Free Republic

The agonizing fact for Democrats this summer is that President Trump appears to be gaining ground on domestic and foreign policy, while his potential challengers are quarreling and mostly spinning their wheels. Trump is taunting allies and defying Congress — and seemingly getting away with it. He isn’t just rewriting the political rulebook, he’s tossing it aside. And the painful fact is that the Democrats haven’t figured out a way to stop his forward momentum, even when they believe it’s taking the country over a cliff. Trump remains a divisive and unpopular leader who is vulnerable in 2020. But a...

It was as if nice, old Joe Biden was out on the street begging for votes when Kamala Harris walked by with a 50-pound handbag and slammed him on the head. He didn’t recover immediately and might or might not make a comeback, but the day was hers, a triumph for fraudulent bullying. You know the actual facts, right? It was the second of two Democratic debates of 10 candidates each, and Harris, who had identified herself as the only black woman on the stage, said to Biden that she did not think he was a racist as she went...

Democratic presidential candidate says the holiday should not be about Trump’s ego. President Donald Trump’s plans for a grand military parade on the Fourth of July make America “look smaller,” Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday. “Think about the strongest, toughest person you know. It’s probably not a person who goes around talking about how strong or tough they are,” the Democratic presidential candidate told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview. “I think the president’s trying to honor himself, and, again, my worry is it ultimately makes us look smaller,” he said. Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., and a military...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released four policy considerations to fix the illegal immigration crisis on the southern border after a volatile visit to the border earlier this week. The New York Democrat suggested first that the Trump administration "reinstate U.S. humanitarian aid in the Northern Triangle." She said the U.S. should treat the countries in Latin America as real partners. "Climate change: There is broad consensus from military to activists that resource strains (droughts, famine, etc) & nat disasters are drivers of refugees," Ocasio-Cortez said was her second policy recommendation. "People are fleeing places that were once livable &are no longer....

Donald Trump's walk into North Korea can best be explained through the lens of the 2020 election. If history is to remember one of the most audacious photo ops in American diplomacy as anything more than a stunt, the President must now produce breakthroughs from his friendship with the brutal dictator Kim Jong Un. Yet even if that progress is slow to emerge, Trump can still chalk up a valuable political win that will underscore how his foreign policy is often directed by his electoral priorities. He can use his singular televised moment to bolster his claims to be a...

Time magazine’s July 1 issue, with its “respectful” cover photo of Donald Trump looking “presidential” — for which the magazine was "scorned" — features a provocative interview with the headline quote: “My Whole Life Is a Bet.” Within the interview, one “Trumpian” statement stands out because it defies traditional political logic: When Time asked whether he should reach out to swing voters, he said, “‘I think my base is so strong, I’m not sure that I have to do that.’” I was intrigued and confounded by the president’s bravado when supposedly he is running for president of the United States,...

OSAKA, Japan — President Donald Trump on Saturday defended former Vice President Joe Biden's performance in the first Democratic presidential debate and said Sen. Kamala Harris got "too much credit" for her searing attack on Biden over his history on race and busing to desegregate schools. Although he conceded that Biden "didn't do well, certainly," Trump said the facts might not have been on Biden's side and that had he "answered the question a little bit differently, it would have been a different result." Speaking to reporters at a news conference after the G-20 summit in Japan, Trump said that...

Outspoken Trump critic Jeff Flake offered a rare defense of President Trump in response to former President Jimmy Carter's remarks suggesting the current president isn't a legitimate one. Speaking at a Democratic forum on Friday, Carter weighed in on Russia's interference in the 2016 election and expressed his belief that it played a much bigger role in the election of Trump than Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded. "I think a full investigation would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016," the 94-year-old former president said. "He lost the election, and he was put into office because the...

The Rasmussen Survey has two recent polls that shed early light on how voters see President Trump and the Democratic presidential candidates in relation to their own views. A poll of likely voters released today found that: …just 25% of Likely U.S. Voters consider most of the announced candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination to be about the same as they are in political terms. Fifty-four percent (54%) say most of these candidates are more liberal than they are, while only 13% think they are more conservative. The survey also asked, “Would it be more accurate to describe the...

Never has there been a presidential race as sprawling and wide-open as the 2020 Democratic primary. It would be a landscape entirely without a map, except that a small handful of battle-hardened veterans have navigated similar terrain before. At the kickoff of the primary debate season four years ago, no fewer than 16 candidates were jockeying for position in the largest Republican presidential field in history—only to end up being mowed down by Donald J. Trump in what became a slaughterhouse of a campaign. What’s in store for this year’s Democrats? To get an insider’s view, POLITICO Magazine invited four...

Rep. Adam Schiff joined MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Wednesday to discuss breaking news that Robert Mueller has agreed to testify before Congress in July. (snip) MITCHELL: Congressman, is he going to go beyond the four corners of his report? SCHIFF: Well that is certainly what we're going to ask of him. We're going to be asking questions. He has to go to what's in the report, but we're going to be asking questions that are outside the report. The attorney general has made it clear that he feels completely free to discuss matters not in the report. In fact, the attorney...

You’ve got a historically unpopular opponent in the White House, but there are nearly a dozen ways you could still blow this. To: All Democratic candidates As you prepare for your first debates later this week, some unsolicited thoughts on what you could do to blow this election. With 20 of you clamoring for attention over two nights, the opportunities are abundant for you to kick off the primary season with an easy win for the president. This might seem impossible. Donald Trump remains historically unpopular because the past three years have cemented the public’s image of the president as...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called President Donald Trump's threatened coast-to-coast deportations of migrants "outside the circle of civilized human behavior" and the Senate's top Democrat labeled the warning "the very definition of callousness" on Monday in remarks that underscored the gap between the two sides over immigration. The two leaders spoke after a weekend tweet in which Trump said he would give Congress two weeks to solve "the Asylum and Loopholes problems" along the border with Mexico. "If not, Deportations start!" he tweeted. The president had earlier warned that there would soon be a nationwide sweep aimed at "millions" of...

President Donald Trump over the weekend backed off a threat to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conduct massive nationwide raids to deport "millions" of migrants illegally in the United States, an act that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says came after she phoned the president last week. "When I spoke to the president, I said, 'Look, I'm a mom, I have five kids, nine grandchildren and children are scared. You're scaring the children of America, not just in those families, but their neighbors and their communities,'" the California Democrat said Monday while discussing immigration at an event in Queens, New...

Former Vice President and current presidential candidate Joe Biden promised Saturday that on "Day One" of a Biden presidency he would repeal President Trump's 2017 tax cuts and close $500 billion on tax loopholes. Speaking at the South Carolina Democratic Party Convention, Biden said that "Income inequities are at an all-time high and made worse by Trump's tax cuts and enormous giveaways to the top one-tenth of the 1 percent ... and it's time we start to reward work over wealth." Outlining his policy proposals in this visit to the early primary state, Biden said the GOP-backed tax cuts, which...

Joe Biden is pleading for party unity after a week of harsh attacks from his presidential rivals. “Here’s the deal — whomever the Democratic nominee is, we have to stay together,” he said at a South Carolina event on Friday night, where 20 other Dem candidates also converged. “You all know in your gut this election is more important than any one you’ve ever been involved in,” he said in a 2-minute speech. “Not because any one of us are running, but because of the man who occupies that office.” Biden’s campaign has been in damage-control mode since Tuesday night,...

Abusive behavior pushes good people away from participating in public policy and getting involved at a local level. We’ve heard from many who have either given up or are considering quitting politics because it’s become so toxic in our state. People involved in Idaho politics on a volunteer basis are forced to choose between standing up and taking the abuse or leaving in silence to avoid further nastiness.

Club for Growth, a conservative political group, will launch new attack ads against Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden targeting his past statements about race that will run during his first debate appearance next week. The decision by Club for Growth to attack Biden is based on internal polling the organization conducted that was viewed exclusively by Reuters. The ad will air on MSNBC and NBC stations in Des Moines, Iowa, according to the organization. Iowa holds the nation's first nominating contest....

I’ll be out next week. Remember that if you’re in the Hilton Head area, you can hear me ramble about the book, answer some questions about politics and the presidential race, and get some free food Monday night. It’s free, just RSVP here. Making the click-through worthwhile: contemplating whether the attacks Trump used against Hillary Clinton will work against Elizabeth Warren; the Democrats pick their top 20 candidates for the debates, leaving a governor, a former senator, a Congressman and a mayor out in the cold; and Trump proves, once again, that he will never change, no matter the consequence....

Joe Biden’s self-inflicted wound praising segregationists led to the sharpest criticism from his fellow Democrats in this still-young campaign season. For the former vice president, the blunder was the equivalent of an own goal in soccer. Comments at closed-door fundraisers should never drive news cycles. They are entirely avoidable. For his opponents, it was an easy lay-up in their quest to bring the frontrunner down to earth. In a road this long and winding, the brouhaha could soon be overwhelmed by events. The situation with Iran appears to be worsening, and next week will be dominated by the two-night presidential...