weakened the U.S. By dispensing with that conceit, Trump shows he intends for America to win the great-power competition. The undiplomatic words that Donald Trump had for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week left some Washington, D.C., observers wondering how the Europeans saw the situation. After all, they wondered, if that’s how Trump treats a war-torn country fighting for its independence against Russian despot Vladimir Putin, what do Paris, London, and Rome, etc. think about U.S. security commitments? Other foreign policy analysts recognize that Trump has many audiences outside the...

Ukraine doesn’t actually have any commercial deposits of the rare earths that both Washington and Kyiv have hyped up. The country does not currently produce rare earths, which are a type of critical mineral, nor has it produced rare earths in recent decades. Kyiv only has Soviet-era rare-earth geological mapping, and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war is certain to complicate any mining or processing efforts—all of which require years of hefty investments, even in countries that are not in war. “Mining is a long-term effort—so the United States may not yield benefits for another 20 years,” a report by the Center...

The president’s swift moves underscore the confidence of an administration with a much firmer grip on the levers of government than during his first term.The last time President Trump held office, he tried to make deep cuts to foreign aid, but was blocked by Congress. He is finding little resistance from fellow Republicans this time to his move to freeze such funding.During a special counsel’s inquiry in his first term, Mr. Trump expressed a desire to fire the investigator, but White House lawyers stopped him. This term, Mr. Trump has swiftly forced out a slew of federal officials who had...

NBC News’ chief foreign affairs Andrea Mitchell said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that there was an international backlash developing against President Donald Trump’s agenda. Host Kristen Welker said, “We just talked to the Trump national security adviser amid questions about Gaza, whether he plans to try to make Canada the 51st state and of course, all of these cuts that we’re seeing. How do you see the Trump doctrine right now?” Mitchell said, “It appears to the world as might makes right in Panama, Canada. You can argue that this is an opening bid but we’ve seen in...

Mike Benz on how USAID spent tens of millions of dollars of US taxpayer funds to remove Jair Bolsonaro from power and end free speech in Brazil: “When populist waves swept the world within the U. S. in 2016 with Trump and with what happened all over Europe with Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini and Nigel Farage, USAID declared censorship holy war against every single populist group, including Bolsonaro. Steve, I’m telling you right now, if USAID did not exist, Bolsonaro would still be the president of Brazil and Brazil would still have a free and open internet. It...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is traveling through Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic as he represents President Trump and the new administration. He’s doing great. Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered remarks to reporters in El Salvador discussing his role as Acting Director of USAID after President Trump and Elon Musk moved to incorporate USAID into the State Department. Secretary Rubio repeated that USAID must align with U.S. foreign policy and the national interests of the U.S. government. Citing the “uncooperative” nature of the USAID leadership acting as an independent entity, Secretary Rubio announced...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino on Sunday, making it clear that the U.S. won’t tolerate China’s growing influence over the Panama Canal. “Secretary Rubio informed President Mulino and Minister Martínez-Acha that President Trump has made a preliminary determination that the current position of influence and control of the Chinese Communist Party over the Panama Canal area is a threat to the canal and represents a violation of the Treaty Concerning the Permanent Neutrality and Operation of the Panama Canal,” the State Department said in a statement. “Secretary Rubio made clear that this status...

In January, President Donald Trump returned to the White House, facing a world that is arguably more complicated than when he left the building four years earlier. The war in Ukraine, which will enter its fourth year in February, will take much of Trump’s time as he begins to craft and sell a detailed plan to cease the fighting and negotiate a peace settlement that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin can live with. China, the aspiring hegemon that seeks to displace the United States as the world’s foremost power, will be a constant challenge for Trump’s...

Elon Musk and MAGA are already disrupting the status quo, and Europe seems ill-prepared.For the last decade or more, Europe’s governments have been trying to resist covert influence operations from adversaries like Russia and China. Now they have a very different challenge: Fending off overt efforts by Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement to seize territory, oust elected leaders and empower far-right causes and parties. Even before he retakes office, Mr. Trump is making threats — perhaps serious, perhaps not — to acquire the territory of NATO allies like Canada and Denmark. And Mr. Musk, the president-elect’s biggest financial...

In the recent frenzy of commentary seeking to interpret U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s increasingly adamant comments about territorial expansion to Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, too much of the discussion has focused on matters of secondary importance. These range from assessing whether Trump is merely engaging in a game of showmanship or distraction, to deciphering how those regions’ inhabitants feel about ceding territorial control to the United States, to determining how much it would cost to purchase their acquiescence. From a policy perspective, though, more fundamental matters have gone surprisingly unaddressed, beginning with the question of whether any of...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken told The Associated Press that he hopes the incoming Trump administration will press forward with key points in President Joe Biden’s foreign policy, including on the Middle East and Ukraine. But in an wide-ranging interview Friday on his last workday as America’s top diplomat, he expressed concern that the Trump team might abandon all or some of those policies. Blinken said there is reason to be concerned that the new administration might not follow through on initiatives that Biden’s national security team put into place to end the war in Gaza,...

Biden’s farewell boasts ring hollow as his foreign policy missteps—from emboldening Iran and Hamas to the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal—undermine his claims of global achievement. Departing President Joe Biden offered a farewell brag this week to his State Department about how his tenure had improved America’s stature abroad. In his now accustomed weird mix of whispering and fiery shouting, Biden apparently felt he had to lie or mislead about almost every one of his “achievements.” Yet to the extent that anything improved abroad on his watch—the weakening of Iran or the near destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah—it was due despite, not...