Free Republic

Donald Trump told a private gathering of donors last year that he once sought to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from attacking Ukraine by threatening to “bomb the sh*t out of Moscow” in retaliation, according to audio provided to CNN. “With Putin I said, ‘If you go into Ukraine, I’m going to bomb the sh*t out of Moscow. I’m telling you I have no choice,’” Trump said during one 2024 fundraiser, according to the audio. “And then [Putin] goes, like, ‘I don’t believe you.’ But he believed me 10%.” The remarks, which came as Trump made his case for a...

A tell-all describes how the war in Gaza loomed over the 2024 campaign and strained Biden’s reelection bidJosh Shapiro’s Judaism was not a factor in Kamala Harris passing him over as a running mate, according to a 2024 election tell-all, contradicting a narrative Republicans eagerly peddled. If anything, Harris rejected Shapiro because they had too much in common — both were former attorneys general who hoped to be president. That and poor chemistry knocked Shapiro out of the running, according to How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, by political reporters Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and...

Biden bombshell: Here’s one for the history books. This morning, Playbook readers can read the actual six-page memo that convinced President Joe Biden to push for an early debate with Donald Trump last June. And a quick trigger warning: Dems may prefer to read it through their fingers. With friends like these: In the ill-fated briefing document, dated April 15, 2024, Biden’s senior advisers told him not to wait for the autumn dates proposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates — the first of which, they noted, was scheduled after mail-in ballots would start going out — but instead to...

It's almost a year ago now, the Butler, Pennsylvania moment that changed history. You probably remember where you were when you heard the news—that then former president and candidate for president Donald Trump had been shot at a campaign rally. The nation had suffered trauma before; the killings of Abraham Lincoln and JFK wracked the country, and the near miss against Ronald Reagan reminded us of how tenuous our democracy can be. From that moment on, it seemed assured that he would become president again, and indeed he did. Now a new book is coming out detailing some of the...

They needed to get the president alone. On April 9, financial markets were going haywire. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wanted President Trump to put a pause on his aggressive global tariff plan. But there was a big obstacle: Peter Navarro, Trump’s tariff-loving trade adviser, who was constantly hovering around the Oval Office. Navarro isn’t one to back down during policy debates and had stridently urged Trump to keep tariffs in place, even as corporate chieftains and other advisers urged him to relent. And Navarro had been regularly around the Oval Office since Trump’s “Liberation Day”...

President Trump finally blinked. It took a week for the plunge in the stock and bond markets—along with a sustained campaign by executives, lawmakers, lobbyists and foreign leaders—to prompt Trump to roll back for 90 days a major element of his sweeping tariff plan. The president said that the reaction to the tariffs was getting a bit “yippy”—like a nervous athlete unable to perform—and he relied on his instincts to change course as he watched the bond market tank and listened to business leaders including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon express fears of a recession. The episode was classic Trump:...

Despite repeated messages of support by Trump, Waltz has lost sway with the president and the backing of senior aides within the White House, officials said, just as the administration struggles to broker peace deals and faces the threat of further war in the Middle East. For Trump, Waltz’s biggest sin wasn’t starting a Signal chat to coordinate strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, or even posting Israel-provided intelligence onto an unclassified network, it was having the Atlantic magazine’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s number in his phone and inadvertently adding him to the conversation. Trump’s anger spilled over into...

Soon after President Trump won the presidential election in November, British drugmaker GSK brought an unusual claim to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. A senior GSK scientist, who formerly worked at rival Pfizer, had told GSK colleagues that Pfizer delayed announcing the success of its Covid vaccine in 2020 until after that year’s election. The scientist disputes that account of what he told colleagues. But prosecutors are taking a closer look at what GSK shared with them, which is potentially politically explosive. Trump for years has claimed that Pfizer sat on the positive results...

President Trump’s stop-and-start trade policy and uneven economic messaging have rattled some of his own allies, triggering a flood of calls from business executives, concerns from Republican lawmakers and tension in the White House. Senior officials, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, have received panicked calls from chief executives and lobbyists, who have urged the administration to calm jittery markets by outlining a more predictable tariff agenda, according to people familiar with the discussions. Many in the business community have abandoned efforts to get the president to reverse course on trade, instead pleading with the White House for...

Layoffs are expected to rock The Washington Post this week, according to people familiar with the matter. The layoffs are slated to hit the Jeff Bezos-owned and Will Lewis-led newspaper's business division, I’m told. One person familiar with the matter said that the cuts will be deep, impacting many dozens of employees. The layoffs will surely deplete morale further inside the beleaguered newspaper, which has suffered a talent exodus over the last several weeks. As I reported earlier, star reporter Josh Dawsey will exit The Post for a job at The Wall Street Journal. His departure comes on the heels...

By Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker and Perry Stein November 22, 2024 at 5:43 p.m. EST The plans show how president-elect Donald Trump wants to use the Justice Department to address his own personal grievances President-elect Donald Trump plans to fire the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution, according to two individuals close to Trump’s transition. Trump is also planning to assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the...

A thousand miles from the austere buildings where Washington runs, Donald Trump’s transition team in his Mar-a-Lago resort has begun what a close ally calls a hostile takeover of the federal government.Since his victory, Trump has ignored many of the rules and practices intended to guide a seamless transfer of power and handover of the oversight of 2.2 million federal employees. Instead, the president-elect, who has pledged to fire thousands of civil servants and slash billions of dollars in spending, has so far almost fully cut out the government agencies his predecessors have relied on to take charge of the...

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement, though he maintained that their encounter was consensual, according to a statement from his lawyer Saturday and other documents obtained by The Washington Post. Hegseth’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, said that Hegseth was “visibly intoxicated” at the time of the incident, and maintained that police who were contacted a few days after the encounter by the woman concluded “the Complainant had been the aggressor in the encounter.” Police have not confirmed that assertion.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump expressed support for Israel’s offensives against Hamas and Hezbollah in a recent call with the country’s prime minister — a position that could complicate his campaign’s outreach to Arab Americans claiming he opposes the war. Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu in one call this month, “Do what you have to do,” according to six people familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive and confidential information. Trump has said publicly that the two have spoken at least twice in October, with one call as recently as Oct. 19. “He didn’t...

When clients tell Mercury Public Affairs, a consulting and lobbying shop with 18 offices worldwide, that they’re concerned about Donald Trump’s possible return to office, the firm has just the person to ease their nerves: Bryan Lanza. “He gives them assurances that there will be life after Nov. 5,” said one of the colleagues, referring to Election Day.Lanza declined to comment through a Mercury spokesman. A Trump spokesman did not respond to questions.Eight years after Trump entered politics promising to reduce the influence of Washington lobbyists — to “drain the swamp,” as he put it — advocates for corporate interests,...

Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations. In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his...

If you've read RedState for any length of time, you know one of the things we are most known for is our hard-hitting commentary on press bias. Whether you come for the facts or the snark, we do our best to deliver insight into how the far-left twists narratives to push their political desires. That's what makes this next story so surprising. According to Politico, Donald Trump's campaign team wined and dined with top left-wing reporters on Tuesday night in preparation for the GOP primary debate (the former president will not be attending). SPOTTED IN MILWAUKEE — Team Trump wining...

South Carolinians have been bombarded in recent weeks with massive door hangers from a political action committee affiliated with Florida governor Ron DeSantis. These missives encourage them to consider the second-term Sunshine State governor as an alternative to Donald Trump. A paid employee leaving these “door hangs” for the Never Back Down PAC wants a particular voter in Charleston, S.C. to consider something else that dangles, though. Specifically … his balls. “#### you, get off my ####### lawn,” the door-knocker is heard saying on a Ring door camera, mimicking a property owner in the area who apparently confronted him for...

Former president Trump’s campaign quietly commissioned a second firm to study election fraud claims in the weeks after the 2020 election, and the founder of the firm was recently questioned by the Justice Department about his work disproving the claims.Ken Block, founder of the firm Simpatico Software Systems, studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign in late 2020 and found they were “all false,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post.“No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside...

Former president Donald Trump, fighting criminal charges in New York and multiple other ongoing investigations by federal and local prosecutors, is pitching Republican elected officials to get behind him as the inevitable nominee — and many of them are buying it. Trump is finally seeing the response he was hoping for when he announced his candidacy almost six months ago, in a moment of political weakness, as many Republicans were openly blaming him for the party’s disappointing showing in the midterms. Now, Trump is reasserting his primacy in the GOP, capitalizing on his early polling lead and using his indictment...