Free Republic

THE WALL WILL PAY FOR ITSELF. The estimated cost to complete the Border Wall is $15 to $25 billion. If we have a trade deficit with Mexico, by all means, let’s address that inequity on its own merits, but with the legendary negotiating skills of Donald Trump, we can easily reduce that outrageous $60 billion deficit by half, and that, in itself, would go a long way to pay for the wall. The annual costs of illegal immigration at the federal, state and local level is estimated to be about $113 billion. This figure includes education, medical, law enforcement and...

Chelsea Manning was convicted of leaking classified information (up to 700,000 documents) obtained while serving as an Army intelligence analyst that included diplomatic cables and troop locations, to the Wiki-Leaks website . House Speaker Paul Ryan described President Obama’s move as “outrageous” and “a dangerous precedent that those who compromise our national security won’t be held accountable for their crimes,” and that “Manning’s treachery put American lives at stake and exposed some of our most sensitive secrets. We are a nation of laws and the laws need to be upheld. What Chelsea Manning did was treasonous and the commutation by...

Chelsea Clinton attended a massive protest against President Trump’s immigration ban in New York City on Sunday afternoon. Chelsea, the daughter of Trump’s democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, and former President Bill Clinton, tweeted from the protest. “#NewYork #NoBanNoWall,” she wrote alongside a photo of the protest, which included one sign with her mother's “Love trumps hate” slogan from the 2016 campaign....

President Trump’s decision to shake up his National Security Council by removing a prominent military leader in favor of political adviser Steve Bannon is worrisome and a “radical departure,” Sen. John McCain said Sunday. Trump signed executive action Saturday adding Bannon, who headed the alt-right Breitbart web site before joining the campaign, to his core security council while removing the Director of National Intelligence and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs. “The appointment of Mr. Bannon is something which is a radical departure from any National Security Council in history,” McCain (R-Ariz.) told CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “The role...

HOUSTON — Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who in 2007 became the first Muslim member of Congress, said in an interview Saturday that opponents of President Trump’s executive orders on immigration and refugees should oppose them in the streets. “It’s time for people to get active, to get involved, to vote and to organize,” said Ellison, who was in Houston to campaign for chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “Trump must be stopped, and people power is what we have at our disposal to make him stop. We need mass rallies. We need them all over the country. We need them...

The American coastal elites are living in a different country than they thought and it has a powerful voice in the new president Donald Trump is an unlikely president. He is also an unlikely cultural warrior. That hasn’t stopped him from becoming both. Besides throwing American politics into a tumult that won’t end in the near future, President Trump has reoriented and reinvigorated the American culture war. He has wrenched it away from its decades-long focus on issues related to religion and sexual morality and created another axis around populism and nationalism. The issues involved in this new culture war...

“Retreat” is an appropriate description of what took place in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, this week. Senate Democrats took a break from not confirming President Trump’s cabinet to visit this historic city in a state the president won by 40 points. According to Politico the assembled were scheduled to hear from associates of the Clinton family and to “hold lessons on how to talk to real people.” Oh to be a fly on the wall. I like to imagine Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer nodding sagely as Joe Manchin, the only Democratic senator with a modicum of common sense, asks...

We're just a week into Donald Trump's presidency. But already, you can see how this brand of politics could wind up being a viable model for future Republican majorities — or a Pyrrhic victory for the GOP. Trumpism is potentially very popular. A Morning Consult poll taken after the president's inaugural address found voters responding favorably to his "America First" message (taken both literally and seriously, without the phrase's historical baggage). When Trump said, "From this moment on, it's going to be America first. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit...

Via the Daily Caller. “I am from Idaho,” she says late in the clip below. “We are so white!” I think that mostly explains this ostentatious journey into wokeness at last week’s DNC candidate forum. When you’re from a famously white state that routinely votes Republican and you’re auditioning to lead the Democratic Party, you’d better go the extra mile in reassuring the party’s minority voters that they can trust you. Remember, this is a woman who’s competing with a former Nation of Islam member for the job. There had better be some serious self-flagellation to impress the audience. Black...

Dark. Negative. Divisive. That's was the immediate narrative about President Donald Trump's inaugural address. But many Americans liked it. . . A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows that the new president’s message is resonating with voters, refuting the idea that Trump bungled his first speech as commander in chief. Trump got relatively high marks on his Friday address, with 49 percent of those who watched or heard about the speech saying it was excellent or good, and just 39 percent rating it as only fair or poor. Sixty-five percent of those surveyed reacted positively to the “America First” message, the...

If you turned on your television last night around 7:00 p.m., you might have skipped past Sports Center and Wolf Blitzer and whatever soft-core fantasy porno is on HBO and The Real Housewives of Mackinac County all the way to CSPAN3. If you did, you would have been treated to “a historic and important conversation about the future,” which is to say, a bunch of people you’ve probably never heard of standing on a nondescript stage talking about how they want to be in charge of fundraising and other boring tertiary tasks for the Democratic Party. Lucky you. Naturally to...

Listening to the drivebys, and even Rush and Hannity to some extent, tells me that Trump STILL is playing 3D chess while everyone else is watching a Parcheesi match. The latest is this "fight" over crowd size at the inauguration, or how many people watched it. First, this is unprovable, because no one knows how many people were viewing this on a non-TV screen--Facebook, a phone, iPads, etc. Any REASONABLE person would assume that with the 31 million confirmed watching on TV, and the million present at the event, at last 10 million more watched on alternative media, this was...

Protesters against Donald Trump’s inauguration are flooding to DC and putting forth their best effort to ensure that there will be a second Trump inauguration to protest four years from now. I’m not boasting or gloating about this outcome. I didn’t want there to be a first Trump inauguration, and I probably won’t be too happy about a second one, either. Yes, a lot can and will go wrong with the Trump administration over the next four years, so it’s impossible to predict the next election. But everything in the behavior of Trump’s opponents on the Left tells us they...

The eye of a storm is a calm place surrounded by turbulence. So is Donald Trump. Much of liberal America is in an absolute tizzy over his impending presidency, with denunciations and declarations of defiance competing for the most apocalyptic scenarios. Will the world end Friday or Saturday? The sturm und drang is not limited to the homefront. Europe is reeling from Trump’s salvo that Brexit is a “good thing” and NATO is “obsolete.” And China threatens to “take off the gloves” if Trump keeps flirting with Taiwan. But if the president-elect is rattled or even worried about the turmoil,...

President-elect Donald Trump is paying too much heed to the ranting of civil-rights veteran John Lewis: The Georgia congressman’s been playing the same tune about every top Republican for years now. Yes, Lewis’ accusation was baseless and blatantly partisan: He said Trump isn’t a “legitimate president” because of Russian hacking, and he’d skip the inauguration, “the first one I’ve missed since I’ve been in Congress.” Oops: He didn’t attend George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001, either — charging that Dubya wasn’t truly elected. Last year, Lewis said Trump “reminds me so much of the things that George Wallace said and...

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Geneva on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that he does not believe that president-elect Donald Trump will repeal everything he says he will when his administration comes into power on Friday, but if he does it could cause significant damage for "a year, two years, whatever, while the [Trump] administration is there."(continued)

BRUSSELS — European leaders said Monday that they may have to stand alone without the United States once Donald Trump enters office, raising the prospect of an unprecedented breach in transatlantic relations after Trump’s comments that the European Union is bound for a breakup and that NATO is obsolete. Trump said in a weekend interview with the Times of London and Germany’s Bild newspaper that the 28-nation European Union was a vehicle for German interests and said that he was indifferent to the bloc’s fate. He also said he was committed to European defense even as he expressed skepticism about...

LULA, Ga. — Patti Thomas owns a flower shop in the north Georgia town of Lula. Xavier Bryant runs an independent pharmacy just outside Atlanta. Looking toward the inauguration of an entrepreneur as president, the two share this expectation: Donald Trump will be good for business. "He's already proven he can turn things around," the 52-year-old Thomas said, crediting Trump with Ford Motor Co.'s recent announcement that it would scrap a planned Mexico plant while expanding in Michigan. "Just his business enthusiasm, we've been lacking that." "My intuition," the 33-year-old Bryant agrees, "is telling me that small business owners will...

Ted Cruz was once one of Donald Trump’s most vocal critics. Now he's one of the president-elect's most important Senate allies. Ted Cruz met with Donald Trump exactly one week after Election Day. As it turned out, Cruz’s tete-a-tete with the president-elect he had spurned from the stage of the Republican National Convention just months before wasn’t the most consequential meeting he would have that day. After his talk with Trump, the Texas senator and his chief of staff, David Polyansky, then sat down with his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, who sounded him out about his interest in filling the...