Free Republic

With the end of their convention, the Republican Party and Donald Trump have reached what in military theory is called the “culminating point.” “The culminating point of victory,” according to the Modern War Institute at West Point, “is the threshold when military advantages peak and then rapidly turn into disadvantages.” As an infantryman, I was taught that the culminating point is a paradox; it’s a moment of maximum vulnerability at a time when you believe you are at maximum strength. Let’s say your platoon has just taken a hill. Exhausted and jubilant, you’ve achieved your objective. Your troops have sent...

WASHINGTON — Kamala Harris had one great day in her ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign: her first. Then came a rapid collapse. The freshman senator who announced her candidacy in January 2019 before 20,000 cheering supporters in Oakland, Calif. dropped out in December before a single vote had been cast. Now, Harris may get another shot. As the sitting vice president, she would be a leading candidate to succeed Biden if he succumbs to party pressure and exits the race. Other elected officials might step forward to challenge Harris, dividing Democrats and clouding the general election picture ahead of a November...

Following the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump, unity was expected to be the hallmark of the Republican National Convention for the presidential candidate. "I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America," Trump said. But the message of unity rings hollow for some in the LGBTQ community, who say they have repeatedly been the target of Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee, and others on the national stage. "It can be difficult to stay hopeful when anti-LGBTQ sentiment comes...

[snip] To be fair, some people who watched the speech thought that the first 10 minutes or so, in which Trump recounted being injured, were good, even thoughtful. I thought they were terrible; although Trump and his people have emphasized Trump’s defiance in the moment after he was hurt, his blow-by-blow account of the incident came across to me as creepy and solipsistic rather than brave. Contrast that with Ronald Reagan, the previous president injured in an attempt on his life. Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post reminded us today that Reagan appeared before Congress a month after he was...

…But as the 2024 Republican National Convention in the garrison state of downtown Milwaukee winds down, a more definitive transformation of the Trumpist creed is under way, chiefly in the selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate. Trump’s own listless, meandering, and astoundingly long acceptance speech on the convention’s last night only made it all the more clear that the MAGA torch is being passed to a more focused and clear-eyed generation of ideologues, with Vance as their de facto leader. But the party’s fulsome embrace of a blood-and-soil brand of economic nationalism, as epitomized by Vance’s...

Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party shows itself in the platform priorities approved here at the convention and the people who are now influencing the Illinois Republican Party. With all the hoopla from inside the convention hall at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, it’s easy to miss the people left outside of the arena and the party. Among them: Adam Kinzinger, who was once viewed as the future of the GOP. He was a fresh-faced military vet who, as a congressman, voted with Trump more than 90 percent of the time. But then he committed the Cardinal Sin of today’s GOP:...

Donald Trump isn’t normally thought of as a consensus-builder, but in one sense that’s exactly what he is. Many of Trump’s most ardent fans and foes alike believe he is the leader of a political movement with a clear and defined set of principles and goals. They disagree only on whether that agenda is good or bad.The tendency to cast Trump as a tool of the ideological right serves the purposes of both sides. The right needs to believe Trump is a warrior for its causes to justify its support for him, and the left wants to believe the same...

The selection of J.D. Vance on Monday as Donald Trump’s running mate is a direct result of the political media’s failure to understand class in America. For his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was venerated by many journalists and book critics as a powerful voice representing long-overlooked Americans. But he’s no working-class hero.Vance portrayed this group — 35% of Americans, by the way — as tragic victims of alcoholism, drug abuse, laziness and their own self-destructive moral failings. Journalists ran with that, bringing their own stereotypes to depict the working class as angry, uneducated white men driven by economic insecurity...

HOLY MOLY! Donald Trump Jr. just told the MSNBC reporter to get lost after he started lying about Trump as usual "GET OUT OF HERE" 55 seconds https://x.com/BehizyTweets/status/1812932339108094236

It remains to be seen whether or not President Biden remains the Democrats’ nominee for president, amid growing calls to replace him atop the ticket. But at this moment, the race is frozen in place. Indeed, Donald Trump’s lead in national polling — now sitting at 3 points (47 percent to 44 percent) per the RealClearPolitics polling average — has remained remarkably consistent for months. This is true even after Biden’s disastrous debate performance and the discontent it engendered among Democrats. Since last November, the race has been stubbornly rangebound, with Trump’s lead over Biden consistently within a 1 to...

New York CNN — Moments after Donald Trump was rushed to safety following a failed assassination attempt at a Saturday night rally, some of his supporters turned toward the press pen with obscenities as they fingered reporters for blame.“This is your fault!” one attendee emphatically yelled, pointing at individual journalists as he approached the fence line separating them from attendees. “This is your fault!”“It is your fault!” exclaimed another.Axios reporter Sophia Cai, who quoted some in the crowd warning the press, “you’re next” and that their “time is coming,” even reported that a few rally goers tried to breach the...

Robbins condemned people with a "deranged mindset" speculating that his political drama 'Bob Roberts' is any way linked to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.Tim Robbins is strongly condemning conspiracy theorists attempting to link his 1992 political drama Bob Roberts to the assassination attempt of Donald Trump. Robbins wrote, directed and starred in the film, which chronicles the rise of a populist conservative politician running for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania. In the film, the fictional Roberts stages being shot by an assassin, and surviving, in order to boost public support and win the election. Some on X have...

On Sunday, “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil reported from the site of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and said that 2024 Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump’s slogan that people aren’t after him, but are after his supporters and he’s in the way is “the kind of rhetoric we’re all going to be analyzing in the days ahead about how we got here and how those words now hit differently this morning.” CBS News Chief Political Analyst and Senior National Correspondent John Dickerson asked, “Did anybody say, we’ve got to reach out a hand, or was there a...

Donald Trump will arrive at the 2024 Republican convention — his Republican convention, finally and completely, without the dissent of 2016 or the pandemic that overshadowed 2020 — closer than ever to a second term. But the likelihood of a Trump restoration has not yet brought clarity about what it would actually usher in.With Trump there is always the whipsaw, the forays toward normalcy and the reversion to a darker mean. Asked on the debate stage whether he would spend a second term seeking revenge on his political enemies, he promised that “my retribution is going to be success. We’re...

On Friday’s edition of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) suggested that 2024 Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is engaging in some sort of deal like “what happened to Jimmy Carter when Reagan and his troops cut a deal with the Iran[ian] ayatollah and leaving Jimmy Carter to hang out there.” Garamendi said, “If there’s going to be a cognitive test, let’s not have a kindergarten cognitive test, which is what Trump continually talks about. If there’s going to be a cognitive test, yes, both should. But I would like to see Donald Trump stand in...

Something amazing has happened in the 10 days since [the] debate: Biden has come in for the kind of coordinated onslaught from the mainstream media and Democratic power brokers that is usually reserved for Republicans. [snip] The American people have since been treated to a deluge of negative Biden coverage: not just of the president’s cognitive impairments, but also the Shakespearean power struggles in his inner orbit and his White House’s breaking of norms by feeding journalists questions ahead of interviews. You could say Biden is getting the Trump treatment. [snip] The same Democratic elites who, in the name of...

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell thinks he has a solution to Joe Biden’s debate problems. Just allow Biden’s staff to be on stage with him during the debates. To be clear, O’Donnell suggests that this is something that all candidates should do, even Trump, presumably. But we all know that O’Donnell is only saying this now because he thinks that Biden is the one who needs the help of other people to get through a debate. It’s amazing that this is the sort of analysis that MSNBC viewers get on a regular basis. Transcript via Real Clear Politics: LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Allow...

As the belief that Joe Biden is fully equipped to be president dissolves like mist on a Delaware morning, some of his defenders have fallen back on the idea that the American presidency is not really a man but a team. “I would take Joe Biden on his worst day at age 86 — so long as he has people around him like Avril Haines, Samantha Power, Gina Raimondo supporting him — over Donald Trump any day,” a former homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, said on MSNBC a few days ago. Don’t think of this as the Biden presidency, in...

It's been a week since President Biden's disastrous debate performance, and his political fortunes only appear to be growing worse by the day. Now it all boils down to two questions: Will Biden drop out of the race? And who is in the top position to replace him? The answer to that the second question should be a no brainer — the vice president, of course. I honestly don't know if Harris can win in November, or if she truly is the best candidate to steer this country away from what appears to be certain ruin if Trump wins. What...

One of America’s political parties has a presidential candidate who is really old and showing it. The other has a presidential candidate who is a convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, business fraudster and self-described aspiring dictator for a day. And also really old.One of the parties is up in arms about its nominee and trying to figure out how to replace him at the last minute. The other is not.The spectacle of the week since the nationally televised debate between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump has thrown into sharp relief two political parties that agreed to be...