Free Republic

Donald Trump and JD Vance are lying about the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene. “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan last week, telling his audience that the agency responsible for disaster response had abandoned victims of the hurricane. “They promised $750 to American citizens who have lost everything,” Vance said at a rally in Butler, Pa., over the weekend, suggesting that the government had given only a pittance to those affected by the hurricane. In truth, the $750 was an upfront payment to help...

The classic example of chutzpah is that of the child who murders his parents and then pleads for mercy as an orphan. With the 2024 presidential election, we have a new way to illustrate the point: the candidate who condones violence, dehumanizes his opponents and whips his supporters into a frenzy, then turns around to condemn the harsh rhetoric of his opponents and call for peaceful discourse. Following the second attempt on his life in as many months, Trump blamed Democrats for casting him as an existential threat to American democracy. “Look,” his running mate JD Vance said on Monday,...

Donald Trump is stuck. He is a brutally transactional politician who represents a coalition of ideologues. His instinct is to promise the moon, and he’ll say anything to get a vote — or just to get out of a room. He also knows, however, that he has no choice but to dance with the date that brought him. He can’t abandon the groups, interested parties and constituencies that put him in the White House to execute their agenda — to exercise their will. The problem comes when most voters don’t want what your partners hope to do with the power...

In 2016, Democrats taunted Donald Trump as “dangerous Donald.” In 2020, they moved on from dangerous to say that Trump’s Republican Party was a threat to the “soul of America.” Both messages — one relatively successful, one much less so — emphasized the threat that Trump posed to America and the world.This year, as it mounts its third national campaign against Trump and his MAGA acolytes, the Democratic Party has abandoned the language of peril and danger in favor of something that is a little less heated.Trump and JD Vance, Kamala Harris and her allies say, are “weird.”It started with...

For years, before he won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Donald Trump was something like the spiritual leader of the Republican Party’s right-wing base. He earned his place in the hearts and minds of conservative voters by doing what most Republican politicians at the time refused to do: He attacked Barack Obama as a foreign interloper and openly questioned his right to serve as president of the United States.Birtherism made Trump a celebrity on the right. It made him a force to reckon with in the Republican Party. It made him so popular with Republican voters that, while fighting...

It is just my luck that the week I was on vacation also happened to be one of the most consequential weeks in recent American political history. In addition to the attempt on Donald Trump’s life and the subsequent Republican National Convention, there was also President Biden’s decision to stand down from the presidential race and hand the baton to his vice president, Kamala Harris.I have a lot of thoughts about all this, but for now I want to talk about one of the minor characters in this saga — JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president.That Vance, more...

The Supreme Court is caught in a crisis of its own making.There is the gross corruption of Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, who have received millions of dollars in gifts and benefits from various billionaire benefactors.There is the court’s open assault on the basic rights of tens of millions of Americans, exemplified in its decision to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion on the basis of a vague and inconsistent standard of “text, history and tradition.”And there is the hubris of Chief Justice Roberts, who, the legal scholar Eric J. Segall writes, has “led the court to...

Do a search for “Larry Elder” and gorilla on the CNN website and nothing comes up. Washington Post? Zilch. Nothing comes up on The New York Times site either, although if you make it to the 15th paragraph of a story titled “The Vice President pushed back against the effort to recall Newsom in the Bay Area,” you will find a bland passing reference to Wednesday’s disgusting incident. According to our nation’s media leaders, it’s not a story that a white person wearing a gorilla mask attacked Larry Elder, a black man seeking to become the first non-white governor of...

President Biden’s job approval rating is on the downslope. As of Friday morning he was at 45.8 percent approval and 48.5 percent disapproval — from a high of 54 percent approval, 41 percent disapproval at the end of his first 100 days. There is a laundry list of reasons for this. Not only is the United States still in the grip of a pandemic, but also the Delta variant of the coronavirus has led to record infections and deaths in Florida, Texas and other states with relatively low vaccination rates (and where officials have taken a stand against mitigation efforts)....

It’s still well under the radar, but the movement to circumvent the Electoral College gained ground this week. On Sunday, Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, said he would sign a bill to join the National Popular Vote interstate compact, whose members have pledged to give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The Maine Legislature, likewise, is mulling membership and will hold hearings to discuss the issue. Attacking those lawmakers, Paul LePage, the former governor of Maine — who still calls into conservative radio shows from his retirement home in Florida — dismissed the proposal...

In America today there is nothing worse than being called a racist. You can’t easily defend yourself against the life-changing, sometimes career-ending smear which evildoers can wield with impunity. “There is nothing worse for your career,”  New York State Assemblyman Kieran Lalor (R), said on Fox and Friends, “there’s nothing worse for you as a person. A lot ofpeople don’t want to speak up because they’re going to be accused of being a racist.” Yet outrageous, even genocidal, statements are issued every day now by hate-filled black supremacists and their radical allies. In a case of deviancy having been...

Donald Trump ran a campaign of racist demagoguery against Muslim Americans, Hispanic immigrants, and black protesters. He indulged the worst instincts of the American psyche and winked to the stream of white nationalists and anti-Semites who backed his bid for the White House. Millions of Americans voted for this campaign, thus elevating white nationalism and white reaction to the Oval Office.

But Trump’s relative weakness doesn’t mean he’s vulnerable. While Trump isn’t as strong as previous front-runners, his coalition has a similar shape. Take Virginia, a varied state where Trump won with 34.7 percent of the vote. The Washington D.C. suburbs aside, Trump won every region of the state, from exurban Northern Virginia and the central region of the state, to the vote-rich, eastern Tidewater and the Richmond metropolitan area. More important than that, however, is the ideological and socio-economic shape of his coalition. Trump won “very conservative” and “somewhat conservative” voters in Virginia, and placed second with self-described Republican moderates....

Trump was winning handily with more than 45 percent of the vote and nearly 90 percent of the results counted, to about 23 percent for Rubio and about 22 percent for Cruz. Trump won with every demographic, exceeding Cruz with evangelicals and beating Rubio with more moderate Republicans. It was a complete rout, and once again, Trump showed he was the only candidate with a coalition that can carry him through the entire primary, bringing working-class whites together with conservative evangelicals and Republican moderates. Indeed, Trump is poised to dominate in next week’s Super Tuesday primaries, where he leads in...

The largest obstacle, the force that’s dominated the race for months, stretching back to last summer, is Donald Trump. If we’re judging by votes and victories, Trump is the front-runner for the nomination. He holds the most wins (New Hampshire, South Carolina, and probably Nevada), he holds the most delegates, and he has the broadest coalition. As the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein shows in his analysis of the vote in South Carolina, Trump won 33 percent of independents and 32 percent of self-identified Republicans. He carried 33 percent of evangelicals and 42 percent of voters without a college degree. The same...

MARK HALPERIN: The establishment wing of the party is going to have to settle on one or two people by March 1st. And I think today, if you look at, again, the four people the establishment talk about, leave Governor Christie aside, Kasich, Bush, Walker, Rubio. JOHN DICKERSON, FACE THE NATION: How -- HALPERIN: Even Trump hasn't gone after him yet. NOONAN: True. True. JAMELLE BOUIE: -- I think there's a sweet spot for Republican presidential candidates and it's basically, I want to cut your taxes, I don't want to stick it to anyone. And I think Kasich hits that...

The wealthiest Americans don’t care about inequality, and our presidential candidates are following their lead. That’s not to say they aren’t talking about inequality. They are, for anyone who will listen. As Noam Scheiber notes for the New York Times, Sens. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio broached the issue in January, while Hillary Clinton discussed it at the Center for American Progress last week. But none of them have ideas for tackling the problem. Neither Cruz nor Paul nor Rubio was willing to say “the government should intervene to solve it,” while Clinton would rather retreat to platitudes—“We...

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of this Slate article, “Divide and Conquer,” by Jamelle Bouie. He has done the GOP a favor by revealing the Democratic party’s strategic plan for defeating Scott Walker in 2016: smearing him as a “divisive” candidate who will send dog whistles to his white supporters and seek to run the table with the still-majority white voters to win the White House. This article is the 2015 equivalent to the Zimmerman Telegram, and the GOP deserves to lose the White House if it ignores it. Governor Walker and the RNC will repeat Mitt Romney’s fatal...

Some people see a racist inside every head that formerly wore a mullet. Is it “racially polarizing” to publicly applaud people who achieve the American Dream? If you’re a liberal critic of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s recent Iowa Freedom Summit speech, the answer might be yes. On Wednesday, Slate writer Jamelle Bouie published “Divide and Conquer,” a guide to “Scott Walker’s divisive message for winning the White House.” If any candidate could “run a rigid campaign of polarization—aimed at winning as many white voters as possible,” Bouie writes, “it’s Walker. His language is already there. In his Iowa speech, he...

Michael Brown: typical teenager who died tragically, or dangerous thug who invited trouble?Did you know Michael Brown was a killer? Did you know he was a devoted gang member with an extensive juvenile record who routinely robbed convenience stores and committed acts of mayhem? And did you know that when Officer Darren Wilson shot Brown, he wasn’t using unjustified force, he was defending his life? The 6-foot-4, 300-pound 18-year-old fractured Wilson’s eye socket while reaching for his gun, and was killed while charging at Wilson to land another blow. If this sounds suspect—if it sounds almost unbelievable—then your head is...