Free Republic

Ukrainian leader met with Trump on Tuesday at the White House WASHINGTON—For more than a year, President Trump insisted in private conversations with advisers that Ukraine was losing the war.But in recent weeks, the president has expressed fresh optimism about Ukraine and its leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, according to people who have spoken to him. Trump, the people said, has been impressed with Zelensky’s resilience as he takes the fight deep into Russian territory.The shift comes after several meetings on the sidelines of global summits where the Ukrainian president has tried to charm Trump, the people said, part of a concerted...

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:...

It takes loyalty to rise in Donald Trump’s world. And on Saturday, July 13, Karoline Leavitt demonstrated it in uncommon fashion. As she tells it, Trump’s then-campaign spokeswoman had only just carried her 3-day-old baby boy home from the hospital when she switched on the television to watch her boss’s campaign rally in Butler, Pa. It turned out to be the fateful event at which a would-be assassin’s bullet clipped Trump’s ear. Almost immediately, according to Leavitt, she and her husband decided: She would scrap a planned maternity leave and go back to work, which she did four days later....

DURHAM, New Hampshire — First Donald Trump’s Republican critics banked on one of his opponents catching a spark in Iowa. Then they said New Hampshire was where they’d make their mark. Eventually, advisers to Trump’s rivals maintained, someone would emerge from the field of lower-polling candidates to get a clear shot at Trump. After the past week, that idea has never looked more out of reach. In Iowa, new polling shows Trump not only maintaining his enormous lead in the first caucus state, but expanding on it — stretching his support to 51 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers. And in...