Free Republic

The Trump administration threatened on Thursday to withhold federal funding from public schools unless state education officials verified the elimination of all programs that it said unfairly promoted diversity, equity and inclusion.In a memo sent to top public education officials across the country, the Education Department said that funding for schools with high percentages of low-income students, known as Title I funding, was at risk pending compliance with the administration’s directive.The memo included a certification letter that state and local school officials must sign and return to the department within 10 days, even as the administration has struggled to define...

President Trump’s fixation reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, and created a powerful point of unity between the factions of his party.Two months after the Education Department officially opened its doors in 1980, Republicans approved a policy platform calling on Congress to shut it down. Now, more than four decades later, President Trump may come closer than any other Republican president to making that dream a reality. Though doing away with the agency would require an act of Congress, Mr. Trump has devoted himself to the goal, and is said to be preparing an...

Voters in liberal strongholds across the country, from city centers to suburban stretches, failed to show up to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris at the levels they had for Joseph R. Biden Jr. four years earlier, contributing significantly to her defeat by Donald J. Trump, according to a New York Times analysis of preliminary election data. The numbers help fill in the picture of Mr. Trump’s commanding victory, showing it may not represent the resounding endorsement of his agenda that the final Electoral College vote suggests. Mr. Trump won the White House not only because he turned out his...

One of the truisms of Trump World is that being viewed as boring is a sin more deadly than being wrong. On the campaign trail, former President Donald J. Trump often takes that to mean he must go off-script and veer off message. His critics say such detours are a troubling sign of his incoherence and raise questions about his age and cognitive health. Many of his supporters and allies see his circular way of speaking, which he calls “the weave,” as entertaining and not alarming. The partisan debate over the implications of Mr. Trump’s meandering speech has only intensified...

Heading into the final three weeks of the 2024 election, Senator JD Vance of Ohio will still not say whether his running mate won or lost the last race for the White House.In an interview with The New York Times that will be published on Saturday, Mr. Vance repeatedly refused to acknowledge former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat and went to even greater lengths to avoid doing so than he did during the vice-presidential debate earlier this month.When asked about the previous election during an hourlong interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a host of “The Interview,” a Times podcast published each...

Donald J. Trump appears to be giving more weight to political calculations in selecting a running mate, by picking someone who “helps you get elected.”For much of the past year, Donald J. Trump has described his perfect running mate as someone who could easily take over as commander in chief if needed and help him draw a contrast to President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.“It’s got to be somebody that can be a good president, which Biden doesn’t have,” Mr. Trump said in April during an interview with Hugh Hewitt, a conservative political commentator.But now, as the curtain closes...

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida prizes preparation and the way it allows him to control his political narrative. But suddenly, he was on the verge of going off message. He had traveled to a Central Florida warehouse this past week to promote a $2 billion tax cut proposal when he was confronted with the inevitable: an especially ugly attack from former President Donald J. Trump that seemed to warrant a strong response. Mr. Trump had insinuated on social media that Mr. DeSantis behaved inappropriately with high school girls while he was a teacher in his early 20s. As a reporter...

As Donald J. Trump weighs whether to open an unusually early White House campaign, a New York Times/Siena College poll shows that his post-presidential quest to consolidate his support within the Republican Party has instead left him weakened, with nearly half the party’s primary voters seeking someone different for president in 2024 and a significant number vowing to abandon him if he wins the nomination. By focusing on political payback inside his party instead of tending to wounds opened by his alarming attempts to cling to power after his 2020 defeat, Mr. Trump appears to have only deepened fault lines...

The end of the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling was the culmination of decades of work by Republicans and social conservatives — one that came to pass only after a former Democrat from New York who had once supported abortion rights helped muscle through three Supreme Court justices. Publicly, former President Donald J. Trump heralded the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday ending federal abortion protections as a victory. Yet, as he faces possible prosecution over his efforts to subvert the 2020 election and prepares for a likely 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has privately told friends and advisers the ruling...

WASHINGTON—President Trump isn’t expected to declare a national emergency at the southern border when he addresses the nation Tuesday night about his request for funding for his long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico boundary, according to a person who has reviewed drafts of the speech. The president’s speech didn’t include any declaration of a national emergency, according to the person. Instead, the speech seeks to explain the president’s rationale for why he viewed the situation at the border as a crisis. Mr. Trump has said he wouldn’t sign any bill ending the partial government shutdown, which is now in its third...