Free Republic

Presidential hopeful Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said during Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate that she can address “institutional racism” by explaining white privilege to women in the suburbs. “I can explain it to white women in the suburbs,” Gillibrand said on the debate stage. “When their son is walking down the street with a bag of M&Ms in his pocket, wearing a hoodie, his whiteness is what protects him from not being shot.” The New York senator was addressing racial injustice issues when she made the remarks. “I don’t believe that it’s the responsibility of Cory and Kamala to be the...

The president’s reelection campaign hopes to use some of the Democratic presidential candidates’ most liberal stances to draw new working-class and independent voters to Trump. When the Democrats running for president all agreed at their first debate — via a raised hand — that public health insurance should cover undocumented immigrants, the Trump campaign saw an opening. The campaign war room immediately clipped the video and shared it on social media. President Donald Trump tweeted about it. It was a tactic, people assumed, to rile up Trump’s steadfast but limited base ahead of 2020. Inside the Trump campaign, though, officials...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Joe Biden was at a soul food restaurant in Los Angeles on Thursday when he blasted President Donald Trump’s “racist” taunts at a rally the night before. “This is about dividing the country,” the early Democratic front-runner, who has been criticized for his own handling of race, told reporters. “This is about dividing and raising the issue of racism across the country because that’s his base, that’s what he’s pushing.” But Michael Fisher, an African American pastor from Compton who attended the event, warned Democrats to ignore Trump.

Support for U.S. President Donald Trump increased slightly among Republicans after he lashed out on Twitter over the weekend in a racially charged attack on four minority Democratic congresswomen, a Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll shows. The national survey, conducted on Monday and Tuesday after Trump told the lawmakers they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” showed his net approval among members of his Republican Party rose by 5 percentage points to 72%, compared with a similar poll that ran last week. Trump, who is seeking re-election next year, has...

President Donald Trump referenced Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in a series of posts that literally urged the freshman congresswoman to go back to Africa. On Sunday morning, Trump referenced the recent tension between Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the four freshman Democrats who voted against the House version of a border bill — Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). “So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if...

The highly public, racially charged rift between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a clutch of freshmen congresswomen led by Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has spilled into the 2020 Democratic presidential contest. The intramural conflict is threatening to overshadow President Donald Trump's history of race-baiting and xenophobia. Seizing an opportunity to rile his opponents, Trump on Friday offered a finger-wagging rebuke to Ocasio-Cortez and a defense of Pelosi. "She is not a racist," he said of the speaker, who rarely hides her contempt for the president and certainly was not seeking his support. While many Democrats had hoped to use the president's...

Elizabeth Warren on Thursday unveiled her plan to reform the nation’s immigration system amid a deepening crisis over detention at the southern border and a fraught debate across the country and within the Democratic Party on the way forward. Among other things, the proposal calls for allowing more immigrants to come into the country legally, lifting the refugee cap from 30,000 under the Trump administration to 125,000 and then 175,000; a revamp of the immigration court system to establish independence from Justice Department leaders; and the creation of an "Office of New Americans" tasked with facilitating integration, including teaching English....

Poll numbers in recent days have shown a remarkable surge toward President Trump. In the most recent national poll by Emerson, he either ties or beats every Democrat except Vice President Joe Biden among registered voters – and he only trails Biden by 6. Given the 92 percent hostility of news media coverage toward Trump, according to a Media Research Center study, I suspect there is an unspoken Trump vote that will not tell polls they support him. It is probably a big enough group of voters to mean that he is now tied with or leading Biden. After two...

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...