Free Republic

On Friday’s broadcast of PBS’s “Washington Week,” New York Times Chief White House Correspondent and MSNBC Political Analyst Peter Baker stated that there have been instances of political violence from the left “But it does seem, at times, that Trump and his people seem to be more willing to use words like traitor and treasonous that might excite people to take action.” Baker stated, “On the physical violence part, and that has also been seen on both sides too, of course. President Trump was the target of two different assassination attempts last year. Just this last week, I think the...

President Trump in just two weeks back in office has moved with astonishing speed and boundless ambition to overturn the existing political, economic, cultural and international order in an even more far-reaching way than many of his supporters or critics had imagined possible.Mr. Trump has thrown the nation’s capital into turmoil by purging enemies at home, attacking allies abroad, shuttering one agency while targeting others, handing the tools of government to an unelected billionaire, ignoring multiple laws, trying to rewrite the Constitution and even flirting with staying in power beyond his two-term limit.Taking a Gatling gun approach to governing, firing...

Someone needed to fill the delusional, pretentious void left by Paul Krugman at The New York Times to tell Americans they’re too stupid to realize the God-Bless-America awesomeness of the Biden economy. It looks like Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker volunteered. Baker used a Jan. 5 news item to clap back at President-elect Donald Trump for denigrating Bidenomics and wound up insulting Americans in the process. “President Biden is bequeathing his successor a nation that by many measures is in good shape, even if voters remain unconvinced.” In other words, darn those uneducated plebeians! But it got worse. Baker...

To hear President-elect Donald J. Trump tell it, he is about to take over a nation ravaged by crisis, a desolate hellscape of crime, chaos and economic hardship. “Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” he declared on social media last week.But by many traditional metrics, the America that Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden when he takes the oath for a second time, two weeks from Monday, is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since George W. Bush came into office in 2001.For the first time since...

On the night he won a second term, President-elect Donald J. Trump rejoiced in the moment. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he boasted. In the two weeks since, his campaign has repeatedly heralded his “landslide,” even to market Trump merchandise like the “Official Trump Victory Glass.”But by traditional numeric measures, Mr. Trump’s victory was neither unprecedented nor a landslide. In fact, he prevailed with one of the smallest margins of victory in the popular vote since the 19th century and generated little of the coattails of a true landslide.The disconnect goes beyond predictable Trumpian braggadocio. The...

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,...

President-elect Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on Friday, vowing to bring justice to his name after years of attacks from the mainstream media. The incoming 47th president announced he is suing several media outlets, including the New York Times, CBS News, Penguin Random House, and the Daily Beast, alleging widespread bias and defamation. Trump’s lawyer, Edward Andrew Paltzik, demands $10 billion in damages for publishing defamatory material. In the lawsuit, Trump accused the mainstream media of “defaming and disparaging” him during coverage of the election and making “false and defamatory statements.” The NYT was at the center of the lawsuit....

Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election. Follow live updates and results.In her closing rally on the Ellipse last week, Kamala Harris scorned Donald J. Trump as an outlier who did not represent America. “That is not who we are,” she declared.In fact, it turns out, that may be exactly who we are. At least most of us.The assumption that Mr. Trump represented an anomaly who would at last be consigned to the ash heap of history was washed away on Tuesday night by a red current that swept through battleground states — and swept away the understanding of...

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...

When the history of the 2024 election is written, one of the iconic images illustrating it will surely be the mug shot taken of Donald J. Trump after one of his four indictments, staring into the camera with his signature glare. It is an image not of shame but of defiance, the image of a man who would be a convicted felon before Election Day and yet possibly president of the United States again afterward. Sometimes lost amid all the shouting of a high-octane campaign heading into its final couple of weeks is that simple if mind-bending fact. America for...

When Finland wanted to join NATO to ward off Russian aggression, it knew it had a friend living in the White House and could count on President Biden’s support. But to ensure that the U.S. Senate would ratify its membership bid, Finland’s government decided to also seek out the president living in Florida. And so Mikko Hautala, the Finnish ambassador to the United States at the time, made a point of speaking privately with former President Donald J. Trump to persuade him of the merits of his country’s joining the alliance. The goal was to head off any opposition by...

Former President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on his side. Except that there was no audience. The debate was held in an empty hall. No one “went crazy,” as Mr. Trump put it, because no one was there.Anyone can misremember, of course. But the debate had been just a week earlier and a fairly memorable moment. And it was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately. In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer...

The last time the nation held a debate with the presidency on the line, a candidate with about eight decades of life behind him faced the challenge of proving that he was still up to the job of running the country. He failed. Two and a half months later, the cast of characters has shifted and another candidate heading toward the octogenarian club confronts his own test to demonstrate that he has not diminished with age. Whether he passes that test may influence who will be the next occupant of the Oval Office. At 78, former President Donald J. Trump...

When a draft of a blockbuster Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade leaked in 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris met with Ron Klain, then the White House chief of staff, in her West Wing office. He had an idea: She should lead a new task force on abortion rights. She seemed uncertain. “Why?” she asked. “We need a real leader, and you’re the leader,” Mr. Klain responded. Ms. Harris asked for time to think about it. She did not want to just give a speech without substance. And she had spent much of the previous year and a half...

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,...

WASHINGTON — Some longtime aides and advisers to President Joe Biden have become increasingly convinced that he will have to step aside from the campaign, and in recent days they have been trying to come up with ways to persuade him that he should, according to three people briefed on the matter. A small group of Biden’s advisers in the administration and the campaign — at least two of whom have told allies that they do not believe he should keep trying to run for a second term — have said they would have to convince the president of several...

The New York Times chief White House Correspondent has admitted to using “translation headsets” to help understand what Joe Biden is saying during public speeches, even when he is 20 feet away from the president, according to the Times. This raises other questions. How does the sign language interpreter interpret what Biden says when he gives official speeches? According to The New York Times, Biden recently told Democrat governors that his ‘health is fine,’ “it’s just my brain.” The Democrats are in disarray over Biden’s mental fitness, with many top officials calling on him to drop out of the race...

One of America’s political parties has a presidential candidate who is really old and showing it. The other has a presidential candidate who is a convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, business fraudster and self-described aspiring dictator for a day. And also really old.One of the parties is up in arms about its nominee and trying to figure out how to replace him at the last minute. The other is not.The spectacle of the week since the nationally televised debate between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump has thrown into sharp relief two political parties that agreed to be...

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...

Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Donald J. Trump from the Oval Office.President Biden has not had a lot of fun perusing polls lately. He has a lower approval rating than every president going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower at this stage of their tenures, and he trails former President Donald J. Trump in a fall rematch. But Mr. Biden can take solace from one survey in which he is way out in front of Mr. Trump.A new poll of historians coming out on Presidents’ Day weekend ranks Mr. Biden as the 14th-best president in American...