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...

SAN FRANCISCO — Former Vice President Al Gore on Monday compared President Donald Trump’s administration to Nazi Germany and issued a dire warning about Trump’s use of power in a speech devoted to climate change. Speaking at an event at the start of San Francisco’s Climate Week, Gore said the Trump administration was “trying to create their own preferred version of reality” to achieve their sweeping objectives similar to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in the 1930s and ‘40s. “I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement,” Gore said to an...

Giorgia Meloni’s interpreter has apologized for faltering during a high-stakes meeting with Donald Trump earlier this week, prompting the Italian prime minister to jump in and translate her own comments about NATO and defense spending. Valentina Maiolini-Rothbacher, who was interrupted by Meloni when providing a translation at the White House meeting on Thursday, said in an interview with Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that the mishap was the “worst thing that can happen to an interpreter, a terrible setback.” Footage of the meeting shows President Trump asking Maiolini-Rothbacher for a translation of Meloni’s response to a question from an Italian...

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...

President Donald Trump has told his inner circle, including members of his Cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role as governing partner, ubiquitous cheerleader and Washington hatchet man. The president remains pleased with Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency initiative but both men have decided in recent days that it will soon be time for Musk to return to his businesses and take on a supporting role, according to three Trump insiders who were granted anonymity to describe the evolving relationship. Musk’s looming retreat comes as some Trump administration insiders...

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.”

Inside the White House, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been perhaps the biggest proponent of ”Liberation Day,” President Donald Trump’s promised unveiling of sweeping new tariffs on Wednesday. But as the day nears, the potential fallout from those tariffs may well liberate Lutnick from his role in the administration, according to half dozen people close to the White House. While Americans and much of the world brace for a possible season of pain following the imposition of the new tranche of tariffs, Trump’s orbit is ready to play the blame game should things go poorly for the White House. And...

U.S. presidential adviser Elon Musk has lambasted the French court verdict that blocked Marine Le Pen from a 2027 presidential run after the far-right figurehead was found guilty of embezzlement. “When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents,” Musk said Monday. “This is their standard playbook throughout the world.”Musk, a tech billionaire turned close aide to U.S. President Donald Trump, has backed far-right causes across Europe in recent months, while the White House has become increasingly critical of democracy in Europe.“This will backfire, like the legal attacks against President Trump,”...

House Republicans don’t have the votes to impeach any federal judges. But a growing number of hard-liners is discussing several other legislative options as GOP leaders search for a release valve for the MAGA fury building over recent court rulings checking President Donald Trump. Top Republicans are likely to put at least one bill, California Rep. Darrell Issa’s “No Rogue Rulings Act,” on the floor in early April, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss scheduling plans. The legislation would crack down on the ability of lower-court judges to issue far-reaching injunctions. That is seen by Speaker Mike Johnson...

Amid the growing battle between President Donald Trump and the courts, a once-unthinkable question is harder to shrug off: Will the administration deliberately defy federal judges if it doesn’t get what it wants? The issue has come into sharp relief in the challenge to the administration’s deportation of Venezuelan nationals under the purported authority of the Alien Enemies Act. The presiding judge — James Boasberg, chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C. — directed the government from the bench to turn the planes around carrying the deportees. That did not happen, though the administration claims it did...

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.”...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning to meet with top executives of several major food brands on Monday, marking the first sitdown between the new Health and Human Services secretary and companies he’s publicly accused of harming Americans’ health. Senior leaders from General Mills and PepsiCo are among those expected to participate in the discussion with Kennedy, said four people familiar with the matter, who were granted anonymity to discuss details that are not yet public, though they cautioned the attendee list could still change. Kennedy agreed to meet with the food executives at the suggestion of the White House,...

CHASING AMY: In its restless quest to display total dominance over Washington, the MAGA movement this week found a new and unlikely object of scorn: Justice Amy Coney Barrett. You’d be forgiven if you missed how one of Donald Trump’s own court picks — particularly one who has rarely strayed from the conservative majority — got crossways with his supporters. Barrett’s great judicial apostasy, as the very-online MAGA right sees it, came when she joined the 5-4 majority that ruled against Trump in Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. Essentially, as our senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein...

President Donald Trump convened his Cabinet in person on Thursday to deliver a message: You’re in charge of your departments, not Elon Musk. According to two administration officials, Trump told top members of his administration that Musk was empowered to make recommendations to the departments but not to issue unilateral decisions on staffing and policy. Musk was also in the room. The meeting followed a series of mass firings and threats to government workers from the billionaire Tesla founder, who helms the Department of Government Efficiency, that created broad uncertainty across the federal government and its workforce. DOGE’s actions have...

When several dozen Democratic political operatives and elected officials gathered at a tony resort off the Potomac River last month, frustration boiled over at the left wing of their party. Democrats had become too obsessed with “ideological purity tests” and should push back “against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging,” according to a document of takeaways from the gathering produced by the center-left group Third Way and obtained by POLITICO. The group of moderate Democratic consultants, campaign staffers, elected officials and party leaders who gathered in Loudoun County, Virginia for a day-and-a-half retreat,...