Free Republic

Donald J. Trump has made his revisionist account of the Capitol attack the foundation of this campaign, even when there is little political advantage.When a moderator asked Donald J. Trump about Jan. 6, 2021, at the presidential debate, the former president slipped immediately into a now-familiar revisionist history of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. He falsely claimed that he had nothing to do with the assault, blaming it on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the police officers who protected the building that day against a mob of his supporters. But then Mr. Trump made a brief but telling...

When my family moved back to the United States from East Africa in the mid-1980s, one might have thought it was a peak time of compassion for people suffering in faraway places. A glittering group of music superstars had recorded “We Are the World,” a smash hit charity single to raise money and awareness for the victims of a brutal famine that had gripped my mother’s home country, Ethiopia.But when I told my new grade school classmates of my origins, I was met with cruel taunts. I was awfully fat for an Ethiopian, one said with a snigger. Must be...

In Tuesday’s debate against Donald Trump, Kamala Harris emphasized her middle-class background, her admiration for small business owners and her plans for an “opportunity economy.” She promised tax credits for young families and support for first-time homeowners. Those attempts to put meat on the bones of her economic plan will not be enough to win the presidential election.In the latest Times/Siena poll, Ms. Harris trailed Mr. Trump by 13 points on the economy, the issue that matters most to voters. It’s why she’s merely tied with Mr. Trump in the race overall, not crushing him.Optimistic words and some admirable proposals...

Billionaire Elon Musk slammed a New York Times writer that wrote an article which claimed the U.S. Constitution can be considered one of the "biggest threats" to the country. The Times' book critic Jennifer Szalai claimed that "The United States Constitution is in trouble" due to the fact that former President Trump was able to become president through the Electoral College. "Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us; a growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it," Szalai said. "The document that’s supposed to be a bulwark against authoritarianism can end up fostering...

What is it about the New York Times op-ed page and every crackpot idea under the sun. Somehow, they always find each other. So now we have their latest: kill your air conditioner to save the planet The Times found some guy in Salina, Kansas, who praises going without and says he does it himself: "Whenever people ask me how my wife and I have endured 25 Kansas summers almost entirely without air-conditioning, I like to say we do it because air-conditioning makes it too hot outside. We’re not ascetics, Luddites or misers; we just want to keep living comfortably,...

Over his decades in the public eye, former President Donald J. Trump has a well-established history of making degrading and racist remarks about women, people of color and pretty much anyone else who crosses his path. It is a proclivity that dates to his days as a reality television star and that has only expanded in the meme-driven era of social media. In the words of Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, Mr. Trump is “an equal opportunity offender.” But in Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump has found a particularly complicated and risky target for his trademark brand...

Kamala Harris is beginning to offer the first definitive clues of a new economic vision — one with the potential not only to offer a unifying vision for the Democratic Party but also to serve as the foundation for a governing philosophy that crosses party lines. In recent years, both parties have broken with a markets-know-best default setting. The question is, what comes next? One influential school of thought, advanced by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, argues for increasing the supply of essentials such as housing, health care and clean energy, in part by using government to break the choke...

If the Republican convention’s message for America last month had to fit on a bumper sticker, it would read: “TRUMP IS GOD.” Delegates deified him relentlessly as the risen Trump after the assassination attempt. They told me over and over that he was spared to save the country with his re-election. Only on the final night did Trump come crashing down to earth with his nomination speech. Divine it was not.What a mistake. The most divisive man in America was suddenly getting a measure of goodwill from skeptical voters after he was nearly killed. People were tuning in to see...

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...

Late on Sunday morning, Vice President Kamala Harris summoned a small clutch of her closest advisers and allies to the Naval Observatory, where she lives and works, with little notice and even less information. President Biden had informed Ms. Harris earlier that morning that he was withdrawing from the race. The vice president had assembled her team so that the exact moment Mr. Biden formally quit, at 1:46 p.m. — one minute after the president had informed his own senior staff — they were ready to go. Time was of the essence. A sprawling call list of the most important...

WASHINGTON — In his first memoir, President Joe Biden reflected on what at the time was the most searing moment of his political career. He had withdrawn from his first presidential campaign in disgrace, driven out by charges of plagiarism. Now, some 37 years after that flameout, Biden’s epitaph weighed heavily as he made surely the hardest political decision of his long career in Washington to give up the presidency after just one term and end his bid for reelection. As he sat in isolation with COVID at his Delaware beach house these past few days, hacking and hacked off,...

At the outset of Christopher Marlowe’s late 16th-century play “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus,” the scholar at the center of the tale abandons all the learning he has mastered. Law, philosophy, medicine — none of these have fulfilled his boundless ambition. Instead, he turns to magic, making the fateful decision to sell his soul to the demon Mephistopheles, for what he “most desires” — “a world of profit and delight, /Of power, of honor.” That brand of striving, so strong that it compels Faustus to sell what is most essential to him, must lie somewhere in the makeup of...

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...

Christian nationalists aim to impose their beliefs on others.Whenever a politician cites “Judeo-Christian values,” I find it’s generally followed by something unsettling.Last month brought two flagrant instances. In both cases, Republican officials introduced state laws that formalize precepts of the Christian nationalist movement — in the words of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers (A.D. 2019), “doing everything we can to restore the Judeo-Christian foundation of our nation.”On June 19, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana signed legislation requiring public classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, a practice struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1980. A rich endorsement...

The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in a special column following the recent Presidential debate that it had been painful to watch. "Joe Biden is a good man and a good President. He must bow out of the race," Friedman wrote in the headline of his column. He recounted: "I watched the Biden-Trump debate alone in a Lisbon hotel room, and it made me weep. I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime — precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no...

When a Manhattan jury found Donald J. Trump guilty, it should have sent shock waves through the nation. Yet, though the trial and conviction of a former president was unprecedented in American history, it seems most people couldn’t have cared less. As Michelle Goldberg recently noted, only 16 percent of respondents to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll said they had followed the first few weeks of the trial very closely, and when asked how they felt, many replied, “bored.”In its way, that must have annoyed Mr. Trump: how insulting, that no one would care. There was media coverage, but no frenzy,...

This week, Breitbart interviewed the former Trump official Peter Navarro, one of many criminals in the ex-president’s orbit, from the Miami prison where he is serving four months for contempt of Congress. While life behind bars is difficult, Navarro boasted that his stint has been smoothed by his ties to Donald Trump, which make him something of a made man. The former president, said Navarro, is beloved not just by the guards, but by the “vast majority” of inmates as well. “If I were a Bidenite, things would be a lot tougher here — and yes, they know exactly who...

Contrary to what many political pundits, including this one, thought would happen as soon as Donald Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee, the former president has maintained a slim but steady polling lead over President Joe Biden. As of today, the RCP Average has Trump with a 1.1% overall advantage, with Quinnipiac being the only May poll showing Biden leading, albeit by a mere 1%. By contrast, Biden enjoyed a 5.6% advantage this time in 2020, an election in which Trump never actually took the average polling lead.Still, are there signs that Trump's lead might be softer than we think?...

CLAIM: President Ronald Reagan, like President Joe Biden, withheld arms from Israel to influence its military policy. VERDICT: MISLEADING. Reagan acted within the law, and in very different circumstances, in withholding arms. The New York Times‘ Peter Baker — winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper’s bogus reporting on “Russia collusion” — wrote Friday that President Reagan, too, withheld weapons from Israel over concerns about their use. Baker’s aim in the article appears to be to rescue Biden from some of the criticism he has faced since he confirmed earlier this week that the administration was withholding bombs and...

“How many more police officers and how many families need to make the ultimate sacrifice before we start protecting them?” Stephanie Diller’s plaintive question at Saturday’s funeral for her husband, Det. Jonathan Diller, somehow turned out to be news not fit to print for The New York Times. Nor the lines that preceded it: “It’s been two years and two months since Detective Rivera and Detective Mora made the ultimate sacrifice — just like my husband Jonathan Diller. SNIP Her words made the front page of The Post and even the hyperleft Daily News; nebbishy Newsday at least put the...