Free Republic

Feb. 28 was one of the darkest days for Ukraine since Russia’s invasion three years earlier. An Oval Office visit by President Volodymyr Zelensky meant to win favor with President Trump turned into a televised shouting match, prompting Mr. Trump to banish his guest from the White House without even serving him a planned lunch. Mr. Trump was already a deep skeptic of U.S. support for Ukraine. But after the disastrous meeting with Mr. Zelensky, he accelerated his diplomacy with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, drafting a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine that offered major concessions...

...ending the war with Russia that has been raging for more than three years is only the first hurdle that will need to be overcome before the United States can realize any potential windfall. Maps showing trillions of dollars of mineral deposits scattered across Ukraine — including in areas occupied by Russian forces — are based largely on outdated studies, and proper surveys could take several years to complete, experts said. The deposits might not be easy to extract; investors will need to pump billions into Ukraine to pull the resources from the earth. And the nation’s energy infrastructure —...

Behind the scenes, a top department official pressed employees to gather a list of activists and investigate them, people familiar with the matter said.A top Trump appointee in the Justice Department ordered an aggressive investigation in the last several months of student protesters at Columbia University, raising anger and alarm among career prosecutors and investigators who saw the demand as politically motivated and lacking legal merit, people familiar with the episode said. The demand for the inquiry into students who protested Israel’s conduct of the conflict in Gaza also prompted pushback from a federal magistrate judge, who believed some of...

The text of the agreement, made public by Ukraine’s government, made no mention of the security guarantees that Kyiv had long sought. The minerals deal signed between the United States and Ukraine on Wednesday could bring untold money into a joint investment fund between the two countries that would help rebuild Ukraine whenever the war with Russia ends. But Ukraine’s untapped resources that are the subject of the deal will take years to extract and yield profits. And those could fail to deliver the kind of wealth that President Trump has long said they would. It is not yet clear...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat. Some of those people said that the information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.

As President Trump imposes tariffs on products from countries around the world, foreign governments are answering back with tariffs of their own. China has targeted corn farmers and carmakers. Canada has put tariffs on poultry plants and air-conditioning manufacturers, while Europe will hit American steel mills and slaughter houses. The retaliatory tariffs are an attempt to put pressure on the president to relent. And they have been carefully designed to hit Mr. Trump where it hurts: Nearly 8 million Americans work in industries targeted by the levies and the majority are Trump voters, a New York Times analysis shows. The...

The railroad tracks that slice through downtown Freehold, N.J., used to be lined by dozens of men, waiting for work. Each morning, the men — day laborers, almost all from Latin America and undocumented — would be scooped up by local contractors in pickup trucks for jobs painting, landscaping, removing debris. In recent weeks, the tracks have been desolate. On a gray February morning, a laborer named Mario, who came from Mexico two decades ago, said it was the quietest he could remember. “Because of the president, we have a fear,” said Mario, 55, who agreed to be interviewed on...

A leftist group financed by America’s most notorious billionaire George Soros launched a lawsuit against the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by X owner Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy just moments after President Donald Trump took office. That’s not even enough time for anyone in the Trump administration to pass gas.

California has focused on fortifying communities against wildfires. But with growing threats, that may not be enough. This week’s fires around Los Angeles present a puzzle: Why is California, the state best equipped to deal with wildfires, seemingly unable to prevent blazes from consuming entire chunks of the country’s second-largest city?California’s building code for wildfires is among the most protective in the nation. Its local fire departments are backed up by CalFire, the state fire agency, which has a $4 billion budget and some of the best trained firefighters in the world. The state’s huge tax base generates effectively unlimited...

The first- and second-wave feminist movements really just wanted women to have equal footing with men, which was noble, even if we disagree with some of the methods and outcomes. But the late-stage feminism, with its capitulation to the transgender agenda, has literally undone over a century of work on behalf of women. To the point where women are not only second-class citizens to delusional men who pretend they're women, but we can't even be called women anymore. They've had a list of euphemisms for us -- womb owner, egg producer, birthing person -- but now we're literally being redefined...

This New York Times “gotcha” is about as sharp as a soggy bowl of breakfast cereal. The Times was relentlessly mocked over the weekend for appearing to unintentionally make Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s case in a recent article that tried to poke holes in his anti-processed-food crusade. Kennedy, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has long pushed for purging artificial ingredients from the food supply, routinely calling such additives “poison.” The Times on Friday ran a story positing that the Kennedy scion’s stance while potentially leading the agency could put him on a...

On the night he won a second term, President-elect Donald J. Trump rejoiced in the moment. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he boasted. In the two weeks since, his campaign has repeatedly heralded his “landslide,” even to market Trump merchandise like the “Official Trump Victory Glass.”But by traditional numeric measures, Mr. Trump’s victory was neither unprecedented nor a landslide. In fact, he prevailed with one of the smallest margins of victory in the popular vote since the 19th century and generated little of the coattails of a true landslide.The disconnect goes beyond predictable Trumpian braggadocio. The...

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) reportedly bragged to people involved in Florida politics that he had met women through a county tax collector who has since been hit with federal sex trafficking charges. Two people who heard his comments directly told The Washington Post that Gaetz had also showed them videos of nude women on his phone. Some of the videos were from parties with former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg. The sources said the women in the videos appeared to be adults. “Matt was never shy about talking about his relationship to Joel and the access to women that...

That was quick.Donald Trump is planting the seeds of his own political demise. The corrupt, incompetent and extremist men and women he’s appointing to many of the most critical posts in his cabinet are direct threats to the well-being of the country, but they’re also political threats to Trump and to his populist allies.To understand why, it’s important to remember a cardinal reality about Trump’s political career. He has now won two general elections when he was the only alternative to an unsatisfactory status quo, and he lost the one when he was the unsatisfactory status quo. If he can’t...

President-elect Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on Friday, vowing to bring justice to his name after years of attacks from the mainstream media. The incoming 47th president announced he is suing several media outlets, including the New York Times, CBS News, Penguin Random House, and the Daily Beast, alleging widespread bias and defamation. Trump’s lawyer, Edward Andrew Paltzik, demands $10 billion in damages for publishing defamatory material. In the lawsuit, Trump accused the mainstream media of “defaming and disparaging” him during coverage of the election and making “false and defamatory statements.” The NYT was at the center of the lawsuit....

Iran faces a dilemma after the Israeli strikes on Saturday. If it retaliates, it risks further escalation at a time when its economy is struggling, its allies are faltering, its military vulnerability is clear and its leadership succession is in play. If it does not, it risks looking weak to those same allies, as well as to more aggressive and powerful voices at home. Iran is already in the middle of a regional war. Since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has moved swiftly to damage the militant group in Gaza and other Iranian proxies, including Hezbollah, the...

It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks. Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest...

When former President Donald J. Trump decided to take a day off the battleground campaign trail in the waning days of the race to hold a rally Sunday at Madison Square Garden, it prompted a question from many political observers: Why? New York is hardly a battleground state, and New York City is still a Democratic stronghold. So how come Mr. Trump is planning an event in Midtown Manhattan in the final two weeks of his presidential campaign?Here are five reasons: He will get to see his name in lights. Mr. Trump was a performer and reality TV star before...

Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis hurried through the medieval monastery that is part of her 500-room palace. It was a chilly autumn night in Bavaria, with rain spitting outside, as she arrived at the chapel to pray. The room glowed red, lit from a crypt below where her husband and other family members lay in their coffins. The princess knelt and soft bells sounded. Her dinner guests, a British baroness and her husband, slipped in to join her as a priest led prayers. Princess Gloria, 64, who burst onto the international scene in the 1980s..as since evolved into a...

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are carrying out a virtual house-to-house hunt for the final few voters who are still up for grabs, guided by months of painstaking research about these elusive Americans. Inside the Delaware headquarters of Ms. Harris’s campaign, analysts have spent 18 months curating a list of which television shows and podcasts voters consume in the battleground states. Her team has assigned every voter in these states a “contactability score” from 0 to 100 to determine just how hard that person will be to reach — and who is best to deliver...