Free Republic

The Pentagon and National Security Council significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to US military strikes while planning the ongoing operation, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. President Donald Trump’s national security team failed to fully account for the potential consequences of what some officials have described as a worst-case scenario now facing the administration, the sources said. And now it may be weeks before the administration’s efforts to alleviate the intensifying economic fallout take hold, officials said Thursday, including high-risk naval escorts of oil tankers through the strait that the Pentagon...

Expats claim they will leave Dubai and never return as they fear for their lives and see their businesses destroyed while missiles continue to rain down over the United Arab Emirates. Once a tax-free haven attracting influencers from across the globe and thousands of Brits seeking warm weather and crime free streets, Dubai's carefully crafted image has been shattered and residents believe it is 'finished'. The emirate, home to around 240,000 British expats including Rio and Kate Ferdinand, Luisa Zissman and Petra Ecclestone, has been targeted by constant Iranian missile and drone attacks as the regime strikes US allies in...

Not satisfied with being commander-in-chief, Donald Trump has become the White House’s very own shoe salesman. The US president has been buying his favourite shoes for his staff so frequently that they have become the unofficial White House uniform. One female White House official told the Wall Street Journal: “All the boys have them. It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them.” Mr Trump has fallen in love with Florsheim, a brand that sells some pairs for as little as $49.90 (£37.27) – a far cry from his expensive Brioni suits. The president has been buying the shoes for...

If you've been following coverage of the Trump administration's military action against Iran, you've probably noticed something: A lot of people are determined to convince you that the United States is losing. They're wrong. Even worse, many of them know they're wrong. Critics across the political spectrum — from Democrats to elements of the so-called horseshoe Right — are pushing narratives that paint the conflict as a disaster in the making. The goal is simple: Undermine public confidence and turn what is shaping up as a strategic success into a perceived failure. Three particular claims are circulating widely. All three...

Investing.com - U.S. stocks were a sea of red on Monday as the escalating conflict in the Middle East pushed oil prices to $100 a barrel, raising fears that higher energy costs could weigh on the economy. At 09:43 ET (13:43 GMT), the benchmark S&P 500 index slid 1.2% to 6,655.57 points, the tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite slumped 1.3% to 22,103.06 points, and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 1.4% to 46,846.08 points.

Every few years, Washington rediscovers fraud. A viral clip of someone misusing food stamps. A headline about child care providers in Minnesota. A politician promising to crack down on “fraud and abuse.” The ritual is familiar. And the response is always the same: more paperwork, more surveillance, more hoops to jump through for people who are already struggling.

A classified report by the US National Intelligence Council concluded that the Iranian regime was unlikely to be toppled even by a large-scale assault, the Washington Post reports. Three people familiar with the report tell the newspaper that the assessment, completed around a week before Israel and the US launched their assault on the Islamic Republic, outlined small- and large-scale assaults as scenarios for potential succession. The report concluded that protocols would be followed if supreme leader Ali Khamenei were to be killed to ensure the regime’s survival, with it “unlikely” that Iran’s opposition would take control. The Post says...

President Donald Trump is just incredibly lucky. He kept rolling the dice on the economy and somehow the doom-sayers keep losing. All the experts said his tariffs would drastically increase inflation; instead it went down. Democrats projected at the end of 2024 that "Mass Deportations Would Deliver a Catastrophic Blow to the U.S. Economy." It has not.This luck just has to stop at some point. Such is the weird attitude of Politico's economics correspondent, Victoria Guida. She thinks that the economic success of the Trump administration is based just on the sheer luck of making the correct gambles as reflected...

X Freeze@XFreezeThe “Wikilaundering” scandal is finally blowing wide open and it’s worse than we thoughtA massive investigation by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism just exposed the ugly truth: Wikipedia is corrupt to its coreYou do not get information. You get propaganda.... articles manipulated by the highest bidder, billionaires, PR firms, and woke activistsHere’s exactly how the rot works:📍 Shadow Network: London-based PR firms like Portland Communications run secret “black hat” editors and middlemen to bypass every rule📍 Reputation Scrubbing on Steroids: They delete scandals, human rights abuses, and even controversial Epstein files for powerful politicians...... while scrubbing migrant worker deaths...

Donald Trump's chief of staff Susie Wiles is demanding action to bring gas prices down as the war with Iran sends oil skyrocketing, sources have revealed. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and other top officials, including a council led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, 'are getting screamed at to find some good news', industry executives said. Iran has shut the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil flows, sending prices soaring more than 10 percent in a single week, with Brent crude jumping from $72 to more than $82 a barrel. The average gas price jumped 11...

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn said Thursday that Republicans need to find an alternative to former President Donald Trump for the 2024 presidential election, saying the party needs "a candidate who can actually win." "I think President Trump’s time has passed him by," Cornyn said when asked about the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which is still taking shape. "I don’t think President Trump understands that when you run in a general election, you have to appeal to voters beyond your base."

US troops reportedly told the war in Iran is intended to bring about biblical end times, Armageddon. As conflict in the Middle East enters its fifth day on Wednesday, American and Israeli officials are pushing rhetoric suggesting that the campaign against Iran is a religious war. On Tuesday, Muslim civil rights organisation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), condemned the Pentagon’s use of this rhetoric, deeming it “dangerous” and “anti-Muslim”. ...US watchdog Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) said it has received emailed complaints that US service members were told the war with Iran is meant to “cause Armageddon”, or the...

WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump denies that Israel dragged the US into war with Iran, insisting that if anything, the opposite could be true and that he felt Iran was going to attack first. Trump was asked by a reporter in the Oval Office, “Did Israel force your hand to launch these strikes against Iran? Did Netanyahu pull the United States into this war?” “No, I might have forced their hands. You see, we were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they [the Iranians] were going to attack first,” Trump claims in response, during...

WASHINGTON, March 1 (Reuters) - Only one in four Americans approves of the U.S. strikes that killed Iran’s leader, while about half — including one in four Republicans — believe President Donald Trump is too willing to use military force, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that concluded on Sunday. Some 27% of respondents said they approved of the strikes, while 43% disapproved and 29% were not sure. About nine in 10 respondents said they had heard at least a little about the strikes, which began early on Saturday. The poll was conducted during the strikes on Iran by the U.S....

Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe.

The European Union’s executive arm requested “full clarity” from the United States and asked its trade partner to fulfill its commitments after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down some of President Donald Trump’s most sweeping tariffs. Trump has lashed out at the court decision and said Saturday that he wants a global tariff of 15%, up from the 10% he announced a day earlier. The European Commission said the current situation is not conducive to delivering “fair, balanced, and mutually beneficial” trans-Atlantic trade and investment, as agreed to by both sides and spelled out in the EU-U.S. Joint Statement of...

A 6-3 Supreme Court majority on Friday struck down President Trump’s sweeping emergency tariffs (Learning Resources v. Trump) in a monumental vindication of the Constitution’s separation of powers. You might call it the real tariff Liberation Day. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Court’s decision for the law and the economy. Had Mr. Trump prevailed, future Presidents could have used emergency powers to bypass Congress and impose border taxes with little constraint. As Chief Justice John Roberts explains in the majority opinion, “Recognizing the taxing power’s unique importance, and having just fought a revolution motivated in large part...

Victor Schwartz, 67, became the face of the battle to strike down the president's controversial tariffs when he sued the government last April. Schwartz has owned VOS Selections in Manhattan since 1987 and feared the tariffs would devastate his small business. He argued that the US President lacked the authority to impose tariffs without congressional approval, becoming one of the few dissenting corporate voices to publicly oppose the fees

Tommy Robinson, Britain’s self-styled free speech warrior, has been allowed to enter the U.S. despite a long criminal rap sheet. On Thursday, Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, posted a video on social media from an airport in the U.S. announcing, “I’ve arrived!” He said the trip was “last-minute” after he’d been informed only hours earlier that he’d gotten a visa, and hinted at plans to throw himself into U.S. politics. That apparently included a meeting with Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, a longtime peddler of MAGA election conspiracy theories. Sharing a photo of himself shaking...

Rep Ted Lieu has ignited a fresh political storm after alleging that Donald Trump is repeatedly named in the unredacted Jeffrey Epstein files released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act in January 2026. Lieu claimed that members of Congress who reviewed the fuller set of documents encountered disturbing allegations tied to the former president. His remarks, delivered during a forceful exchange on Capitol Hill, have triggered sharp partisan reactions and renewed scrutiny of the Epstein records. According to Lieu, the unredacted files viewed by a select group of lawmakers mention Trump “thousands and thousands of times”. He further asserted that...