Free Republic

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that there were “enough” Republican senators who would not vote for the so-called “big, beautiful” spending bill without significant changes. Host Jake Tapper said, “How determined are you to be that guy if it actually means telling President Trump you are going to vote against the bill and you’re going to try to get other Republican senators to join you, unless there are major, major changes?” Johnson said, “Well, in 2010, I sprang out of the Tea Party movement and as I did parades I would shout, this...

Elon Musk has split with Donald Trump on tariffs in the latest sign the billionaire is distancing himself from the White House. The president's special adviser told a political rally he hopes to see a 'zero tariff situation' between the US and Europe to create a free trade zone. On Wednesday, Trump introduced a controversial 20 percent tariff for Europe along with even higher tariffs for other global trading partners as what he dubbed 'Liberation Day'. But while the president has been pushing US isolationism, Musk espoused a more collaborative approach. 'I hope that the United States and Europe can...

This week’s Emerson College Polling national survey finds 49% of voters support Vice President Kamala Harris, while 48% support former president Donald Trump for president in 2024. One percent of voters plan to support someone other than the major party nominees on the ballot, and two percent are undecided. When undecided voters are asked which candidate they lean toward, Harris’s overall support increases to 50%, and Trump’s to 49%. “Women and male voters break in near opposite directions: men for Trump, 56% to 42%, and women for Harris, 55% to 41%” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said....

The Democratic Party released its official platform on Sunday night, to be voted on at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois — and it calls for reelecting President Joe Biden, who was still the candidate at the time the document was finalized in mid-July. “President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Democrats are running to finish the job,” it says. Read the full, 91-page document here. https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTER-PLATFORM.pdfThe platform begins with a “land acknowledgment,” declaring that the convention is being held on lands once belonging to Native Americans. This is a left-wing practice that, the Wall Street Journal noted last weekend,...

House Republicans issued a blistering report Monday accusing President Biden of committing at least two offenses that would justify his impeachment — delivering a political black eye to Biden just hours before he speaks on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention. Republicans launched the investigation last September after evidence surfaced that Biden, 81, repeatedly interacted with his relatives’ foreign business partners during his vice presidency — and following allegations from two IRS investigators of a far-reaching Justice Department cover-up.Biden engaged in “abuse of power” and “obstruction of justice or obstruction of Congress” by corruptly abetting and concealing a...

“Mass Deportation Now!” declared the signs at the Republican National Convention, giving a full embrace to Donald Trump’s pledge to expel millions of migrants in the largest deportation program in American history. Some Republicans aren’t quite ready for that. Lauren B. Peña, a Republican activist from Texas, said that hearing Trump’s calls for mass deportations, as well as terms like “illegals” and “invasion” thrown around at the convention, made her feel uncomfortable. ... “He’s not meaning to go and deport every family that crosses the border, he means deport the criminals and the sex offenders,” Peña said. But Trump and...

Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker will return the witness stand today for the second day of Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial over covering up “hush money” payments to a porn star. Pecker will resume testimony where he is expected to detail the inner workings of a scheme he, Trump and his “fixer” lawyer Michael Cohen devised to buy up and bury bad news during the 2016 presidential election. Trump is on trial for allegedly fudging business records to conceal a $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels made before the 2016 presidential election. The 72-year-old ex-CEO of the Enquirer’s parent company,...

Donald Trump has suggested he may choose a new lawyer to represent him when he appeals his damages verdict in a case brought against him by E. Jean Carroll. On Friday, a New York City jury ordered that the former president must pay $83.3 million in damages to Carroll for statements made in 2019. He said she was lying about allegations he sexually assaulted her inside a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s. That amount includes $7.3 million in compensatory damages, $11 million for reputational repair, and $65 million in punitive damages. *** The Republican was represented by...

Donald Trump said people "JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH" presidents who "CROSS THE LINE."He posted the lengthy all-caps rant on Truth Social early Thursday morning.A DC appeals court is weighing whether Trump should have criminal immunity.Donald Trump is once again claiming that presidents should have total immunity from any crimes they commit while in office — this time, with an all-caps rant posted to Truth Social.~snip~"A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY, WITHOUT WHICH IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM/HER TO PROPERLY FUNCTION," Trump wrote on his social-media platform in the early hours of Thursday morning. "ANY...

......" In the lead-up to the 2020 election, an Emerson poll suggested that Trump was poised to win one out of every five Black voters, only to secure a mere 8 percent of the Black vote that year." ...So, why do some on the Right insist on peddling this pipe dream? Beyond the allure of clicks, this narrative distracts Republicans from far more compelling evidence showing Trump losing support among White voters.... Our team analyzed every poll with publicly available crosstabs featured in RealClearPolitics in the month of August. Seven out of the nine studies showed Trump performing well below...

Donald Trump has repeatedly taken credit for the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to revoke a constitutional right to abortion care, a landmark ruling that has upended abortion access for millions of Americans in the months that followed. Within his one four-year term, the former president appointed three conservative justices to the nine-member panel, tilting the court’s ideological balance in a promised effort to achieve a long-held Republican goal of overturning the 1973 decision in Roe v Wade. The conservative majority’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization has proved unpopular with most Americans and has fuelled victories in...

The betting odds say the next election will likely be a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It’s odd since polls show most Americans don’t like either man. Trump is simply mean. He humiliates people, taking pleasure in mocking them publicly. In his real-estate work, he’s famous for not paying little people who work for him. He stiffed a cabinet-builder, a dishwasher, and a plumber. *** Trump lies even about unimportant things, like the crowd at his inauguration, ratings for his TV show, even claiming he won a nonexistent “Man of the Year” award. And of course, he lies...

In early 2015, a man who runs a small technology company showed up at Trump Tower to collect $50,000 for having helped Michael Cohen, then Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, try to rig online polls in his boss’s favor before the presidential campaign. In his Trump Organization office, Mr. Cohen surprised the man, John Gauger, by giving him both a blue Walmart bag containing between $12,000 and $13,000 in cash and, randomly, a boxing glove that Mr. Cohen said had been worn by a Brazilian mixed-martial arts fighter, Mr. Gauger said. Mr. Cohen disputed that he handed over a bag of...