Free Republic

Ever since President Biden’s Sunday announcement that he would not seek re-election, clearly because of age, I keep thinking about Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s contemptuous reactions to one of the most difficult personal decisions a president has ever made, and what it says about their character.“The Democrats pick a candidate, Crooked Joe Biden, he loses the Debate badly, then panics, and makes mistake after mistake, is told he can’t win, and decide they will pick another candidate, probably Harris,” Trump wrote on social media on Monday. He later added: “It’s not over! Tomorrow Crooked Joe Biden’s going to wake...

It’s always a good idea to pay attention to Nancy Pelosi and to judge where things are going by which direction she’s nudging them in, but that was especially true over the past few weeks. When she started sending President Biden signals that he should reconsider his candidacy, I felt almost certain that he’d eventually do so, because she was both giving other Democrats permission to break ranks with him and letting him and his allies know the extent and inevitability of the rebellion.And I realized that Vice President Kamala Harris wouldn’t face any competition for the Democratic nomination when...

And guess what the DNC will champion in August? A major theme of the Republican National Convention was illegal immigration or the invasion of migrants across our nation’s southern border.Speaker after speaker elaborated on the migrant invasion while The New York Times midway into the convention ran an article stating these claims were exaggerated. RNC speakers were also careful to state that they supported legal immigration yet these statements were ignored as critics from the left accused the convention of being anti-immigration. Examples of the anti-immigration charge were common on the PBS show, ‘Democracy Now’ despite host Amy Goodman’s superficial...

A former aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul reportedly had her $3.5 million Long Island home raided by the FBI early Tuesday. The feds carried out the pre-dawn search at the five-bedroom property where Linda Sun, one of Hochul’s former deputy chiefs of staff, lives in a gated community in Manhasset, the New York Times reported. The reason for the raid wasn’t immediately clear. Neither Sun, 40, nor her husband, Chris Hu, 41, have been accused of any wrongdoing and no arrests were made, sources told the outlet.

Before last week’s Republican convention, Donald Trump seemed to be moving away from the populism that characterized his 2016 campaign. “This time around, the former president isn’t even pretending to stand up to corporate power,” Rogé Karma observed in The Atlantic. “He’s defending big business, cozying up to billionaires, and wooing C.E.O.s.”When Mr. Trump named Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate, though, pundits quickly concluded that he was doubling down on populism. Mr. Vance has been a leading critic of Reagan-Bush policy orthodoxy in the G.O.P., has expressed skepticism of further corporate tax cuts and has even...

Vice President Kamala Harris got off to a rocky start in office. She is now at the heart of a political drama that could make her the first woman of color to become a major party presidential nominee. Vice President Kamala Harris, who has struggled for nearly four years in President Biden’s shadow, was thrust on Sunday into the center of a remarkable political drama that could culminate with her becoming the first woman of color at the top of a major-party presidential ticket. Mr. Biden’s decision to abandon his re-election bid and endorse Ms. Harris to succeed him puts...

At his first campaign rally since he survived an assassination attempt last week, former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday launched a litany of attacks that suggested his call for national unity in the wake of the shooting had faded entirely into the background.Over the course of an almost two-hour speech in Grand Rapids, Mich., Mr. Trump insulted President Biden’s intelligence repeatedly, calling him “stupid” more than once. He said Vice President Kamala Harris was “crazy” and gleefully jeered the Democratic Party’s infighting over Mr. Biden’s political future.Even as Mr. Trump made numerous false claims accusing his political opponents of...

Just heard that today, during our amazing Rally in the Great State of Michigan, esteemed Florida Circuit Court Judge, Robert L. Pegg, issued a Powerful Decision totally and completely DENYING the Pulitzer Prize Board’s desperate attempt to dismiss my ironclad Defamation Lawsuit against them for awarding the once respected Pulitzer Prizes to Fake News Stories about the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax by The Failing New York Times and The Washington Compost. The Judge specifically stated that the Fake Stories, and the Prizes awarded them, have been debunked by several Government Investigations. He did not allow Pulitzer to hide behind the...

Can Trumpism outlast Donald Trump? The selection of Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate suggests that the answer is yes.Even the most successful political parties are coalitions of odd bedfellows and competing interests. But parties risk decline if they cannot attract new voters or if they suppress internal debates. The Republican Party Mr. Trump inherited in 2016 had been defined by free market ideology and neoconservative foreign policy for a generation: From Ronald Reagan through both Bushes to Mitt Romney, mainstream conservatism pursued a narrow agenda of tax and entitlement cuts at home and wars of regime...

Deal with it. You knew that the New York Times wouldn’t let a patriotic holiday like Independence Day pass without taking a subversive shot at patriotism or America itself or her founding. Sure enough, author, editor, and Times columnist Pamela Paul wrote a July 4th opinion piece with a headline that, in addition to being wrong, was insulting to all Americans of faith: “Your Religious Values Are Not American Values.” Predictably, it regurgitates many of the Left’s usual negative tropes about Christianity and our country’s founding.Allow me to address some of those tropes, and please forgive the belated response to...

WASHINGTON — The shots rang out at 6:10 p.m. Former President Donald Trump clutched his right ear as blood spurted out, then ducked for cover as supporters screamed and Secret Service agents raced to surround and protect him. Within moments, someone shouted “shooter down,” and the agents, agitated but in control, began moving Trump offstage to safety. “Wait, wait, wait, wait,” he called out, then made a point of pumping his fist at the crowd and seemed to defiantly shout, “Fight! Fight!” The crowd roared and responded with chants of “USA! USA!” For the first time in more than four...

Prominent academic and New York Times columnist John McWhorter has declared it would be a good thing somebody assassinated former President Donald Trump. In a new episode of “The Glenn Show” with Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury, McWhorter said, “I have taken a great deal of heat for saying, for implying, that I wish somebody would kill Donald Trump.”

Donald Trump will arrive at the 2024 Republican convention — his Republican convention, finally and completely, without the dissent of 2016 or the pandemic that overshadowed 2020 — closer than ever to a second term. But the likelihood of a Trump restoration has not yet brought clarity about what it would actually usher in.With Trump there is always the whipsaw, the forays toward normalcy and the reversion to a darker mean. Asked on the debate stage whether he would spend a second term seeking revenge on his political enemies, he promised that “my retribution is going to be success. We’re...

I will do all that I can to see that President Biden is re-elected. Why? Despite my disagreements with him on particular issues, he has been the most effective president in the modern history of our country and is the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump — a demagogue and pathological liar. It’s time to learn a lesson from the progressive and centrist forces in France who, despite profound political differences, came together this week to soundly defeat right-wing extremism. I strongly disagree with Mr. Biden on the question of U.S. support for Israel’s horrific war against the Palestinian people....

Left-wing actor-comedienne and TV host Rosie O’Donnell has joined the chorus of Hollywood elites calling for Joe Biden to step aside and let some other candidate rise as the Democrat Party’s standard bearer for the 2024 election for president. O’Donnell jumped to her X account on Friday to note that she now agrees with an article written by left-wing commentator Ezra Klein, who back in February wrote a New York Times editorial in which he concluded that Joe Biden simply wasn’t the best candidate for 2024. Klein urged someone in the party to convince Biden to step aside and close...

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...

Next week, for the third time in eight years, Donald Trump will be nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate for president of the United States. A once great political party now serves the interests of one man, a man as demonstrably unsuited for the office of president as any to run in the long history of the Republic, a man whose values, temperament, ideas and language are directly opposed to so much of what has made this country great. It is a chilling choice against this national moment. For more than two decades, large majorities of Americans have said they...

Hours after a battle in eastern Ukraine in August, a wounded and unarmed Russian soldier crawled through a nearly destroyed trench, seeking help from his captors, a unit of international volunteers led by an American. Caspar Grosse, a German medic in that unit, said he saw the soldier plead for medical attention in a mix of broken English and Russian. It was dusk. A team member looked for bandages. That is when, Mr. Grosse said, a fellow soldier hobbled over and fired his weapon into the Russian soldier’s torso. He slumped, still breathing. Another soldier fired — “just shot him...

In an October 1903 article, the New York Times predicted it would take "one to ten million years" for man to develop a working "flying machine." We all know how that turned out. Sixty-nine days later, on Dec. 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made their historic first successful flight in the heavier-than-air Wright Flyer in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. The New York Times was wrong then, and they continue to be wrong about many important things. One of the most dangerous in recent years was the Russia collusion story, for which they were awarded a Pulitzer Prize. For...

As the belief that Joe Biden is fully equipped to be president dissolves like mist on a Delaware morning, some of his defenders have fallen back on the idea that the American presidency is not really a man but a team. “I would take Joe Biden on his worst day at age 86 — so long as he has people around him like Avril Haines, Samantha Power, Gina Raimondo supporting him — over Donald Trump any day,” a former homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, said on MSNBC a few days ago. Don’t think of this as the Biden presidency, in...