Free Republic

ATLANTA (AP) — The billionaire heir and the former bartender.Many Democrats have been in and out of the spotlight as the party looks for effective counters to President Donald Trump and his second administration. But two disparate figures, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, have seen their national profiles rise by delivering messages that excite a demoralized and fractured party. The governor, a 60-year-old heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, and the congresswoman, the 35-year-old with working-class roots, both won their first elections in 2018. Both have urged mass resistance and accused their party...

Nathan’s Famous has found a foothold in Ukraine, a hot dog-loving country.The hot dog statue wore tennis shoes and held a Ukrainian flag in its left hand and an American flag in its right. (The hot dog had hands.) Standing outside the flagship store of the Ukrainian gas station chain Socar, the statue displayed a sign advertising “Nathan’s Famous” hot dogs in the same green curlicue script that promotes the chain at its original location in Brooklyn’s Coney Island and Nathan’s outlets everywhere. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Ivan Pozniak, a 35-year-old airline pilot, walked past the statue and into...

Moscow’s advantage on the Ukraine battlefield is waning, experts say. But President Donald Trump seems disinclined to ramp up pressure on the Kremlin to engage in ceasefire talks.Russia’s battlefield strength in Ukraine has started to wane and it could run into serious shortages of manpower and weaponry by next year, even as President Donald Trump retreats from pressure on Moscow to end the war, according to senior U.S. and European officials and military experts. In recent days, Trump appears to have abandoned the threat of harsh financial sanctions he repeated as recently as two weeks ago if Moscow doesn’t agree...

The Trump administration sees tariff talks as a chance to pressure a rival into concessions. E.U. officials have acted as though they were dealing with an ally. The European Union has been following tried-and-true rules of global commerce as it tries to negotiate with the Trump administration to avert painful tariffs on cars, pharmaceuticals and just about everything else.The problem? President Trump is ripping up that rule book.Mr. Trump announced in a Truth Social post on Friday morning that he is recommending a 50 percent tariff on European imports as of June 1, claiming that the bloc’s trade barriers, taxes,...

Antisemitism is increasing on university campuses — and throughout the world. But let’s be clear: Donald Trump and the right wing are not fighting antisemitism. They are exploiting it. And they are deliberately doing so, using Jewish people as pawns in a broader war on education.

If the Trump administration succeeds in blocking Harvard from enrolling international students, the hardest-hit group would be students from China, who make up the school’s biggest share of current students from overseas.The consequences are likely to extend far beyond those select few who could gain entry to the prestigious university. The move could reshape the broader relationship between the two countries by cutting off one of the few remaining reasons that people in China still admire the United States.The flow of students from China to the United States has long been one of the most reliable ballasts in the two...

President Trump’s opponents sought to tie him to Project 2025, which he disavowed.During his first months in office, his policy agenda largely aligned with the conservative playbook.Whether Project 2025 was President Trump’s plan for his second presidency was a big point of contention during the presidential campaign.His opponents in the race — first President Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris — aggressively tried to tie him to the Heritage Foundation’s unpopular conservative playbook, which was unveiled in 2023. Trump vociferously denied it was his plan, and the White House still does.Now, several months into Trump’s second term, what is...

If you have an ounce of historical awareness (and basic empathy), the name “Guantánamo Bay” triggers images of torture and pain. It’s a site where the deprivation of the powers that be has been on full display. But what if Guantánamo wasn’t such a downer? What if it became a “prosperous charter city”? That’s the proposal coming from the most recent group of libertarian tech weirdos trying to rebrand Guantanamo with the help of a little modern-day slave labor. Since taking office, President Donald Trump has been courted by several groups proposing “charter”, “startup”, or “freedom” cities in the United...

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was meeting last week with representatives from a teachers union in his home state when things quickly devolved. Before long, Fetterman began repeating himself, shouting and questioning why “everybody is mad at me,” “why does everyone hate me, what did I ever do” and slamming his hands on a desk, according to one person who was briefed on what occurred. As the meeting deteriorated, a staff member moved to end it and ushered the visitors into the hallway, where she broke down crying. The staffer was comforted by the teachers...

Melania Trump is a world-class snubber. She skipped almost every event of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, only returning to regular political spouse duties late last year, as she had a memoir to plug and a lucrative documentary project to film. Despite suggesting she would be a full-time First Lady in Trump’s second term, she has gone unseen for weeks at a time and even skipped her stepdaughter Tiffany’s baby shower (a People source explained, savagely, that Melania “has her own schedule, even on weekends” and didn’t see “any reason” to attend). Now Melania is getting a small taste of her...

After an unprecedented on-air hissy fit last week over the forced exit of a longtime editor, 60 Minutes's Scott Pelley decided to go all in on the Trump-hate, using his on-air time to praise and promote Marc Elias, the architect of the Russia hoax scandal and probably the world's sleaziest lawyer. According to Breitbart News's Joel Pollak: CBS News’ 60 Minutes portrayed Democrat election lawyer Marc Elias as a victim of President Donald Trump’s supposed retaliation against law firms — without once mentioning Elias’s sordid background. CBS’ Scott Pelley portrayed Elias as a hero, the only lawyer brave enough to...

A former top advisor to ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., suggested House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., is not meeting the moment in the current Trump era. “Trump is just giving us all this incredible red meat. I mean, I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s like the biggest gift any party has been given by the opposition, and we’re just squandering it, to a degree,” former Pelosi advisor Ashley Etienne told Politico’s Deep Dive podcast. Etienne helped Pelosi oversee Democrats’ messaging during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment. She also previously worked for former Vice President Kamala Harris and former...

For years, President Donald Trump blamed “communists” for his legal and political troubles. Now, the second Trump administration is deploying that same historically loaded label to cast his opponents — from judges to educators — as threats to American identity, culture and values.Why? Trump himself explained the strategy last year when he described how he planned to defeat his Democratic opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, in the White House election.“All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody who is going to destroy our country,” he told reporters at his New...

Australia’s Anthony Albanese claimed a historic second term as prime minister on Saturday in a dramatic comeback against once-resurgent conservatives that was powered by voters' concerns about the influence of U.S. President Donald Trump. Peter Dutton, leader of the conservative Liberal party, conceded defeat and the loss of his own seat - echoing the fate of Canada's conservatives and their leader whose election losses days earlier were also attributed to a Trump backlash. [snip] Albanese would be the first Australian prime minister to win a consecutive term in two decades. He said Australians had voted for fairness and "the strength...

It got “60 Minutes” sued by the man who became president of the United States. Now it’s up for a major award — for precisely the same aspect of it that so enraged Donald Trump. Last fall’s “60 Minutes” story on Kamala Harris — the subject of Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS — was nominated for an Emmy Award Thursday for “outstanding edited interview.” Trump, in his lawsuit, complained that the interview was deceptively edited to make his Democratic election opponent look good. The annual News & Documentary Emmys will be awarded in late June. “60 Minutes” is competing...

...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 —...

The state requires voters to prove their citizenship. An error led to chaos, suspicion and confusion, signaling broader challenges for Republican-led efforts across the country.PHOENIX — For 30 years, no one questioned Danny Dobosz’s citizenship when the lifelong Republican cast his ballot. So when a letter arrived from a local election official last month asking him to send back a copy of his birth certificate to prove he was an American citizen who was eligible to vote, he tossed it in the trash at his home in Yuma, Arizona. Dobosz, an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump who was born...

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...

Former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was photographed checking his Signal chat the day before President Donald Trump announced he was stepping down from the role. Reuters published photos of Waltz during a Wednesday cabinet meeting checking his Signal account. Chats with newly-appointed National Security Advisor Marco Rubio and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard could be seen on his phone. U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is seen checking his mobile phone while attending a cabinet meeting held by U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 30, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein pic.twitter.com/gQAvgypVFf — Idrees...

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...