Free Republic

Former Sen. Bob Dole on Saturday praised President Donald Trump's European trip, calling his speech in Poland "one for the ages" and saying that the nation "should be proud of the strong American leadership being restored by President Trump." "I want to congratulate President Trump and all Americans on the president's successful trip to Europe this week," Dole, 93, the five-term Kansas senator and former Republican presidential and vice presidential nominee, said in a statement released by the White House via Twitter.....

On the heels of Donald Trump's humiliating and ominous behavior before, during, and after his meeting with Vladimir Putin, Rep. Maxine Waters is calling out the GOP's lack of patriotism and refusal to repudiate Trump's embrace of the Russian strongman. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) has no time for the Republican Party’s hollow claims of patriotism — not when they can’t even bring themselves to denounce their ostensible leader’s deferential embrace of an adversarial country which attacked our very democracy. Donald Trump appeared to willingly placate and buckle under to Russian President Vladimir Putin, proving that Putin’s KGB-honed techniques of manipulation...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) on Saturday pushed back on President Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords, noting that some U.S. cities plan to honor the agreement despite Trump's decision. "American cities are signed on to the Paris Accords. We will do it ourselves," de Blasio said, according to a spokesman who was tweeting his speech at the “Hamburg Zeigt Haltung” rally. (TWEET-AT-LINK) De Blasio is in Germany for events surrounding the Group of 20 summit, where Trump and other world leaders have gathered to address topics including climate change. Every...

Without fanfare, Paul Ryan & Mitch McConnell must be immediately removed as leaders of the House and Senate. After eight years of assuring the American voters they would move immediately, and repeal "Obamacare", they have done no such thing!!! They let their members float around on congress recesses, instead of hard lining them to action without giving the any time off!!! They have no functional plan after all the time they have had to prepare for the abolishment of Obamacare....SAD!!! They do not support POTUS, Trump and are more akin to love the Democrat scum/vermin Establishment!! Republicans...broom them right now...

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, blasted President Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, saying Americans should be skeptical on how hard Trump pressed Putin on Russian meddling in the 2016 election. “The American people can be forgiven for a healthy skepticism about just how hard Mr. Trump could have pressed the Russian autocrat, given that the President publicly cast doubt on Russian responsibility and the probity of our intelligence agencies only the day before,” Schiff said in a statement. “Can we really expect the President to be more forthcoming with...

The governor of New York suddenly looks like the kind of take-no-prisoners pol his party needs. With one catch. NEW YORK — The scene is unfolding in the shabby headquarters of the Hotel Trades Council just off Times Square in the late spring of 2017, but it’s not hard to imagine the speech somewhere in the Rust Belt in 2020, with a Democratic nominee trying to reclaim the Upper Midwest for his party. “The truth is the middle class is under attack. The working families are under attack,” Andrew Cuomo bellows, his tough-guy accent coming in a little thick. “Middle-class...

In October 2016, concerned about progressive complacency toward the election just ahead, I tried to draw attention to the dire immediate consequences of a Donald Trump win combined with GOP success in hanging onto control of Congress. I pointed to Paul Ryan’s confident predictions that his own “Better Way” agenda could be smoothly enacted via the un-filibusterable budget-reconciliation process, which he called the “bazooka in my pocket.” On Election Night I warned that big scary changes for the country might be swiftly on the way thanks to the GOP trifecta victory and the Republicans’ power to impose their will no...

No, silly. Leftists don’t want $32 trillion in new taxes. They want around $15 trillion in new taxes over the next decade plus a cool $32 trillion or so in new debt to pay for single-payer, at least if Bernie Sanders’s platform last year is the template. CNN asks upstart Ryan opponent Randy Bryce about that here. You’re a single-payer proponent, they say. What do you think of $32 trillion to socialize medicine? Bryce: Well, ah, a lot of people aren’t paying their fair share of taxes, you know. That’s a sentiment a lot of Americans, including Steve Bannon, share....

Leftists are such drama queens. The fakeness in which they cry over, CNN, Mika Brzezinski, Mika Scarborough, or whatever her latest iteration may be, is laughable. The left, like CNN and Mika, spends their lives trying to destroy people, especially conservatives. They use the media, primarily through the track of political correctness in order to shame decent people into silence. And the left is trying to destroy this Republican president, as they have tried all Republican presidents since Nixon. Like Nixon, Trump is not as conservative as many think but the left wants to destroy him anyway because they are...

ON ONE WALL of Stephen Bannon’s office in the West Wing of the White House is a large whiteboard with a list of promises the president made on the campaign trail. Most of them fit the nationalist, nativist, populist programme that Mr Bannon has done more than anyone apart from the president himself to shape, but perhaps not all: one commitment is to build a safe zone for Syrian refugees. The president’s chief strategist is a revolutionary in a Ferragamo tie, an alumnus of Georgetown, Harvard and Goldman Sachs who rails against the establishment. He talks about building an alliance...

Democratic Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut appeared on CNN's 'New Day' Monday morning and weighed in on President Trump's anti-media message. "Pretty much every president before this one has understood that the media is absolutely essential to our liberty...Dictators attack the media," Himes said. His comments come one day after Trump shared a wrestling video in which he battles an opponent whose head has been digitally replaced with a CNN logo. After forcing the CNN wrestler to the mat, Trump throws a couple of punches at his head.....

Emily Ekins pushes back against the idea of one type of Trump voter. Her research for the Voter Study Group reveals the coalition that delivered President Trump the White House. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: There are lingering questions about what motivated voters on both sides of the ideological divide in the 2016 election. A new trove of polling data from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group has some answers which might challenge conventional wisdom. What's key about the study is that it goes all the way back to 2011. A group of 20 analysts from across the ideological spectrum have drawn...

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Republican divisions have been front and center in the debate over the party's health care legislation. But the Democrats are not without their own problems. The party has lost a string of special elections many Democrats had hoped that the party could win. And since the 2016 election, there have been bitter debates about what the party should prioritize as it opposes a Republican agenda and looks ahead to the midterms. We reached out to a group of Democratic voters to get their thoughts. Akhurapa Ambak is a law student and joins us from New York City....

Those of you familiar with my columns know that for some time I have argued that Trump’s tweets are anything but “childish reactions” or “temper tantrums” or any other nonsense. They have been 100% strategic, deliberate, and focused, designed to provide the fake news media with a topic of conversation for a news cycle—or often two or three—while the administration methodically dismantles Barack Obama’s regulative state and erases his very existence from the historical record. Further, I have argued that the nature of the tweets, or the topic, is completely irrelevant and in some cases non-existent (“covfefe”). The point is...

Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Scott Walker encouraged President Trump to “tweet more” on Friday, in stark contrast to recent Republican backlash over some of Trump’s more incendiary tweets. “Unlike others, I’d tell him to tweet more, to be on Facebook more, to get the message out more, but to be focused,” Walker told FOX’s Julie Banderas. He praised the president’s direct connection on social media with “all these great Americans.” “Tweet more, I’m fine with but don’t get off in the weeds on other issues,” the 2016 presidential candidate said. If the president focuses on the issues he was elected by...

An amendment is under consideration that maybe, just maybe, could unlock the whole Senate Republican health bill. It might knock over the dominoes necessary for a deal, starting with regulations, moving to tax subsidies, and ending up with more cash for Medicaid and fewer tax cuts for the rich. It comes with big long-term risks for Americans who have high medical costs — and it could ultimately shift the burden of covering the uninsured further way from middle-class Americans who already have insurance, and more onto predominantly wealthy taxpayers. Its author? Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Senate conservatives have been...

Besides the fact that Republicans historically have been more reliable midterm voters, Democrats may have another problem in 2018: Trump isn't the disaster for his party that so many had assumed. An L.A. Times front-pager by Cathleen Decker points to Dems' string of special-election losses this year: "Trump is so distinctive a politician that it's hard to persuade voters that other Republican candidates are carbon copies of the president. Trump's outsized persona makes even those Republicans who share his views seem more moderate, an important attribute to swing voters." Why it matters: "[V]oters' complicated views of Trump may give Republicans...

Democrats lost a special election for a congressional seat they have not held in decades, so some are calling for the head of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. Huh? Dumping Pelosi, who has devoted her professional life to Democratic values, would be like throwing the captain of your ship overboard when the sharks are circling. It only draws more sharks, but leaves you leaderless. The "Dump Pelosi" movement shines a light on some of the unloveliest instincts of some Democrats: self-loathing, scapegoating and a desire for quick fixes, rather than hard work. Sure, Pelosi is unpopular, but compared to what?...

Democrats continued their 2017 run of being unable to win special elections in strongly Republican districts on Tuesday. These results have led people to ask what the Democratic Party must change if it is to take back Congress (and eventually the White House). I have what may be the most cynical answer, but one that is unavoidable: What the Democrats need is better marketing. That's really about it. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that as a general principle Democrats should stop worrying about policy. I care a lot about policy, which is why I write a lot about...

Having lost a series of tantalizingly close congressional elections, the Democratic Party has now placed the fate of its collective psyche in the hands of an unassuming, soft-spoken pediatric neurologist. Virginia Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam says he feels no enhanced pressure to win his gubernatorial race this fall, even though his will be most high-profile contest since Democrats lost the much-watched special election in Georgia’s 6th District. “You always feel pressure,” he told HuffPost in an interview. “If you’re not feeling pressure then you’re not out there to win. And we plan to win in November.” But while Northam may...