Free Republic

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has accused President Donald Trump of using the language of white nationalism and said he would push for a federal buyback programme to encourage Americans to give up their military-style weapons and ammunition if elected. The former vice president said in an interview with CNN that the voluntary weapons buybacks would be in addition to his push for renewing a lapsed federal ban on new manufacturing and sales of such firearms, a prohibition he helped win in 1994 as a senator from Delaware, only to watch it expire a decade later.

President Trump on Sunday forcefully denounced two mass shootings in Ohio and Texas, saying "hate has no place in our country." As the president spoke, top Democratic presidential candidates -- including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker -- demanded Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recall Congress from its recess, currently slated to last until the second week of September, to vote on initiatives to curb gun violence. Addressing reporters in Morristown, New Jersey, Trump promised "we're going to take care" of the problem. He said he's been speaking to the attorney general, FBI director and members of Congress and...

Booker and Beto O'Rourke both cited the president's rhetoric and stoking of racial division in the wake of the Texas shooting. Sen. Cory Booker placed blame on President Donald Trump and his racist rhetoric for a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, that left at least 20 people dead. The shooting is being investigated as an act of domestic terror and a hate crime after officials said that they believed, but have not confirmed, a manifesto filled with anti-immigrant and white supremacist language was posted online and written by the gunman. “I think, at the end of the day, especially...

Don’t get duped by moderate Democrats — their message is a loser. That was the warning Bill de Blasio made to union workers Saturday in Las Vegas, where he urged his party to go hard to the left if it hopes to defeat Donald Trump. “Do we need to nominate a moderate to win in 2020? You hear it everywhere,” said hizzoner at a forum hosted by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “No, it is a trap, because when you listen to the moderates — I don’t disrespect them, I want to work with them —...

President Trump could win. Or he could lose. By no means does anyone know for sure. I base this uncertainty on six dimensions. Dimension 1: Immigration Democrats clearly seem to be implying: “Let all illegal immigrants into the United States. Then give them free health care, including the 11 million illegal immigrants presently in the country.” Costs to taxpayers would be beyond staggering. Trump, as we all know, opposes such actions. We can assume the public is divided. The unknown is: No one can divine the answer. Dimension 2: Trump’s supporters Hillary Clinton found out the hard way that it...

Pollster Lee Carter measured the responses of a group of 100 voters to President Trump’s rally in Cincinnati and she said Friday that independents are leaning toward the president's immigration stance. At one point in the speech, Trump said Democrats’ greatest “betrayal” was supporting “open borders’ and Democratic lawmakers “care more about illegal aliens than they care about their own constituents." “We’re not going to do that,” Trump said to his base at the rally on Thursday. Carter, president of communications consulting firm Maslansky + Partners, said the voter-reaction analysis showed independents tracking closer to Republicans than Democrats in response...

President Donald Trump is receiving the lion’s share of presidential campaign giving among Keizer residents. Trump has received $2,926.24 from Keizerites since the beginning of the year. That total derives from 37 contributions, small and large, made by 12 donors. Earlier this week, ProPublica shared quarterly reports from every state on campaign giving since the beginning of the year. Keizertimes culled the contributions from Keizer residents for this story. Trump’s biggest financial supporter in Keizer made six contributions totaling $600 since January. The largest single donation, $375, from a Keizer resident also went to Trump. For the Democrats, Sen. Bernie...

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...