Free Republic

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and her top aides and family members routinely sent personal messages and requests to young staff members that are now under review by the department’s inspector general. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and her former deputy chief of staff sent texts asking employees to bring wine to them during trips for the department. Sometimes the requests came in the middle of the workday. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer’s husband exchanged text messages with young female staff members, as did her father. Some of the young women were instructed by Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and the former deputy chief of staff to “pay attention” to...

Hide the sharp objects—at least if you take Nicolle Wallace seriously. On Friday’s edition of Deadline White House, Wallace began by painting an apocalyptic picture of the situation in Iran. Grim enough to have Trump supporters reaching for the Lexapro—if they believed her. After laying out her bleak scenario, Wallace went a step further, warning of: “A full-scale global economic crisis that might actually be even worse than those headlines, and worse than we think.”Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture. “The United States,” Colby said, according to a blistering new report by The Free Press, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.” One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the 14th century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission,...

Megyn Kelly on "Piers Morgan Uncensored" discussed the damage sustained by the Trump political coalition, the global economy, and U.S. allies, after 40 days at war with Iran. “The question is now not, who has Trump lost. The question is who remains," she said about the MAGA coalition. "He’s underwater with men, including young men and young people. The young person coalition that Charlie Kirk delivered to the president is gone. They’ve abandoned Donald Trump." "These battles in the Middle East have been fought now for 20-plus years, and we continue to learn the same lesson over and over. It’s...

Donald Trump's dramatic climbdown from his chilling threat to wipe out Iran's civilization has exposed the limits - and the rising risks - of the U.S. president's typically unpredictable negotiating style. His decision on Tuesday to back down and agree to a two-week ceasefire – which critics mockingly called another example ​of “TACO,” or “Trump always chickens out” – marked the biggest step so far toward de-escalating a 40-day-old war that has shaken the Middle East and disrupted global energy markets. But Trump’s claims of victory over Iran overlooked questions about ‌the effectiveness of mixing maximalist demands, erratic rhetoric and...

This is not the run up to the midterm elections that Republicans wanted. A year and a half after winning the White House by promising to lower costs and end wars, Donald Trump is a wartime president overseeing surging energy costs and an escalating overseas conflict that many in his own party do not like. He offered little clarity to a nation eager for answers this week during a prime-time address from the White House, his first since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran more than a month ago, simultaneously suggesting that the war was ending and expanding. “Thanks to...

The Pentagon is sending ground forces to Iran. Trump administration officials gave a story to the Washington Post that is being repeated everywhere: The Pentagon is preparing for weeks of boots on the ground operations in Iran, a major escalation in President Trump’s goal to dismantle the remaining faction of the murderous Iranian regime, according to a report. Thousands of US Marines would be sent to the Middle East to conduct raids that include Special Operations forces and conventional infantry troops, the Washington Post reported, citing sources. Officials have been discussing plans for sending troops into Iran for weeks. ***...

Russia has quietly become Iran’s most consequential external partner. Public reporting shows Moscow feeding Tehran real time satellite imagery of U.S. and Israeli positions — a simple but powerful boost to Iranian targeting and battle damage assessment. Russia has also helped upgrade Iran’s Shahed drones with better navigation and communications systems. These aren’t glamorous contributions, but they matter: they force the United States to burn multimillion dollar interceptors on cheap, disposable threats. None of this changes the balance of power. But it absolutely changes the tempo of the war. China’s support looks different — quieter, but just as important. Beijing...

In the nearly three weeks since President Donald Trump struck Iran, conventional wisdom has set in that his base is sticking with him on the war. It’s true that Trump’s base hasn’t ditched him in huge numbers — and an overwhelming number of MAGA supporters, especially, say they support the war. The opposition from the likes of Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Megyn Kelly and other influencers hasn’t translated to wide swaths of the GOP base itself. But Trump has alienated some significant portions of his base, and he’s risking alienating more. A fresh batch of polling in recent days...

Boy, it's been a struggle whipping up ugly racist sentiment since President Trump "closed" the border last year. No more stories about immigrant caravans marching ominously north to steal our jobs and rape our women. No more tall tales of Haitian gangs eating the cats, eating the dogs. Sure, immigrants might still be "poisoning the blood" of our country, as the president claimed numerous times during his 2024 campaign. But with so many violent deportations and the killing of two white American citizens protesting them, that rhetoric has lost some of its glow. What we need are some fresh scapegoats....

President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is not going well. He began the conflict with a promise to use an air campaign to initiate regime change in as little as “two or three days.” But about three weeks in, Iran’s government, military and security forces remain highly functional. No popular uprising has emerged. And Iran’s government has seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, sending global oil prices surging and Trump into a panic. Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, is one of the analysts who saw this situation coming a long way off. An expert...

Three weeks into a military engagement in Iran, a war Republicans will not call a war, the American and Israeli militaries have all but wiped out Iran's capacity to make war. We have killed their leadership, the replacement leaders, and militia members on the ground. We have destroyed their missile launchers and the factories in which they made the missiles. But Iran still has one of the most powerful weapons in the world on its side, and it is ruthlessly deploying it – the American press corps. "Families mourn as dead are laid to rest in Tehran," blared the front...

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — In the two weeks since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, President Donald Trump increasingly has been knocked on his political heels. He’s grown more agitated with news coverage and has failed to find a way to explain why he started the war — or how he will end it — that resonates with a public concerned by American deaths in the conflict, surging oil prices and dropping financial markets. Even some of his supporters are questioning his plan and his overall poll numbers are declining. Meanwhile, Moscow is getting a boost...

In 1991, American officials flew to Israel to keep the country from retaliating against Scud missile attacks and joining the Gulf War. In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned it would be “in Israel’s overwhelming best interests not to get involved” in the looming invasion of Iraq. In 2026, the United States went to war alongside Israel. “It’s the first time,” said Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, “that Israel is going to war together with a superpower.” The United States has been the Jewish state’s most important backer for decades, providing it with weaponry and working...

The scenario long-dreaded by Republican strategists looks increasingly plausible following Tuesday’s primary election in Texas: Democrat James Talarico may face Republican Ken Paxton for the state’s U.S. Senate seat in November. Paxton is heading for a runoff against Sen. John Cornyn where he is likely to be at least a slight favorite, though the final results from the first round of voting could shift expectations. Talarico defeated Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic primary, according to Associated Press projections. Republicans fear the matchup could, at the very least, cost the party tens of millions of dollars to protect Paxton, the...

Every few years, Washington rediscovers fraud. A viral clip of someone misusing food stamps. A headline about child care providers in Minnesota. A politician promising to crack down on “fraud and abuse.” The ritual is familiar. And the response is always the same: more paperwork, more surveillance, more hoops to jump through for people who are already struggling.

President Donald Trump’s disdain for the Constitution is evident in his launching a war in Iran without any semblance of congressional approval. Congress must act quickly to protect its role in a Constitution that was meant to prevent such unilateral action by the president.

“The dominant reaction from the Left to Trump’s bombing of Iran has been to declare the action illegal, reckless, and unconstitutional.” Shortly after President Donald Trump ordered strikes on Iran, the Left locked into a single talking point: illegal war. Reckless. Idiotic. Betrayal. Forever war. Constitutional crisis. Pick your adjective. The speed and uniformity were almost impressive. Sen. Tim Kaine led the charge, and he did not ease into it. In a graphic posted to X, Kaine asked whether Trump was “too mentally incapacitated” to understand that the United States once had a diplomatic agreement with Iran. He declared the...

In the wake of Iranian Supreme Leader Aylatollah Khamenei coming down with a killer headache after getting a U.S. warhead on his forehead, on Saturday, The Washington Post published one of their infamous glowing remembrances of Islamic terrorists. The paper fondly remembered the brutal Islamic dictator as a “avuncular figure” with an “easy smile” and love for “Persian poetry.” Readers might remember when The Post fluffed up the former leader of ISIS as an “austere religious scholar”; well, they're back at it again with Khamenei in their obituary titled: “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is dead at 86.” The...

Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in President Trump's first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News. The official statistics contained in the DHS document, which had not been previously reported publicly, provide the most detailed look yet into who ICE has arrested during the Trump administration's far-reaching deportation operations across the U.S. The internal DHS figures undermine frequent assertions by the Trump administration that its crackdown on illegal immigration is primarily targeting...