Free Republic

When Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, dispatched his National Guard troops to Washington to support President Trump’s crackdown on crime, Democrats and other critics wondered why he didn’t keep them within state lines. Memphis, after all, has long been one of the most dangerous cities in the country, with a murder rate about twice as high as the nation’s capital, according to F.B.I. statistics. Nashville has a higher rate of violent crime than Washington as well. The same questions could be asked of other Republican governors like Greg Abbott in Texas, Mike DeWine in Ohio and Mike Kehoe in Missouri,...

President Trump has cut hundreds of thousands of jobs from the federal work force, disproportionately affecting Black employees.When President Trump started dismantling federal agencies and dismissing rank-and-file civil servants, Peggy Carr, the chief statistician at the Education Department, immediately started to make a calculation. She was the first Black person and the first woman to hold the prestigious post of commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. As a political appointee, she knew there was a risk of becoming a target. But her 35-career at the department spanned a half dozen administrations, including Mr. Trump’s first term, and she...

The deployment of federal agents and National Guard troops has caused some Black parents to return to the days of “the talk” about policing that they had hoped was no longer needed to keep their children safe.Days after President Trump ordered a surge of federal law enforcement agents in Washington, D.C., Charlene Golphin told her 17-year-old son that his curfew was being cut short by two hours. Ms. Golphin feared that as a Black boy, her son would be caught in the dragnet set up by officers tasked by the president with cracking down on the “roving mobs of wild...

... Mr. Moran, 44, is the pasha of a new power tribe in the capital: the gay men of the Trump administration. These are the A-Gays. They’re (mostly) out, they’re proud (to work for President Trump) and they have big jobs inside (or alongside) this administration. They wield influence all over town, from the Pentagon to the State Department to the White House to the Kennedy Center. “We’re like Visa,” Mr. Moran said. “Everywhere you want to be.” He sipped a dirty vodka martini and surveyed the room. Two Republican men waved at him from across the club. “Both gay,”...

It’s not just you. It really is impossible to keep track of all the political news. But one thing is pretty reliable: When Donald Trump has a bad week, he will use social media to make a presidential announcement.Last week was one of those bad weeks. President Vladimir Putin of Russia landed in America as if he had V.I.P. tickets to a private Taylor Swift meet-and-greet. He made no concessions in Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Trump belatedly realized that he had been played. Plus, that Jeffrey Epstein thing just won’t go away.So, true to form, the president took to...

Democratic friends, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you woke up one morning and all your media sources were produced by Christian nationalists. You sent your kids off to school and the teachers were espousing some version of Christian nationalism. You turned on your sports network and your late-night comedy, and everyone was preaching Christian nationalism.That’s a bit how it feels to be more conservative in the West today — to feel drenched by a constant downpour of progressive sermonizing. What would you do in such circumstances? Well, at least at first, you’d probably grit your teeth and take it...

For quite some time, the leftist political establishment has been accusing President Donald Trump of abandoning the US Constitution. Now they have me wondering why that’s supposed to be a criticism. Just last week The New York Times, the establishment’s chief house organ, boosted the arguments of writer Osita Nwanevu in a column headlined: “Abolish the Senate. End the Electoral College. Pack the Court.” Why? Because “The left can’t win without a new Constitution.” He’s hardly the first Democrat to say so. I’ve noticed that whenever the Constitution stands in the way of something the left wants at the moment,...

Thousands gathered in cities across the country on Saturday to protest President Trump's plan to keep control of Congress after the 2026 midterms by pushing Republican-led states to redraw their congressional maps in favor of Republicans. The president’s push for the rare and aggressively partisan redistricting, while centered on Texas so far, has set off a furious response among many Democratic state leaders and party activists. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Friday that he was moving forward with a plan to redraw his state’s lines, and allow voters to approve it in November. On Saturday, progressive activists, labor...

By ordering 800 National Guard troops to Washington, on the pretext of an illusory crime wave, President Trump has further dragged the U.S. military into domestic law enforcement, in a move credibly perceived as an ominous “test case.” This continues what the administration started in California in June as part of the its deportation efforts. Unfortunately, though we (and others) had hoped that the military would only respond to calls to action in American cities and states kicking and screaming, we no longer expect resistance from that institution. Once, perhaps, traditionalist officers might have leaned on protocol and refused to...

The administration’s claims are overblown, but newly declassified information provides some messy details about a January 2017 intelligence assessment of Moscow’s election interference.The Trump administration in recent weeks has released a series of reports intended to undermine the conclusion reached by intelligence agencies before President Trump’s first term that Russia had favored his candidacy in 2016 and sought to improve his chances of winning.That assessment, an unclassified version of which was made public in January 2017, has long infuriated Mr. Trump. In disclosing the reports, he and his team are proclaiming that President Barack Obama and his team torqued the...

Attorney General Pam Bondi informed President Trump in the spring that his name appeared in the Jeffrey Epstein files, according to three people with knowledge of the exchange. The disclosure came as part of a broader briefing on the re-examination of the case against Mr. Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, by F.B.I. agents and prosecutors. It was made by Ms. Bondi during a meeting that also included the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, and covered a variety of topics. Ms. Bondi frequently meets with Mr. Trump to brief him on various matters, officials...

President Trump reposted a fake video showing former President Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office, as Trump administration officials continue to accuse Mr. Obama of trying to harm Mr. Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election, and the president seeks to redirect conversation from the Epstein files. The short video, which appears to have been generated by artificial intelligence and posted on TikTok before being reposted on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social account on Sunday, comes days after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration trying to...

This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Trump gave Mr. Epstein a note for his 50th birthday in 2003 that included a sketch of a naked woman and a cryptic reference to a “secret” the two men shared.In the swirl of money and sun-tanned women that was their Palm Beach-and-Manhattan set, Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein spent nearly 15 years mingling side-by-side as public friends. There were lavish dinners with boldface names at Mr. Epstein’s mansion on the Upper East Side and raucous parties with cheerleaders and models at Mr. Trump’s private club and residence at Mar-a-Lago....

As a warming planet delivers more extreme weather, experts warn that the Trump administration is dismantling the government’s disaster capabilities.In an effort to shrink the federal government, President Trump and congressional Republicans have taken steps that are diluting the country’s ability to anticipate, prepare for and respond to catastrophic flooding and other extreme weather events, disaster experts say. Staff reductions, budget cuts and other changes made by the administration since January have already created holes at the National Weather Service, which forecasts and warns of dangerous weather. Mr. Trump’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year would close 10 laboratories...

Some senior officials who have taken the test have been asked whether they said anything negative about the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, in a highly unusual use of the tool.Typically, the F.B.I. has turned to polygraph tests to sniff out employees who might have betrayed their country or shown they cannot be trusted with secrets. Since Kash Patel took office as the director of the F.B.I., the bureau has significantly stepped up the use of the lie-detector test, at times subjecting personnel to a question as specific as whether they have cast aspersions on Mr. Patel himself. In interviews and...

On Saturday, the New York Times editorial board published an article claiming that Trump’s “politicized FBI” has “made Americans less safe.” That’s rich. I’m old enough to remember when the Obama administration and the Biden administration actually did weaponize the FBI against Donald Trump. And I’m pretty sure everyone on the NYT editorial board is, too. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino wrote a scathing response to the article, calling it “precisely why hard-working Americans simply do not trust the media.” Bongino’s tweet, which quickly gained traction online, took direct aim at what he described as a “poorly thought out hit...

Only 11 days after President Trump was inaugurated for a second term, his administration began a purge of the F.B.I. that now threatens some of the bureau’s most important missions. His appointees ousted eight of its most experienced managers, including the division heads overseeing national security, cybersecurity and criminal investigations. Several had worked on prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters or had assisted in the various investigations of Mr. Trump, and Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, said they could not be trusted to carry out the president’s agenda.That was just the beginning. Over the past five months, many...

The Supreme Court has set a new, higher bar for judges seeking to block Trump administration policies nationwide. But some legal routes remain open.A Supreme Court ruling limiting the ability of judges to block White House policies will bring a wave of urgency and uncertainty to the federal courts, experts said, as plaintiffs pursue new ways of blocking President Trump’s agenda and judges sort out how to apply the court’s complex ruling. On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that district court judges likely exceeded their authority with so-called nationwide injunctions. Also known as universal injunctions, they have been used by...

The court tied the hands of judges at a time when Congress has been cowed and internal executive branch constraints have been steamrolled.The Supreme Court ruling barring judges from swiftly blocking government actions, even when they may be illegal, is yet another way that checks on executive authority have eroded as President Trump pushes to amass more power.The decision on Friday, by a vote of 6 to 3, will allow Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship to take effect in some parts of the country — even though every court that has looked at the directive has...

Zohran Mamdani’s stunning performance in the Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday amounted to a watershed moment for Muslim New Yorkers, who could see one of their own lead City Hall for the first time should he succeed in the general election in November. New York City is home to roughly one million Muslims; they made up 12 percent of the electorate in the 2021 mayoral election. Mr. Mamdani wove his faith into his campaign from its earliest days, hitting the trail while fasting for Ramadan and taking his message of affordability to mosques and Muslim community centers throughout the city....