Free Republic

When Americans were experiencing inflation and shortages during the Biden presidency, there was an internet meme going around that juxtaposed a paltry egg with the iconic 2019 image of a grinning Donald Trump, welcoming the national championship–winning Clemson Tigers to the White House, spreading his arms to display a massive bounty of burgers piled in front of him. The underlying message behind that joke became a central part of the 2024 campaign: Under Trump, Americans had plenty; under Biden-Harris, they had less. Yet bizarrely, the man who for decades has been a symbol of unapologetic American excess is now defending...

“I will use my presidential authority to set import quotas. . . . We can manage the short-term shortages more effectively and we will, but there are no short-term solutions to our long-range problems. There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice.” — Jimmy Carter, the “malaise speech,” July 1979 “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” — Bernie Sanders, May 2015 “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream.” — Scott Bessent, March 2025. “[China] made a...

The vibe around President Trump’s second term has shifted, and it’s all his doing. The president entered office with a bit of a wind at his back. His polling was better than the first time around, protesters weren’t in the streets, and federal investigators weren’t after him. The GOP was more united than in 2016 and business leaders wanted to work with him, while the culture was generally heading in an anti-woke direction. Now, though, his polling is in a marked decline. His job approval rating is sliding. Depending on what poll you believe, it’s down to 44 percent (Fox...

Believing that a country is in bad shape if it imports more goods than it exports — i.e., if it has a trade deficit — is, in most cases, a harmless error in reasoning. It’s the sort of thing that seems to make sense at first glance, but any halfway decent economics professor can train it out of students in one or two lectures. That error in reasoning becomes harmful when the person who believes it is the president of the United States, and he is willing to claim emergency powers to act on it unilaterally. That’s what Donald Trump...

You’ve probably noticed more than a little criticism around these parts for the administration discussing the plans to attack the Houthis and inadvertently looping in Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg. You can agree with us or disagree with us, but at least none of us has committed the sin (or crime?) that is alleged to have occurred here, leaking classified information. And a few among us have U.S. government national security clearances, or have had them in the past. The op-ed page of the New York Times could have gotten anyone in the world to criticize Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth,...

What’s a good analogy for Signal, the commercial, publicly available encryption app?Have you ever watched a public hearing of the Senate or House Intelligence Committee? It happens almost every time: A witness from one of our intelligence agencies is asked a question that, whether the interrogating lawmaker realizes it or not, calls for an answer that includes national defense information — in the main, classified intelligence.... So what happens next is a commonplace: The agency official will tell the panel that he or she cannot answer the question in public, but may be willing to address the matter in the...

Fifty years after he resigned the presidency, Richard Nixon is back. At least, some people on the right would like us to believe that he is and that it's time for conservatives to embrace his legacy wholeheartedly and to reject the stale leftist narratives about Watergate (among other things) that have sullied his reputation. It is necessary to reject the standard left-wing gloss on Nixon. But doing so hardly absolves Nixon of his sins. From a conservative perspective, there was good to the man and his presidency, but also bad — and ugly. Conservatives will only learn the right lessons...

“A failure on this scale isn’t just bad luck, it isn’t a global trend or taking your eye off the ball – no, this is a different order of failure,” the prime minister continued. “This happened by design, not accident. Policies were reformed deliberately to liberalize immigration. Brexit was used for that purpose, to turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders.” Following Brexit, net migration reached a previous peak of 764,000 in 2022. In 2015, before the referendum passed, net migration totaled to no more than 333,000. The latest immigration numbers are higher than previously thought.

The price of an $80 pair of blue jeans spiking to $90 or even $96. A pair of $90 gym shoes rising to $116. A $1,500 mid-tier couch rising to over $1,600. The rising costs of these three household items may seem like examples of Bidenomics at work over the last four years. But if that’s what you’re thinking, think again. These are the kinds of price increases American consumers can expect if President-elect Donald Trump proceeds with some of the tariff proposals he floated on the campaign trail this year, according to a new report from the National Retail...

Rumors are swirling that Representative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) is under consideration to be secretary of agriculture in the incoming Trump administration. A committed libertarian such as Massie would be a good person to lead perhaps our most socialistic government department. Trump’s first agriculture secretary, former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue, was a more status quo pick. Massie, or someone like him, would be a positive sign that Trump intends to keep his promise to shake up the federal bureaucracy and reduce the power that Washington, D.C., holds in American life.

Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares on Monday took the commonwealth’s noncitizen-voter case to the Supreme Court after a lower court blocked officials from purging their voter rolls of noncitizen aliens. A federal appeals court on Sunday backed a lower court’s Friday ruling that ordered Virginia to restore some 1,600 suspected noncitizens who are ineligible to vote to the state’s voter rolls. Miyares and Governor Glenn Youngkin, both Republicans, responded with a pledge to take the case to the Supreme Court with just nine days left before the election. They followed through on Monday. The request asks the Supreme Court to...

If you’ve been watching the polls in the Wisconsin Senate race, you’ve seen the Republican Eric Hovde making it a competitive race with the incumbent Democrat Tammy Baldwin. You’ve also seen someone named Thomas Leager showing up at 2 percent or so in some polls. Who is Leager? He is supposedly the “America First” candidate but is really the product of a Democratic conspiracy to tank the GOP in close congressional races. The Associated Press has done great work on this true false-flag operation. Leager was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Whitmer kidnapping plot and has fringy right-wing views that...

It seems that Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of National Review, has been canceled from two speaking engagements. One was at Indiana State University and the other at the Badger Institute, which Lowry describes as “a right-of-center institute in Wisconsin.” This was in response to Lowry appearance on the Megyn Kelly Show where, apparently, he committed a disastrous speaking error when explaining the Haitian migrant problem in Springfield, Ohio. From Lowry’s account, it would seem that he slurred the word “migrant” in pronouncing the phrase “Haitian migrants,” and it sounded to his listeners that he was engaging in a racial insult. Retribution...

Let me stipulate for the record: The American press is an embarrassment. Journalists are being unfair in their coverage. CNN and Politico and the New York Times and the Associated Press and NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt and NPR News are hyping Kamala Harris as the second coming and putting a thumb, two hands, and a 45-pound dumbbell on the scales in an attempt to prop her up. It also doesn’t matter. None of it is remotely decisive. The reason why the Republican Party is, at the moment, on track to lose the 2024 election is that the Republican...

It was 6:29 p.m. on the last Wednesday in May 2020, when Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey phoned Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Riots had erupted the day before over the police killing of George Floyd, and the city was overwhelmed. Frey pleaded with Walz to call in the National Guard. Less than three hours later, the city made a written request to Walz’s office for 600 guardsmen to help quell the chaos that was engulfing the Twin Cities. Rioters were burning buildings. They were shooting at police officers and attacking them with Molotov cocktails, fireworks, bricks, and bottles filled with cement....

Fifty years after he resigned the presidency, Richard Nixon is back. At least, some people on the right would like us to believe that he is and that it’s time for conservatives to embrace his legacy wholeheartedly and to reject the stale leftist narratives about Watergate (among other things) that have sullied his reputation. It is necessary to reject the standard left-wing gloss on Nixon. But doing so hardly absolves Nixon of his sins. From a conservative perspective, there was good to the man and his presidency, but also bad — and ugly. Conservatives will only learn the right lessons...

Since becoming governor in 2019, he has signed off on legislation to give numerous privileges to illegal immigrants, including access to state-funded health care and free college tuition. He also approved legislation in 2023 to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. “Ensuring drivers in our state are licensed and carry insurance makes the roads safer for all Minnesotans,” Walz said at the time.

Right now, MSNBC and CNN post-debate panels are openly talking about options for pressuring Biden to withdraw, or party officials conspiring to replace him at the convention anyway. I truly believe that convention drama is usually energizing for a party, not demoralizing. And the selection between Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom would allow Democrats to feel like the party of the future again, rather than a party litigating a recent past that voters hated. If Biden’s bad performance really does lead to his departure from the race, Republicans will miss him.

As far as we know, Nikki Haley isn’t on the short list, nor on the long list. There’s no indication that she’s being considered as Donald Trump’s VP pick, and Trump forcefully smacked down a report in Axios that the campaign was looking at her. She’d still probably be the choice who, more than any other possible pick, would help Trump win in November. By conventional rules, the former South Carolina governor getting the nod would be so obvious as to be completely unremarkable — she’s the runner-up in the nomination fight; she represents a different faction of the party;...

The Alvin Bragg case has gotten grander at trial, but also more ridiculous. The Manhattan DA has a meaningless business-records misdemeanor wrapped within a theory about an alleged Trump conspiracy to defraud the voters by denying them disparaging information before the election and obscuring, after the fact, the payments that were used to do so. Bragg is accusing Trump, in effect, of stealing the election. He, thus, joins all the other progressives who have denied the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 election, although he finds the culprit not in Russia (at least not in this case) but in the shady maneuverings...