Free Republic

President-elect Donald J. Trump has promised to unravel President Biden’s major legislation when he takes office next month, but Mr. Biden is hoping to salvage his most prized policies with help from an unlikely source: Republicans.With just weeks left in office, Mr. Biden and his aides have emphasized that his signature economic legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, overwhelmingly benefits Republican districts, in the hopes that Mr. Trump would face blowback from his own party if he repealed it.The administration is also racing to award hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and finalize environmental regulations to lock in Mr. Biden’s...

When he takes the oath of office in January, Donald J. Trump will make history as the first court-adjudicated sexual abuser to assume the presidency. But if he gets the team of his choice, he will not be the only one in the room whose conduct has been called into question.Mr. Trump, who was found liable in a civil trial last year of accosting a woman, has selected a defense secretary, an attorney general, a secretary of health and human services and an efficiency czar, all of whom have been accused of variations of sexual misconduct and, like the president-elect,...

For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.” Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their...

The New York Times editorial board was despondent over President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive victory, declaring his return to power was a “grave threat” to the republic. “American voters have made the choice to return Donald Trump to the White House, setting the nation on a precarious course that no one can fully foresee,” the board wrote on Wednesday, later adding, “Mr. Trump’s election poses a grave threat to [the] republic, but he will not determine the long-term fate of American democracy. That outcome remains in the hands of the American people.” Trump capped a stunning political comeback from his defeat...

The New York Times published a think piece last week strategizing how leftists might be able to thwart the will of American voters and rescue democracy from President Donald Trump should he win on Nov. 5. Using the term "democracy" euphemistically for a state of things in which Democrats or leftists of other stripes are in power, the authors — a pair of Harvard University professors hostile to Trump, the Constitution as written, and the Electoral College — recommended "societal mobilization" should the powers that be fail to get their way. Daniel Ziblatt and Steve Levitsky's call to action, which...

As the presidential contest enters the final sprint, campaign aides and allies close to Vice President Kamala Harris are growing cautiously optimistic about her chances of victory, saying the race is shifting in her favor. Top Democratic strategists are increasingly hopeful that the campaign’s attempts to cast former President Donald J. Trump as a fascist — paired with an expansive battleground-state operation and strength among female voters still energized by the end of federal abortion rights — will carry Ms. Harris to a narrow triumph. Even some close to Mr. Trump worry that the push to label him a budding...

A memo circulating among at least half a dozen advisers to former President Donald J. Trump recommends that if he is elected, he bypass traditional background checks by law enforcement officials and immediately grant security clearances to a large number of his appointees after being sworn in, according to three people briefed on the matter.The proposal is being promoted by a small group including Boris Epshteyn, a top legal adviser to Mr. Trump who was influential in its development, according to the three people.It is not clear whether Mr. Trump has seen the proposal or whether he is inclined to...

Plenty of presidents have been called dictators by their political opponents, but none until now has been publicly accused of being a “fascist” by his own handpicked advisers.When former President Donald J. Trump’s longest serving chief of staff said the other day that his old boss “falls into the general definition of fascist,” Mr. Trump let loose with the insults, assailing his onetime right hand as a “total degenerate,” a “LOWLIFE” and a “bad General.”What Mr. Trump did not do, at least at first, was actually deny that he was or aspired to be a fascist.Any other politician might consider...

A campaign marked by Donald J. Trump’s apocalyptic extremes has turned even darker in its final days.With voting already underway in battleground states, the former president on Friday escalated his threats to prosecute and imprison a wide range of people involved in elections and politics. Hours later, on the hugely popular “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, he said that the “enemy within,” a phrase he has used to describe political opponents, poses a bigger threat to the nation than North Korea.For eight years, Democrats have warned that Mr. Trump’s political ambitions have fueled some of the nation’s deepest divides. But...

Late this summer, a prominent right-wing think tank invited conservatives from around the country to learn how to work in a second Donald J. Trump administration. In a series of training sessions in Washington, former Trump officials shared strategies with attendees for combating leftist civil servants in the federal government and dealing with the mainstream media. Participants were sent home with a thick binder of materials for further study. One section’s title: “Tales From the Swamp: How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump.” The classes could easily have been the work of Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint and personnel project...

“ Thirteen former Trump administration officials released an open letter on Friday amplifying warnings from John F. Kelly, Donald J. Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, that the former president would rule like a dictator if he returned to office.” ……………. “The letter, organized on Wednesday after Mr. Kelly’s comments were published in The Times on Tuesday, was signed by several outspoken Harris supporters, including two who gave speeches at the Democratic National Convention: Stephanie Grisham, a former Trump White House press secretary, and Olivia Troye, who was an adviser to Mr. Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence. Other signers...

Donald Trump has described at length the dangerous and disturbing actions he says he will take if he wins the presidency. His rallies offer a steady stream of such promises and threats — things like prosecuting political opponents and using the military against U.S. citizens. These statements are so outrageous and outlandish, so openly in conflict with the norms and values of American democracy that many find them hard to regard as anything but empty bluster. We have two words for American voters: Believe him. The record shows that Mr. Trump often pursues his stated goals, regardless of how plainly...

Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt advised pushing a "militant democracy" to ensure an "authoritarian figure" like former President Trump never rises to power again. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Levitsky and Ziblatt describe how they spent the last year "researching how democracies can protect themselves from authoritarian threats from within," lamenting how close Trump remains to getting a second term. "How could such an openly authoritarian figure have a coin flip’s chance of returning to the presidency? Why have so many of our democracy’s defenses seemingly broken down, and which, if any, remain?" they wrote....

The cardinal should go to confession. Timothy Dolan let a white-tie charity dinner in New York showcase that most uncharitable of men, Donald Trump. At the annual Al Smith dinner, Dolan suffused the impious Trump in the pious glow of Catholic charities. Dolan looked on with a doting expression as Trump made his usual degrading, scatological comments about his foils, this time cloaked as humor. “We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child,” Trump told the New York fat cats. “It’s a...

With three weeks left before Election Day, former President Donald J. Trump is pushing to the forefront of his campaign a menacing political threat: that he would use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him. In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Trump framed Democrats as a pernicious “enemy from within” that would cause chaos on Election Day that he speculated the National Guard might need to handle. A day later, he closed his remarks to a crowd at what was billed as a town hall in Pennsylvania with a stark message about his political opponents....

Donald Trump is so dependent on racial and ethnic antagonism that without it, he would be a marginal figure, relegated to the sidelines. Trump’s constant demonization of Black people and immigrants has inured the public to the fact that he is the first — or certainly the most explicit — modern president and party nominee to transparently generate, not to mention exacerbate, fear and white animosity toward people of color. Despite his appeal to a small if potentially crucial segment of Black and Hispanic men, racial bigotry has been central to Trump’s appeal from his initial quest, in 2015 and...

Heading into the final three weeks of the 2024 election, Senator JD Vance of Ohio will still not say whether his running mate won or lost the last race for the White House.In an interview with The New York Times that will be published on Saturday, Mr. Vance repeatedly refused to acknowledge former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat and went to even greater lengths to avoid doing so than he did during the vice-presidential debate earlier this month.When asked about the previous election during an hourlong interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a host of “The Interview,” a Times podcast published each...

Former President Donald J. Trump escalated the nativist, anti-immigration rhetoric that has animated his political career with a speech Friday in Aurora, Colo., where he repeated false and grossly exaggerated claims about undocumented immigrants that local Republican officials have refuted.For weeks, Aurora has been fending off false rumors about the city. And its conservative Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, said in a statement on Friday that he hoped to show Mr. Trump that Aurora was “a considerably safe city.”But Mr. Trump has made debunked claims about Aurora, a Denver suburb, such a central part of his stump speech that he took...

In Valdosta, Ga., Donald Trump made a false claim about President Biden’s responsiveness and demonstrated his long-held instinct to view disaster response through the prism of his personal politics

The classic example of chutzpah is that of the child who murders his parents and then pleads for mercy as an orphan. With the 2024 presidential election, we have a new way to illustrate the point: the candidate who condones violence, dehumanizes his opponents and whips his supporters into a frenzy, then turns around to condemn the harsh rhetoric of his opponents and call for peaceful discourse. Following the second attempt on his life in as many months, Trump blamed Democrats for casting him as an existential threat to American democracy. “Look,” his running mate JD Vance said on Monday,...