Free Republic

Nevada’s departing senator would have fought Trump with a ruthlessness perhaps no other Democratic leader has. Harry Reid was searching for someone to take a stand. It was a Tuesday morning in early December, three days before his three-decade congressional career would effectively come to an end, and Reid had summoned about 20 of his staffers to his Capitol office just off the Senate floor. Although it’s reserved for the leader of the Senate’s minority party, it’s still a ­magisterial space, with soaring ceilings and mosaic floors. As a cold rain pelted the windows, the Nevada senator sat in a...

Donald J. Trump won the white working-class vote over Hillary Clinton by a larger margin than any major-party nominee since World War II. Instead of this considerable achievement inspiring introspection, figures from the heights of journalism, entertainment, literature and the Clinton campaign continue to suggest that Mr. Trump won the presidency by appealing to the bigotry of his supporters. As Bill Clinton recently said, the one thing Mr. Trump knows “is how to get angry white men to vote for him.” This stereotyping of Trump voters is not only illiberal, it falsely presumes Mr. Trump won because of his worst...

When Susan Allen was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2012, she became the first openly lesbian Native American woman to win office in any state legislature. But framing that achievement as one for the lesbian community alone obscures another aspect of Allen’s identity, and one that is directly connected to her Native American ancestry: Allen also identifies as “two-spirit.” While Americans are increasingly familiar with the elements that make-up our modern LGBTQ abbreviation, other, often older queer identities like two-spirit remain unappreciated to the point of erasure. But if Allen and other two-spirit folks have their way,...

Hillary Clinton spent much of last summer arguing that Ronald Reagan would never vote for Donald Trump. At the Democratic National Convention, a series of speakers — including Barack Obama — argued that the patron saint of the conservative movement would recoil at Trump’s authoritarian ethos. At a September press conference, the Democratic nominee suggested that the Gipper would be incensed to see the Republican nominee praise Vladimir Putin while disparaging the American president. One of her super-PACs’ final campaign ads cast Reagan’s ghost as a Clinton surrogate. The point of all this nostalgia for the man who killed off...

ROCKVILLE, Md. — Democrats’ belief that new information revealed after Donald Trump’s election — as when the reports of Russian interference spurred calls on the left for a revote or, failing that, for “faithless” electors to abandon Trump — would change voters’ minds has taken another hit. A Pew Research survey Wednesday showed a whopping 97 percent of all voters would cast the exact same vote they did on Election Day, including 99 percent of Trump voters and 96 percent of Clinton voters. As with the recount that saw Clinton lose votes and the Electoral College vote that saw her...

Lawmakers are loath to say anything remotely critical, fearful they might set off the president-elect or his horde of enforcers. "People are naturally reticent to be the first out of the block for fear of Sean Hannity, for fear of Breitbart, for fear of local folks," Rep. Mark Sanford said. In early December, Rep. Bill Flores made what seemed like an obvious observation to a roomful of conservatives at a conference in Washington. Some of Donald Trump’s proposals, the Texas Republican cautioned, “are not going to line up very well with our conservative policies," though he quickly added that there...

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Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is expected to be named special adviser to the president on overhauling federal regulations, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Icahn, who has spent the past four decades battling big companies as an activist investor, already has been wielding influence in President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team. He is playing a central role in selecting the next chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the people said. Interested candidates have reached out to him, and he is interviewing others at the request of Mr. Trump, the people said.

We've gone beyond virtue-signaling to toxic brew of all-you-people-need-to-shut-up-and-listen-to-why-you're-the-problem ranting. MTV—which famously took years to feature black musicians on its regular programming—has come full circle since its launch in 1981. It has released a short video titled "2017 Resolutions for White Guys." Among the suggestions, some of which were articulated by white folks who seemed plucked from the junior versions of Prairie Home Companion and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir: "Try to recognize that America was never 'great' for anyone who wasn't a white guy"; "Blue Lives Matter isn't a thing"; "stop bragging about being 'woke'; "feel free to take Kanye...

In a typical year, Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign would go down as one of the most startlingly deficient endeavors in political history. But a postliminary campaign by Clinton allies to shape why the heavily favored and first major party female nominee lost to an eccentric billionaire reality television star is already bending the storyline in their favor through a concerted media offensive meant to undermine the president-elect, his tactics and the ultimate outcome. The Clinton campaign's stunning and largely unforeseen loss has only hardened its own resolve to win the post-mortem of how it happened. In the six weeks...

Professor Jacobson has covered the Democrat’s futile attempt to mount an electoral college insurrection in the hopes of turning over the results of the recent presidential election. Monday morning, establishment media outlets along with a bevy of Democrats decided Russia was to blame for Hillary’s embarrassing electoral loss. The sudden, unified chorus was an amusing sight to behold. I blogged: The Russian hacking/tainted election story line is a particularly fascinating coping mechanism in leftist elite circles. All signs point to a painfully out of touch party platform, the world’s worst presidential candidate, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the political landscape,...

By now, who hasn’t heard a Bernie supporter or surrogate claim that Sanders would have won the election against Donald Trump? The Sanders wing of the Democratic Party has developed a narrative that the Democratic Party was held back by Hillary Clinton. They claim that she was fatally flawed, that the DNC stole the nomination from Sanders, and that the ever so coveted white working class voter dislodged by globalization will never again vote for corporate interests. Of course, this narrative ignores the facts—that despite Clinton’s supposed flaws, she easily defeated Sanders in the primary via the pledged delegate count,...

Hillary Clinton spoke to a group of donors in Manhattan Thursday and offered them, as an explanation for her loss, two factors. One was the letter from FBI Director Comey in the final weeks of the election. The other was Russian hacking of Democratic groups, which she said was an attempt to “undermine our democracy.” From the NY Times: “Swing-state voters made their decisions in the final days breaking against me because of the F.B.I. letter from Director Comey,” she said. The Russians, she said, sought to “undermine our democracy” through cyberattacks on Democratic targets… “This is not just an...

Looking for Mythological ReaganRonald Reagan’s legacy looms large over American conservatives. Everyone wants to be the new Ronald Reagan and Republican candidates can’t stop declaring his name with bated breath. Regrettably for conservatives, the visage of Reagan they broadcast has little to do with the actual president but epitomizes a caricature forged in Republican media circles and punditry for the last 20 years. This Mythological Reagan is evoked as the tough, principled, provocative conservative who spoke truth in an uncompromising fashion. A man hated by liberals and leftists while he celebrated America’s greatness at home and abroad; a leader who...

I’ve started to rewatch Trump rallies from the month before he was elected president. I’ve seen some of them before, but that was always with the presumption he was unlikely to win. Now I watch them trying to figure out how he did it, and how the Democrats can rebuild their economic message out of this mess....

"In a democracy, trust must be earned. It cannot be imposed. The days of captive audiences are over. The monopoly on "news" and propaganda has been broken for good." "Here's The Washington Post's criminally false "fake news" article in case you missed it: Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say."

Until Nov. 8, everyone talked as if the presidential election would hinge on smallest incident: a killer ad, a fatal gaffe, an October surprise. But now, in the emerging conventional wisdom, tactics are suddenly deemed unimportant, as we rush to propound big theories about What It All Means. We now hear that Donald Trump’s victory — which he is calling, preposterously, a landslide — was the result of the grand tide of history, a thundering declaration of Vox Populi: Identity politics is dead. Populism is ascendant. #WhiteWorkersMatter. The people want change. The Democratic Party, without question, has lessons to learn...

Following President-elect Trump's surprise phone call on Friday with the Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, the response has been predictable if not disheartening. Academics in D.C. this morning are claiming that, “Trump…doesn’t have clue.” An expert at the University of California added that the call was “impulsive.” Regrettably, my Democratic Party pushed back too. By its measure, Trump demonstrated his “incompetence” and threatened our national security. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) went so far as to say that Trump’s actions might push the nation into war with China. What academics and my party don’t understand is that he’s not interested in starting...

Donald Trump’s critics on the left are enraged with his handling of the Carrier Corporation’s intention to move their Indianapolis operation to Mexico. He has possibly been slightly overgenerous in his favors to Carrier in order to get them to reconsider sending 1100 jobs out of the country. Let us compare the alternative choices of other US companies who consider similar moves in the future: Cost of an AC unit produced and sold in the US: $4000 approx. Labor cost to produce (@ 20% average): $800. Tax savings (under Trump) to produce in US $4000 x (35%-20%): $600. Note: Current...

The group of Democratic electors who are trying to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president have been in contact with Clinton allies. Politico reports: Advocates of the long-shot bid to turn the Electoral College against Donald Trump have been in contact with close allies of Hillary Clinton, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions, but the Clinton camp — and Clinton herself — have declined to weigh in on the merits of the plan… In a sign of the sensitivity of the issue, former Clinton campaign officials declined repeated requests to comment on the Electoral College effort. DNC officials...