Free Republic

Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) became the eighth Republican lawmaker from Florida to endorse former President Donald Trump for president over Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who has not announced a 2024 presidential campaign. "If we want to get our economy back on track, Donald Trump is just the guy to get it done," Buchanan told Florida Politics on Wednesday. “From lowering taxes to protecting our borders to promoting America-first trade deals, President Trump has done it before and will do it again.” TRUMP'S GROWING LIST OF ENDORSEMENTS SHOWS REPUBLICANS ARE RETURNING TO THE FOLD Several Florida congressional Republicans have chosen Trump...

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said former President Donald Trump is “a live direct threat to the death of corruption, dishonesty, and extremism” of the Left. While appearing on Life, Liberty, & Levin, Gingrich said the allegations facing former President Donald Trump have “no parallel” because Trump is the “first person to have the courage and the willpower to take on the entire corrupt, extremist establishment. And they're fighting in the fight of their life.” “Trump is to the domestic corrupt establishment what Ronald Reagan was to the Soviet empire,” Gingrich said. "The truth is the indictment in...

Is this the right time for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) to run for president ? Potential candidates calculate odds, take polls, and count dollars to determine whether they should run. But it’s often not an easy decision; timing is the biggest conundrum in politics. DeSantis once seemed to have a glide path to the Republican Party's presidential nomination. His strong popularity among Republicans nationwide, together with his big reelection win and former President Donald Trump’s flubbing the midterm elections, put him in the driver’s seat. But now that the nomination is hitched to the wild uncertainties of indictments, some DeSantis...

Former President Donald Trump was arraigned in New York on Tuesday on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, but the largest blow to his hopes of reclaiming the White House might have occurred nearly 1,000 miles away in Wisconsin, where liberals secured a majority on the state's Supreme Court for the first time in 15 years. Hours after Trump became the first American president to face felony charges, Judge Janet Protasiewicz claimed victory over former Justice Dan Kelly, a major Trump supporter and one of the Wisconsin Republicans central to the former president's attempts to throw out the results...

Former President Donald Trump continued to denounce the federal government after his arraignment on Tuesday, calling on House Republicans to “defund” the Department of Justice and the FBI until “they come to their senses.” Trump made the call in a Truth Social post on Wednesday morning, just one day after the former president was charged on 34 counts of falsifying business records in a Manhattan courthouse. Neither government agency is directly involved with that criminal case, which centers on hush money payments Trump allegedly made to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about a sexual affair. “REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS...

While there are a lot of choices, the early betting is on a Capitol Hill firebrand uniquely poised to bring in the libertarian wing of the GOP, which could provide a bump of 3% to 4% of the vote. “There are only two realistic GOP nominees: Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis,” said an adviser to House Republicans who is also close to several past conservative presidential candidates. Since neither is likely to pick the other as a running mate, the adviser offered libertarian Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) as a good fit. “Rand Paul as VP for either eliminates the need...

Fresh off his huddling with donors last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is teeing up a jammed-pack week as he seemingly lays down the groundwork for a 2024 bid. DeSantis will deliver his hotly anticipated State of the State address to the Florida legislature, which is set to convene Tuesday, and start his mad dash to wrangle through a bevy of big-ticket items. Then, DeSantis will close off the week with a trip to the early primary state of Iowa to promote his new book. "Gov. DeSantis has said he is going to have the most productive and successful legislative...

Vivek Ramaswamy announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president in 2024 on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and in a video posted on Tuesday. The 37-year-old billionaire, who has been dubbed the "CEO of Anti-Woke Inc.," founded biotech company Roivant Science in 2014 and served as its CEO until 2021. That same year, he published Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. He is the son of Indian immigrants.

Pakistan is no longer a strategic partner of the United States. With the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan , the political relevance of Pakistan to the U.S. is significantly diminished. Pakistan continues to harbor Islamic terrorists who would bring death to India, an important strategic partner of the U.S. This concern bears renewed attention because Pakistan is facing an economic catastrophe. Its economy is collapsing because of political failures, including poor governance and corruption, causing high inflation, a rapidly depreciating currency, and soaring imports of food and energy. Islamabad's foreign currency reserves, necessary to import essential commodities such as...

When President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address on Feb. 7, he’ll blame Republicans for his failures and take credit for things he hasn’t done. That’s what he does. It’s what many Democrats are doing intensely right now — a strategy I wrote about recently — but Biden has a special sauce that allows him to get away with it more than any of his colleagues. Unofficially launching his reelection campaign, he’ll cast the GOP as the inflation party for opposing his inflationary Inflation Reduction Act, which spent hundreds of billions of borrowed federal dollars on subsidies....

I once asked a senior American official about why he accepted honoraria from the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or the MKO, given the group’s cultlike nature and its lack of popularity inside Iran. His response: Even if the group lied about its support, they said the right things about democracy and regime change, and so he saw no harm in collecting the cash. The regime’s fall, he said, would be a moment of truth: Either the MKO would prove itself right, or its political Ponzi scheme would collapse. The problem with engaging in the MKO’s endorsement-for-cash scheme is the impact it has on...

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said she has identified one of the "massive" reasons Republicans significantly underperformed in last month's midterm elections. McDaniel said a "massive amount" of ticket-splitting was one of the top factors that led to GOP losses in some key races this election cycle despite winning in other races on the same ballot, speaking with John Catsimatidis on Cats Roundtable on the radio station WABC 77 on Sunday. "Ticket-splitting was everywhere. We won eight races statewide in Georgia, but then Warnock wins the runoff. Ron Johnson wins in Wisconsin, but Evers holds the governorship," McDaniel said....

Herschel Walker’s 100,000-vote loss in Georgia puts the exclamation point on the “Donald Trump is electoral poison” narrative. If the former president had deliberately attempted to sabotage the Republicans' chances ever since November 2020, he could not have been more destructive than he actually was. In the Senate, the Trump effect meant Republicans lost chances at a whopping 10 seats (one of them two times!) they either should have won or in which they might have been competitive. In the House, Trump’s harm was more diffused, but almost equally baleful. On Jan. 5, 2021, Republicans lost two Senate seats in...

Leaders of the New Black Panther Party announced they would be deploying armed guards to a number of polling places in the Atlanta area to monitor "white supremacist violence" as voters cast their ballots in the Georgia Senate runoff election. "No one will come and touch, harm, threaten, do anything to any person walking into that voting booth to exercise that right," Khallida Ramla Bastet said at a press conference on Monday. "This is a legal position that we are taking. We are in position so that if anything happens to anyone, we are here to offer you legal representation....

Conservative lawmakers and members of the Republican National Committee have labeled the new leader of House Democrats an "election denier" because the new leader claimed the 2016 presidential election was fake. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who was elected to replace House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the leader of House Democrats on Wednesday, has denied the legitimacy of the 2016 election at least eight times, according to a researcher from the RNC. The 2016 contest resulted in the election of Donald Trump over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Kari Lake told the establishment paper she will "Never" turn on Trump. The Washington Examiner is calling on America First Arizonan, Kari Lake, to turn on President Trump and accept election fraud in the wake of her Governor’s race “loss” to infamous Arizona election boss Katie Hobbs. Shockingly, Hobbs, as Arizona’s Secretary of State, was allowed to run her own election. “Kari Lake can be a conservative superstar if she dumps Trump,” The Washington Examiner claimed in a headline, citing the talking points of a strategist aligned with the open-borders Chamber of Commerce, before claiming that election fraud doesn’t exist....

House Democrats are preparing for a changing of the guard in the lower chamber in the wake of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) Thursday announcement, and that of her deputies, that they will step aside so a new generation of Democrats can move up the ranks. A trio of younger House lawmakers launched their bids on Friday and are widely expected to assume the spots. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is the front-runner to replace Pelosi, while Katherine Clark (R-MA) and Pete Aguilar (D-CA) would serve in the No. 2 and No. 3 positions, respectively. **SNIP** "It has sometimes been said that the...

Kari Lake, the perpetually soft-lit, camera-ready political newcomer from Arizona, may have lost her bid to become the state's next governor, but it's unlikely she'll leave the spotlight. A Phoenix-area news anchor for 22 years, Lake called it quits in 2021 and decided to go all in on politics. She fended off better-funded, more qualified GOP challengers in the primaries and ran a ground game in the general election in which she regularly made headlines for tearing into fellow reporters and mocking her political opponent. Lake ran a full Trumpist campaign and pushed a familiar but divisive message that questioned...

President Joe Biden just gave his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, a propaganda victory. The two met Monday on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, their first in-person meeting of Biden’s presidency. While it’s positive that the two leaders are communicating, the optics of the meeting might have done more harm than good. If Biden wants to set the U.S.-China relationship on a more favorable track, he must engage Beijing from a position of strength. That’s not what happened Monday. The timing of the summit couldn’t have been worse. Xi arrived in Bali fresh from the...

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) was quick to troll Republican Arizona gubernatorial contender Kari Lake after the latter was projected to lose her race to Democratic rival Katie Hobbs. Within minutes of the race being called on Monday, Cheney sent a smug tweet, responding to a weeks-old public letter from Lake thanking Cheney for opposing her campaign. "You're welcome," Cheney said in a tweet that also tagged Lake's account. Weeks earlier, Cheney appeared in a pricey ad urging voters in Arizona to reject Lake and Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for Arizona secretary of state who also was declared the loser...