Free Republic

“There was a $2 trillion tax cut last year. Did you feel it? Did you get anything from it? Of course not. … All of it went to folks at the top and corporations.” That was Joe Biden at a Pittsburgh union workers’ rally ten days ago. C’mon, Joe. You know better. It was an ironic kickoff from the guy who promised the Summer of Recovery in 2010. But the former vice president finds himself in the same politically awkward place as most of the Democratic presidential field and their congressional leaders. Though they try to maintain the false narrative,...

Susan Cropper cast her vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Two years later, on a Friday afternoon in October, she traveled to Bloomington, Indiana, to tell her story to Bernie Sanders. Seated in a small conference room, with cameras rolling and reporters watching, she explained that after 31 years at United Technologies Corp., a manufacturing company Trump promised to save, she lost her job. Now, Cropper said, she lives off credit cards. And every now and then, she’ll pick up free 10-pound bags of potatoes at the local food bank. “It's humiliating,” she said. “I’ve spent my whole life being...

Sen. Bernie Sanders has a story for black audiences. They’ve just heard it already. “I was actually at the March on Washington with Dr. King back in 1963,” Sanders likes to remind audiences. “As somebody who actively supported Jesse Jackson’s campaign — as one of the few white elected officials to do so in ’88 — I have dedicated my life to the fight against racism and sexism and discrimination of all forms.” His most recent audience, at a candidate forum in Texas dedicated to women of color, She the People, responded with a round of groans. Four years after...

Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman is challenging two broadly-accepted understandings about Joe Biden and the 2020 presidential race. That Biden’s moderation muddies his chance to lead a left-leaning Democratic Party, while his broad acceptability and blue-collar appeal makes him the strongest Democrat against Donald Trump. But the opposite could be the case - circumstances make his chances of winning the nomination strong, but his age and moderate views could dampen voter enthusiasm in the general election. The Democrats best-equipped to beat Trump, Wasserman says, include a young gay man and a young black woman who make party traditionalists nervous.

Joe Biden did Donald Trump a huge favor when he announced his presidential run with a campaign ad that featured the tragedy of Charlottesville as a central theme. I don’t think he meant to, because the obvious intention was to paint the current occupant of the White House as a racist who thinks some neo-Nazis are good people. While stirring music plays in the background, the former vice president looks somberly into the camera and says: “It was there in August of 2017 that you saw Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open. … And they...

Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the early front-runners in the 2020 Democratic presidential field, said Saturday that President Donald Trump’s handling of North Korea is one area where he doesn’t “fault” the current commander-in-chief. Speaking to ABC News’ Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl in an exclusive interview for “This Week,” the Vermont senator said that Trump meeting face-to-face with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “is the right thing to do.” Karl asked Sanders how he would respond as president to the apparent launch of unidentified short-range projectiles by North Korea into the Sea of Japan Friday night. “You...

Joe Biden is putting his own spin on President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” the former vice president said his motto would be: “Make America Moral Again.” Biden, who has not been shy about his intention to criticize Trump from the outset of his campaign, ripped into the president's handling of the country while in office. "Make America return to the essence of who we are, the dignity of the country, the dignity of people, treating our people with dignity," Biden said. "End this god-awful, deliberate division that’s being taken in order...

Joe Biden’s long-awaited announcement that he is running for President—in a highly produced video with a distracting piano soundtrack—officially knocked Bernie Sanders out of first place in the Democratic field. That’s a relief for a lot of establishment Dems, who have spent the last several weeks ramping up the hits on Bernie, as it has become increasingly clear that the plainspoken Democratic Socialist from Vermont has a credible shot at becoming the Democrats’ nominee in 2020. Sanders’s socialism is scary for an establishment that worries a lot about electability. More than that, his populist attacks on Wall Street, corporations, and...

Donald Trump cannot win the 2020 election, but the Democrats sure as hell can lose it. That’s why the Democrats have two options for the 2020 presidental race: Make the race a referendum on Trump and Trumpism, or lose. It’s just that simple. So please, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Joe Biden, if you’re running, and the other dozen people stuffed into the growing field, heed my prayer: Check yourselves before you wreck yourselves, because at the rate you’re going, rushing to the left with reckless abandon, Trump’s reelection is looking more and more likely....

Shortly after Sanders took the stage, Sayu Bhojwani, the founder and president of New American Leaders, asked him a pointed question about fighting white nationalism: “What do you believe is the federal government’s role to fight against the rise of white nationalism and white terrorist acts, and how do you plan to lead on that in your first year as president?” Starting off by saying that the “demagoguery we are seeing from the Trump administration is not what this country is about” and that he would “do everything I can to help lead this country in a direction to end...

I’ve always been a fan of Joe Biden. I admire his authorship of the Violence Against Women Act and his longstanding gravitas as a public servant for decades. I even contributed to the Draft Biden PAC back in 2015 in hopes that the straight talker from Scranton would enter the race for the White House. I was, indeed, “Ridin’ With Biden” as they say. I truly believe that 2016 was Joe Biden’s moment to run for president. Yes, he had run unsuccessfully twice before. And, yes, sitting vice presidents are not usually successful in their bid for the top job....

A senior Trump ally says he expects impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump - despite Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi attempting to steer party members away from the move. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, chair of the senate judiciary committee, made the prediction on Twitter on Tuesday morning. He declared that the ‘radical left’ is now in charge of the Democratic Party, meaning attempts by House Speaker Ms Pelosi to avoid divisive impeachment proceedings will fail. “Nancy Pelosi is not in charge of the Democratic Party. The radical left is in charge. “So, I will expect that there will be impeachment proceedings against...

Former Massachusetts governor William F. Weld, who is challenging President Trump as a Republican candidate in 2020, blasted the president for his attacks on democratic institutions and for stoking nationalist rhetoric as Trump seeks money for a wall along the Mexican border. “It’s part of his strategy to try to get everybody upset, and divide the country and persuade us that we shouldn’t be patriots who love our own country and our own people,” Weld said. Instead, “we should be nationalists who hate everybody else,” Weld said. Weld made the remarks during an appearance on WCVB-TV’s “On The Record” with...

Democrats "can foresee" the possibility of impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump following the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's report. Speaking on the Sunday political talk shows, the chairmen of three key House investigatory committees sounded open to the possibility of bringing impeachment proceedings against the president. "I can foresee that possibly coming," House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., told CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, adding that he is "not there yet" on impeachment. The report itself, Cummings said, provides Congress with an investigatory "roadmap," he said. "I think [Mueller] basically said to us as a Congress,...

Of all the questions that will be answered by the 2020 election, one matters above the others: Is Trumpism a temporary aberration or a long-term phenomenon? Put another way: Will the changes brought about by Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party fade away, or will they become entrenched? Trump’s reelection seems implausible to many people, as implausible as his election did before November 2016. But despite the scandals and chaos of his presidency, and despite his party’s midterm losses, he approaches 2020 with two factors in his favor. One is incumbency: Since 1980, voters have only once denied an incumbent...

President Trump normally seems to relish the idea that he and the media are foils. He's gone so far as to call some outlets the "enemy of the people," but he still stops and talks with them as often as he can. But, apparently, First Lady Melania Trump can convince him not to. On Thursday, as the president crossed the White House's South Lawn shortly after the public release of the redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on 2016 Russian election interference and the Trump campaign's conduct surrounding the meddling, he walked right past a "mob of reporters."...

Jim Messina, campaign manager for former President Barack Obama's successful re-election campaign, predicted that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., would be unable to counter President Trump's economic messaging and would therefore lose in a 2020 electoral matchup. "Bernie Sanders is unlikely going to be able to stand up to the constant barrage that is Donald Trump on economic issues," Messina said during the Powerhouse Politics podcast this week. Messina contended that swing voters were "incredibly focused on the economy" and that winners of the last five presidential elections were those candidates who were able to "win" the economic argument with swing...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Friday became the first 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to make a full-throated call for the House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's redacted report. Mueller, who investigated whether Trump's campaign coordinated with Russia during the 2016 election and whether the president tried to interfere with the inquiry, found no evidence of a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign and made no verdict on obstruction of justice. Mueller did find, however, that Trump made numerous attempts to interfere with the investigation but was largely...

Newly arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange needs to “answer for what he has done,” Hillary Clinton said on Thursday. The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee and former secretary of state weighed in on Assange while at a speaking event with her husband, former President Bill Clinton. Assange was arrested earlier Thursday at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and the US has charged him with conspiring with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to break into a classified government computer at the Pentagon. WikiLeaks’ publication of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers during the 2016 election season hurt Clinton’s presidential campaign....

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said Sunday Dreamers, children of immigrants brought into the country illegally, should get legal status. "Well, it's been put in place by President Obama and I believe we have a responsibility to fulfill what is a presidential pledge and commitment. So that's in the past. I would provide legal status for those Dreamers in the country," Romney said on NBC's "Meet the Press," referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that shields these individuals from deportation. "That's something the president's put on the table. I think we should get that job done, and hope,...