Free Republic

The United States has already struck 200 trade deals, President Donald Trump said in an interview this week — but he refused to say with whom. Trump’s comments come just two weeks after he announced a 90-day pause on most of the sweeping global tariffs he imposed earlier this month to allow time for trade negotiations with hundreds of countries slugged by the punishing levies. Only China was exempted from the 90-day pause. “I’ve made 200 deals,” Trump told Time Magazine in a wide-ranging interview published Friday, “100%.” Pressed on which countries he had made deals with, Trump refused to...

Sen. Ron Johnson is actively investigating 9/11. A day after the Wisconsin Republican went on a far-right podcast promoting conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, a spokesperson for Johnson said the lawmaker is currently seeking information and documentation in order to hold hearings on the event nearly 25 years later. He would do so in his capacity as chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, one of Congress’s most storied and powerful panels with far-reaching jurisdiction that gives its chair wide latitude to probe a diverse array of matters. It has...

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett made clear on Thursday that President Donald Trump’s 10 percent baseline tariff on imports is not going anywhere, despite ongoing negotiations with foreign nations to roll back the steeper tariffs Trump put in place last week.

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pledged a first ever $1 trillion defense budget proposal on Monday, a record sum for the military. Trump, during a press event with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said the upcoming budget would be “in the vicinity” of $1 trillion Hegseth went further in an X post on Monday evening, saying Trump “is rebuilding our military — and FAST.” “COMING SOON: the first TRILLION dollar @DeptofDefense budget,” Hegseth posted from his personal account. “(PS: we intend to spend every taxpayer dollar wisely — on lethality and readiness).” The number would be a...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis escalated his attacks against Randy Fine on Wednesday, blaming the representative-elect’s “unique problems” for a special election victory he said should have been won by a higher margin. Appearing at a press conference in Ocala, Florida, the day after the election, DeSantis argued that President Donald Trump’s involvement in the 6th District race pushed Fine over the line. He added voters had not wanted to support Fine, who Trump had endorsed, and that the president “really had to bail him out in the end.”

If Trump decided he wanted to hold onto power past 2028, there are at least four paths he could try:

A federal judge on Thursday ordered federal agencies to reinstate tens of thousands of probationary employees who were fired amid President Donald Trump’s turbulent effort to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy. U.S. District Judge William Alsup described the mass firings as a “sham” strategy by the government’s central human resources office to sidestep legal requirements for reducing the federal workforce. Alsup, a San Francisco-based appointee of President Bill Clinton, ordered the Departments of Defense, Treasury, Energy, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs to “immediately” offer all fired probationary employees their jobs back. The Office of Personnel Management, the judge said, had made...

Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau on Sunday blocked Russia-aligned, far-right candidate Călin Georgescu from running in May’s presidential election. The bureau said it would post the reasons for its decision later, brushing off objections from the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump that the firebrand NATO skeptic should be permitted to stand. The Digi24 news service said the electoral bureau had voted against allowing Georgescu, the frontrunner, to proceed by a margin of 10 to 4. An appeal can run until Wednesday. Georgescu came out of nowhere to win the first round of the presidential vote last November, partly on the...

HELENA, Montana — Tim Walz thinks he and Kamala Harris played it too safe last year. He thinks they should have held more town halls. He thinks they didn’t have time to get their feet under them. And he thinks Democrats should have taken more risks and gone to more places. “We shouldn’t have been playing this thing so safe,” the Minnesota governor said in an interview with POLITICO before speaking to nearly 1,000 Democrats here at the Helena fairgrounds last weekend. ... His prescription for Democrats now and in the midterms, he said, is that Democrats “should be everywhere.”...

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump Administration to restore the gender ideology webpages it deleted. US District Jud7ge John Bates of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, a George W. Bush appointee, ordered Trump to restore the pages by midnight tonight. Last month, President Trump scrubbed public health websites of all things related to “gender ideology.” A group dubbed Doctors For America sued the Office of Personal Management and numerous government agencies, claiming the removal could prevent doctors from helping patients. Judge Bates agreed with Doctors for America and ordered the extremist ideology to...

Democrats’ dream of blocking a Republican governing trifecta is dwindling down to a handful of West Coast races, as California’s large cache of still-untallied ballots and its notoriously slow count now take center stage in the national political drama. The party had long seen the nation’s two blue bulwarks — New York and California — as the decisive staging ground for its quest to retake the House majority. In the Empire State, it flipped two GOP-held seats, a rare bright spot in an otherwise nightmarish election night for Democrats. But after Republicans ousted two Pennsylvania Democratic incumbents, the GOP appears...

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico vowed on Sunday to block Ukraine from joining NATO for as long as he is head of the country's government. NATO's leadership wants Ukraine to join the military alliance after its war with Russia ends in order to deter further aggression from Moscow, but Fico's declaration highlights the political difficulties that are likely to arise in pursuing that aim. “As long as I am head of the Slovak government, I will direct the MPs that are under my control as chairman of the [ruling Smer] party never to agree to Ukraine's joining NATO,” he said...

MADISON, Wisconsin — On an oppressively hot August day in downtown Madison, the signs of this famously liberal city’s progressive activism are everywhere. Buildings are draped in pride flags and Black Lives Matter signs are prominently displayed on storefronts. A musty bookstore advertises revolutionary titles and newspaper clippings of rallies against Donald Trump. A fancy restaurant features a graphic of a raised Black fist in its window, with chalk outside on the sidewalk reading “solidarity forever.”Yet the Green Party, which bills itself as an independent political party that has the best interests of self-described leftists at heart, is nowhere to...