Free Republic

***Marco Rubio insisted Tuesday that he was misunderstood one day prior when he said the US attacked Iran on Saturday because “we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action” that would “precipitate an attack against American forces.” Rubio walked back his prior statements after President Trump flatly denied that Israel chose the timing of the attack — maintaining in an Oval Office pool spray hours earlier, as he had in interviews, that he chose to attack after unsuccessful US-Iran talks Thursday in Geneva. “This was a question of timing, of why this had to happen as a...

President Donald Trump suffered a major political setback on Thursday in his push to pass congressional redistricting in red states. After months of arm-twisting by the president, top allies and aligned groups, the Indiana Senate voted down a new map championed by Trump that would have created two more right-leaning congressional districts in the solidly red Midwestern state, where the GOP controls seven of Indiana's nine U.S. House seats. The districts of Democratic Reps. Frank Mrvan and Andre Carson would have been eliminated. The vote in the chamber was 31-19, with 21 Republicans joining 10 Democrats in voting against the...

President Trump has long mused about using troops to crush violent protests or riots in blue-state cities. He is now moving to do so in Los Angeles.Setting up a rare use of military force on domestic soil, President Trump ordered the Pentagon on Saturday night to send at least 2,000 National Guard troops to respond to protests in Los Angeles set off by his immigration crackdown.Mr. Trump has long mused about using military force on domestic soil to crush violent protests or riots, fight crime and hunt for undocumented migrants — a move that his aides talked him out of...

I am less optimistic about the election of Donald Trump than most. As he adorns the cover of Time magazine as their “Person of the Year,” as Antifa and Black Lives Matter fail to riot, as the left cannot even be bothered to feign outrage, as predictions of Civil War on the horizon melt away, and as the media collectively limps to the acceptance that he will once again be president and that the “woke era” is well and truly over, I cannot help but feel something is up. Surely, all that should signal ultimate triumph and victory, no? Well,...