Free Republic

A lot of early analysis of the 2024 presidential election has suffered from three overlapping problems. First, that vote margins can be influenced by changes in turnout as well as changes in vote preference. If voters stay home, the candidate they would have supported receives fewer votes. And it looks like a lot of 2020 voters stayed home in 2024. But — second — not as many as one might have thought in the first few days after the election. Many immediate analyses of what happened exaggerated the decrease in Democratic votes or suggested that Donald Trump won an outright...

Speaking to CBS News’s Lesley Stahl during his first presidential bid, Donald Trump made an unsurprising admission.Stahl had asked Trump why he continued to disparage journalists and the news media, describing them as an enemy of the American people. Trump’s explanation wasn’t that the media had earned that disparagement or to concede some exaggeration. Instead, he admitted that it was tactical.“I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” Stahl recalled Trump telling her.Again, not surprising. But it does cast a different light on Trump’s...

Bump is ready to quickly move on from any issue that could be a problem for the political party he’s trying to help win this election.Because the national news media can’t be bothered to actually scrutinize Kamala Harris’ campaign — they’re trying to help her win, after all — they instead choose to scrutinize anyone else who tries.That’s why rather than sincerely look into Kamala’s relatively new biographical claim that she once slung Happy Meals working at a McDonald’s, The Washington Post’s most willfully obtuse writer, Philip Bump, decided that this week his energy was best spent belittling anyone who...

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee, narrowed down his appearances on the Sunday political talk shows this weekend to just one: Fox News. Perhaps this was because his multiple appearances a week ago had him trying to defend his running mate Donald Trump’s past engagement with a notorious antisemite; perhaps it was because he is viewed broadly negatively, including faring relatively poorly among Fox News’s central audience, Republicans. Whatever the reason, the friendly environment allowed Vance to lean into claims that would have met more resistance elsewhere, like Trump’s long-standing insistence that every bad poll is (somehow)...

On Saturday afternoon, Thomas Crooks, 20, climbed onto the roof of a building in Butler, Pa., carrying an AR-style rifle purchased by his father more than a decade ago and loaded with ammunition Crooks bought that morning. People in the audience spotted him and pointed him out to law enforcement, but Crooks managed to open fire at former president Donald Trump before he could be apprehended. He was killed shortly afterward by a Secret Service sniper.It’s not clear why Crooks did what he did. He was a registered Republican but appears to have made a small donation to an organization...

There’s a large region of the right-wing media ecosystem that is littered with those always-disappointing carbon-snake fireworks. Touch one of them with a spark and it springs to life, pushing out an unbroken chain of detritus. Eventually it dies out, leaving a mess, but there are other sparks and other snakes still to be lit. On Tuesday, filings from Donald Trump’s federal indictment served as a spark. The mess that followed was unusual only in its hyperbole: because the FBI included documentation about how to handle contingencies in its August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, including limiting the use of firearms,...

On his way into the Manhattan courtroom where he is being tried on 34 felony charges, former president Donald Trump on Tuesday spoke to reporters about another of his indictments, the one obtained by special counsel Jack Smith in Florida related to Trump’s possession of documents with classification markings. “You probably saw last night that Jack Smith got caught with his hand in the cookie jar,” Trump said as part of a lengthy excoriation of prosecutors and President Biden. “It was released late last night, and it’s a big story. The documents case is a hoax created by them for...

Donald Trump called into a CNBC show on Monday morning, allowing host Joe Kernen to ask a question about government spending and, specifically, the large chunk of spending that is committed to social programs. “Have you changed your outlook on how to handle entitlement — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Mr. President?” Kernen asked. “It seems like something has to be done.” At that point, two familiar patterns kicked in. Trump tends to like to align with the opinions offered by his interviewers, particularly on subjects that aren’t at the center of his political identity. He also tends to ramble when...

The internet has been a huge boon for the accessibility of information. There are very few barriers to consuming classic literature or detailed scientific analyses or catalogues of news reports. There is also an exorbitant amount of garbage information, of course, and an entire universe of people who say stuff that they think will get people to click links that will earn themselves money. Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter. While confidence in American institutions has been in decline for some time, it’s not hard to imagine how the economic incentives of the internet contribute....

With every hour that passes, Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination grows tighter. Every day in which his opponents aren’t gaining ground on his position is a day in which he gets nearer to appearing on the ballot next November and nearer to possibly being inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025.

On Feb. 6, 1974, the House of Representatives considered a historic question: Should it authorize an investigation that might lead to the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon? House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino (D-N.J.) argued for the initiation of a probe under his committee’s purview. “We are going to work expeditiously and fairly,” he told his colleagues. “When we have completed our inquiry, whatever the result, we will make our recommendations to the House. We will do so as soon as we can, consistent with principles of fairness and completeness.” When the resolution to launch the inquiry came to...

One good way to tell that the walls are closing in on the Biden Crime Family is by watching the reaction of legacy media “journalists” dedicated to running cover for the Regime. A columnist from the Washington Post named Philip Bump best exhibited the media’s panic with his behavior during a podcast and immediately afterward. As the New York Post’s Miranda Devine reported, Bump spoke with Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman on his podcast. Bump was grilled about the Joe Biden’s connections to his son Hunter’s business dealings, particularly with the fact the White House occupant was receiving millions in...

VIDEOHere is the tail end of an AMAZING interview with Washington Post columnist (and voice of the Deep State) Philip Bump. Perhaps he thought he would get a gushy softball interview with the owner of New York's Comedy Cellar, Noam Dworman. Unfortunately for Bump, Dworman did his homework and asked him (GASP!) hardball questions about the corruption of Hunter Biden and his dad. As you can see, Bump had a lot of trouble handling actual facts. The interview built up to the meltdown of the final crescendo which you see here. You can see the entire revealing hour plus interview...

It’s both amazing and unsurprising for a journalist to call for less evidence to be revealed in a story.The ongoing issue with the attack of Paul Pelosi last week is causing some problems for the media, one of those being that the story is, in fact, ongoing. As I mentioned on the last episode of The Lie-Able Sources VIP podcast, had they allowed this to be chalked up to an incident involving a local homeless individual, the story would likely be fading from the news cycle. But the insistence on making this a political hit job on conservatives–in the hopes...

An underappreciated aspect of Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency was how he co-opted the Republican Party’s power as his own. He had flirted with independent bids in the past, back in the era when Ross Perot had made that seem something close to viable. In 2016, though, he found actual success not by opposing the GOP from the outside but from the inside — casting the party as rotten and ineffective as he gobbled up its supporters and worked his way through its creaky system. The establishment was slow to realize what was happening and slower to figure out...

Katie Lane’s father, Patrick, died of covid-19 in the summer of 2021. Hundreds of thousands of Americans did, of course, but Lane believes that her father was among the estimated 234,000 people whose deaths could have been prevented had he been vaccinated against the coronavirus. Asked during an interview on CNN why she thought her father chose not to get a dose of the vaccine, Lane suggested that there were a number of factors, media consumption included. “He watched some Tucker Carlson videos on YouTube, and some of those videos involved some misinformation about vaccines,” Lane said, “and I believe...

“You hear about certain places like Chicago and you hear about what’s going on in Detroit and other — other cities, all Democrat run,” he said. “Every one of them is Democrat run. Twenty out of 20. The 20 worst, the 20 most dangerous are Democrat run.” Among the 20 cities with the most violent crime per capita, one isn’t a Democrat: the independent mayor of Springfield, Mo.

Sometimes news is newsworthy not because it is particularly revelatory but because it confirms something obvious that lacked confirmation or because it provides something broadly understood with a sense of scale. This certainly applies to the revelation — uncovered by the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns and reported by CNN’s Brian Stelter — that President Biden views Rupert Murdoch, founder of Fox News, as “the most dangerous man in the world.” Obvious in broad strokes but now confirmed and with a sense of scale. But this top-line assessment of the face most associated with the right-wing cable...

It did not take long for Donald Trump to start bragging. Less than three hours after polls closed in Texas, Trump’s political action committee released a statement from the former president. “All 33 candidates that were Trump endorsed have either won their primary election or are substantially leading in the case of a runoff,” it read. “Governor Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick have won in a landslide.” Then, an incongruous “thank you,” before he offered his congratulations to the winners..... You’ll notice a few things off the bat. The first is that most of the candidates being endorsed were...

The Washington Post ripped the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s self-own for trying to garner praise for President Joe Biden for a paltry drop in gas prices. The DCCC tweeted out a graph which appeared to show a significant drop in gas prices. The DCCC captioned its tweet: “Thanks, @JoeBiden.” But the DCCC was being either very misleading or displaying complete ineptitude. Upon closer examination, the graph actually showed only a drop of — wait for it — two cents around the last two weeks of November ($3.40 → $3.38). Liberal Post national correspondent Philip Bump headlined his write-up of the...