Free Republic

JD Vance remains the Republican Party's clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2028. A new Daily Mail/JL Partners poll shows Vance holding a strong lead over every other potential contender, cementing his status as the candidate to beat as the GOP begins looking ahead to the next presidential race that will kick off shortly after the midterms. Vance stands at 48 percent among Republican primary voters, down three points, but remains far ahead of his closest rival, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has climbed three points to 18 percent. Rubio has said publicly he would not challenge Vance...

"No. 1 has been tried for the past 5 months with no effect. No. 1 has been tried since 2018 with no effect. No. 3 can't be done because Israel is against it, so everyone will blame Vance and call him an antisemite."

Vice President JD Vance and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine both raised concerns about escalating the war in Iran as President Donald Trump weighed the possibility during a White House meeting on Friday, a source familiar with the matter and a US official told CNN. On Friday night, the US appeared to pause its bombing campaign on Iran after nearly two weeks of consecutive nights of strikes. Operations are “on a hold,” a Department of Defense source told CNN on Saturday. On Friday, Caine specifically raised concerns about the US munitions stockpile and other potential...

It’s no secret that JD Vance has lost the confidence of many Jewish Republicans, who have taken issue with the vice president’s reprimanding of Israeli officials, indulgence of anti-Israel conspiracy theories and silence on Tucker Carlson, the prominent pundit who has turned against Israel. But Vance is still thought by many to be US President Donald Trump’s likeliest successor at the top of the party’s ticket in 2028, leaving the GOP’s Jewish supporters with the question of whom to back when Trump’s second term ends. “The overwhelming majority of American Jewish MAGA voters, donors, and policymakers are enthusiastically supporting a...

Is VP Vance the front man in a coup d’état? Once upon a time––in 2017, according to VP JD Vance––a state senator from Ohio met an already-arrived conservative commentator and they had what is commonly known as chemistry. They connected. They liked each other. They agreed about major issues, except for one. The state senator––that would be Mr. Vance––loathed President Trump and spared no invective to describe him as “America’s Hitler” and “Unfit for our nation’s highest office,” and “Trump is cultural heroin,” and "I'm a Never Trump guy…" But the conservative commentator––that would be Tucker Carlson––touted POTUS 45 relentlessly...

His online minions attack me fiercely over last week’s column. They should hear what my kids call me. Over many years of writing pieces critical of politicians, my Republican targets mostly took the beatings like men, many going so far as to acknowledge—if only in confidence—that they probably deserved it. Not so Vice President JD Vance, and his dreary band of online enforcers. This egotism—or rather, insecurity—is worth analyzing. This column reported last week on the bitterness Mr. Vance’s congressional colleagues are feeling over his continual absence. In recent administrations, governing majorities have come to rely on the vice president—who...

Vice President JD Vance spoke to podcaster Joe Rogan on Wednesday about how California has declined under Gov. Gavin Newsom to the point that it gave him flashbacks to visiting a "third-world country." Vance recalled driving through a rough neighborhood in Los Angeles on his way to an elite Christmas party and was struck by the contrast between the two settings. "And I realized when I was there, you know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of going to the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti," he said, as Rogan chuckled. "Like super security, crazy wealth and privilege and...

Vice President JD Vance ruled out on Wednesday the possibility of the United States conducting a ground invasion of Iran as hostilities with the Middle Eastern country resume.The vice president said that if there is going to be regime change in Iran, then it would have to come from the Iranian people and not outside forces like the United States. “If the Iranian people want to rise up and change their government, that’s up to them,” Vance said during an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “But we’re not going to send 150,000 ground troops in order to accomplish a...

A leftist Democrat sparked fierce backlash after he appeared to insist that Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s views on Cuba carried less weight because he has not visited the island. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., made the striking claim during a heated exchange with U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz on Wednesday at a committee hearing. Pocan, who has compared Cuba to a "silent Gaza," visited the communist island earlier in July, where he called for the U.S. to relent on its pressure campaign against the Cuban government, blaming U.S. sanctions for the island's economic devastation and fuel shortages....

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department released a sweeping 99-page report on Monday portraying communist Cuba as the Western Hemisphere’s foremost engine of Marxist subversion, arguing that the island nation has spent decades cultivating revolutionary movements inside the United States and across the globe. The report, released alongside a statement from the State Department, casts the Castro regime not simply as a geopolitical adversary, but as the ideological nucleus of what it describes as the modern radical Left. “For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the...

Karl Marx's economics, and it concedes valuable ideological ground to the left every time it's repeated. It's a line some conservatives still reach for, almost reflexively. It's time that changed, because even the claim that communism works in theory is plainly false. In a speech Thursday announcing a global crackdown on left-wing terrorism, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made exactly that argument: communism does not even work in theory. Socialism and communism, by their very nature, require the centralization of power, the destruction of the individual, and the abolition of private property, the very institution that has been instrumental to...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday announced the imposition of visa restrictions in a bid to target violent, far-left terrorist groups. The announcement coincided with an international summit in which Rubio met with representatives of dozens of nations and warned of growing far-left extremism. He further invoked international coalitions to stop the Islamic State as a model for them to emulate. "Today, in support of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 and ongoing U.S. Government efforts to disrupt networks fomenting political violence before they escalate to criminal action, the Department of State is announcing a new visa restriction policy that targets...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is will meet with delegations from scores of countries this week for a summit focused on the neglected threat posed by “the resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism.” ABC News reports that a note shared with foreign governments describes the concept of the meeting as addressing a threat that “has remained a blind spot in the international community’s counterterrorism focus, underestimated and under-resourced, despite the danger it poses.” State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott told Newsmax that the Trump administration is taking seriously the gaps that have persisted for decades in counterterrorism strategy. The conference seeks to...

The man who tried to put Benjamin Netanyahu in handcuffs for defending his people just lost his own job over allegations of non-consensual sex with a junior staffer. Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, was removed Friday by a vote of the court’s member states. Eighty-two of 125 nations decided he had to go. It is the first time in the ICC’s history that a sitting chief prosecutor has been tossed out.

UNITED NATIONS — The International Criminal Court voted to remove the global tribunal's chief prosecutor on Friday, nearly two years after sexual misconduct allegations against him first emerged, the court's oversight body announced.

Amid allegations of misconduct, 82 ICC member states vote to remove chief prosecutor Karim Khan, who issued arrest warrant against Netanyahu. Danon and Sa’ar welcome the move.

"Independence is our birthright. We don’t intend to trade it for rule by a self-appointed priesthood of 'international law.'" — Marco Rubio The International Criminal Court (ICC) is going down. At least, it is if Secretary of State Marco Rubio has anything to do with it. "Most of us would struggle to imagine a world in which U.S. soldiers, police officers, Border Patrol agents, and elected leaders could be dragged before an international court, tried by judges from random countries across the globe, found guilty under international laws we neither consent to nor control, and then imprisoned thousands of miles...

America never agreed to a world tribunal that can override our own courts and the Constitution. Most of us would struggle to imagine a world in which U.S. soldiers, police officers, Border Patrol agents and elected leaders could be dragged before an international court, tried by judges from random countries across the globe, found guilty under international laws we neither consent to nor control, and then imprisoned thousands of miles from America. But that is what the International Criminal Court now claims the power to do. The ICC was born at the turn of the century. At first, it was...

Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, launched a campaign to dismantle the International criminal court (ICC) on Monday, claiming that the global tribunal was interfering with US military and law enforcement operations at the risk of American sovereignty. Rubio invoked images of US Border Patrol agents and elected leaders being “dragged before an international court” and tried by judges from around the world in a lengthy op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal Monday. “If we stand idle, all of them will be at the mercy of foreign judges, thousands of miles away – facing the constant risk of...

In 2006, Tue Lue Vang was convicted for repeatedly raping a 10-year-old girl over a two-year period. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was set to deport him to Laos when Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn) decided to pardon him, hoping this would allow Vang to stay in the US. Walz explained "where Mr Vang grew up it was customary for older men to marry and have sex with girls as young as 12. Admittedly, the girl he had sex with was under this age, but a mere two-year discrepancy isn't enough to justify expelling him from the country. He hasn't...