Free Republic

Not much of a secret when the president tweets to the entire world to "BUY" 3 hours before the announcement. "I'm writing to the White House to demand who knew in advance that the president was gonna once again flip flop on tariffs? And are people cashing in?" "There is just all too much opportunity for people in the White House and the administration to be insider trading."

Recently, the United States has imposed tariffs on all its trading partners, including China, under various pretexts. This severely infringes upon the legitimate rights and interests of all countries, severely violates World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, severely undermines the rules-based multilateral trading system, and severely disrupts the global economic order. The Chinese government strongly condemns and resolutely opposes such move. By taking such action, the United States defies the fundamental laws of economics and market principles, disregards the balanced outcomes achieved through multilateral trade negotiations, ignores the fact that the U.S. has long benefited substantially from international trade, and weaponizes...

Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz recently admitted that he can sometimes be a “train wreck” because he speaks “from the heart.” Minnesota’s Manic Marxist also told New York Magazine, in an interview published March 31st, that the Democratic Party lost the 2024 presidential election because it is too “timid.” Wow, never heard that one before. Tampon Timmy also claimed that Democrats should have doubled down on DEI and other forms of wokeness. This is the same guy who, when pressed during the vice presidential debate about patently false statements he had made regarding his presence at the Tiananmen Square protests...

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...

Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Wednesday on CNN’s “OutFront” that the Signal chat among senior national security officials shows President Donald Trump’s second administration was “drunk with power.” Schiff said, “There will be no accountability in his administration. He isn’t going to hold people responsible. He doesn’t want to fire people. He doesn’t even want to talk about it. He wants to put this off as another witch hunt, another hoax is kind of go to deflection. Don’t look at me whatever you do, America, I’m not responsible. That’s just going to breed further mistakes. We can’t have any confidence...

KYIV, Ukraine—It was a scorching summer day in 2014 when Artem Kravchenko and hundreds of other Ukrainian soldiers put their trust in a Russian promise not to open fire and retreated in a column from the surrounded city of Ilovaisk. By the end of the day, Kravchenko found himself lying in a ditch surrounded by dead comrades after Russian forces shot up the column. With three Russian bullets in his body, he had to drink his own urine to survive. “They started shooting from the right, so we went to the left and met another ambush there,” said Kravchenko, who...

When asked if he agrees with scholars who say the U.S. is in a constitutional crisis, Schumer responded, “Yes, I do.” “And democracy is at risk. Look, Donald Trump is a lawless, angry man. He thinks he should be king. He thinks he should do whatever he wants, regardless of the law, and he thinks judges should just listen to him,” Schumer told moderator Kristen Welker. The full interview will air on “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

President Donald Trump and European leaders cautiously welcomed Russia’s President Vladimir Putin saying he accepted the basic precepts of a ceasefire, but Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky warns Moscow demanding concessions is a “predictable” bid to derail talks altogether. On Thursday, a delegation of American negotiators had talks in Moscow, Russia, in hope of agreeing step one of President Trump’s Ukraine peace plan, a 30-day ceasefire. President Putin said Russia supports the notion in general terms, but said “there are issues that we need to discuss, and I think that we need to discuss it with our American colleagues and partners”...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Monday lauded her fellow Democrats for “showing up” while Republicans are “hiding” from the American people, referring to the GOP’s avoidance of in-person town halls. Warren, in an interview with MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez, weighed in on the large numbers of rally goers attending fellow Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) gatherings across the country, intended to combat the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to overhaul the federal workforce. “Democrats are actually showing up to listen to people, to rally with people, while Republicans are hiding and being told by their leadership, don’t go out in public, don’t have...

The top political adviser to Democratic mega-donor Reid Hoffman suggested that the attack on Donald Trump could have been “staged,” even as Hoffman was criticized for joking before Saturday’s attack about Trump becoming a “martyr.” Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, whose net worth is reportedly $2.5 billion, joked at last week’s billionaire confab in Sun Valley that he wished he had made Trump “an actual martyr.” Sunday, he said on X that he was referring to “accountability to the rule of law” and that he’s “horrified and saddened” by the attack. The scale of Hoffman’s political donations isn’t public but...

The Syrian army has uncovered a clandestine plant in Eastern Ghouta that was used by the terrorists to produce military-grade agents, with equipment of Saudi origin and materials presumably made in Western countries having been found at the building, local media reported on Tuesday. The plant is located in al-Shefounieh town in the area of Duma. Among other toxic chemicals, chlorine was found at the site, the SANA news agency reported, adding that the papers of the Jaysh al-Islam militant group were also discovered. A Syrian field commander said that high-tech equipment was found at the plant, which indicates that...

CNN - President Donald Trump keeps lying not only about the 2020 election he lost but the 2024 election he won. In a Saturday speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump correctly noted that he earned 77 million votes in 2024 — then falsely said his vote total was “actually much more than that,” since unspecified people “cheated like hell.” There’s no basis for this claim. Trump’s official vote total is his actual vote total, and there is no evidence of unsuccessful cheating by vote counters or by his Democratic foes. Trump made various other false claims at CPAC,...

Nearly one in 10 adults in the United States identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., according to a large analysis from Gallup released Thursday — almost triple the share since Gallup began counting in 2012, and up by two-thirds since 2020.The increases have been driven by young people, and by bisexual women. Nearly one-quarter of adults in Generation Z, defined by Gallup as those 18 to 27, identify as L.G.B.T.Q., according to the analysis, which included 14,000 adults across all of Gallup’s telephone surveys last year. More than half of these L.G.B.T.Q. young adults identify as bisexual. ...Members of Gen Z were most...

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said Thursday on CNN’s “OutFront” that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is illegal and unconstitutional. Host Erin Burnett said, “A group of 14 states tonight just filing a new lawsuit against DOGE, arguing that Elon Musk’s ascent to power in the Trump White House is unconstitutional.” Nessel said, “It’s a clear violation of The Appointments Clause, right? You know, the United States Constitution, it grants the President of the United States the ability with advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint cabinet secretaries and directors over particular agencies. But Elon Musk in...

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) claimed Thursday on CNN’s “The Situation Room” that the Republican Party has become the “corruption party” with Elon Musk being the leading agent. Raskin said, “Whoever is left within the vague hemisphere of Trump world who believes in the rule of law will not be able to last because they put corruption first. They are the corruption party at this point. You know, they wiped out the inspectors general. They fired 17 of them illegally without notifying Congress. They have to come to us 30 days before they have to specifically set forth the rationale for...

Elon Musk and his deputies in the Department of Government Efficiency have gained access to Treasury Department systems and targeted a key foreign aid agency for closure, riling Democrats who say the billionaire has no such authority.The debate reflects growing tensions between long-standing government norms and laws, and President Trump’s vision for a new government order of his own making. The world’s richest man, acting as an unelected “efficiency” consultant to President Trump, has in recent days managed the rare feat of overshadowing his boss — presuming to storm into and begin closing out government agencies at will.After two weeks...

With a blizzard of executive orders, President Donald Trump has jump-started an extraordinary plan to transform the federal government into a leaner operation packed with his loyalists. The fine print of those directives reveals how shrewdly the new administration is maneuvering — and sometimes outright ignoring — the arcane laws, rules and regulations that have long protected the civil service of 2.3 million from a political takeover. Trump has skirted Biden-era rules by essentially declaring them unlawful, used probationary periods to place masses of civil servants in limbo and issued a memo lifting restrictions on hiring temporary political appointees to...

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) claimed Thursday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that President Donald Trump had “legitimized” political violence against Democrats. When asked about the J6 pardons, Murphy said, “I mean, let’s let’s really talk about who he let out of prison this week, who walked out of prison. The guy walked out of prison this week that pepper sprayed multiple officers to the point where one had a heart attack, he let out of jail this week. People who were beating police officers over the head with poles he let out of jail. Someone who said when he arrived...

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Tuesday on CNN’s “OutFront” that President Donald Trump’s pardoning the January 6 protesters was to create a “reserve army of political foot soldiers.” Raskin said, “The question is why? Pardons have generally been used when people are actually innocent or there was some procedural miscarriage of justice. Nobody’s claiming that these people were innocent. We’ve got them on tape, you know, hitting the police officers over the head with pipes and bats and Confederate battle flags and all of that’s been established. Most of them pled guilty. The others have been convicted. There was no...

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a former member of the Jan. 6 committee, sought to distinguish between the pardon he received from former President Biden compared to those President Trump gave to those who stormed the Capitol. Just hours apart, both Biden and Trump issued a number of pardons. An order from Biden gave a preemptive pardon to all nine members of the panel that investigated the attack on the Capitol, while Trump, through a series of pardons and commutations, cleared the slate for the more than 1,500 people being prosecuted for the attack. “Look, the people who were pardoned the...